The role of the judiciary as a check on the legislative and executive branches was believed necessary to the effectiveness of the horizontal separation of powers as a check on political factions. The nature of the judicial power was generally agreed to include the power of judicial review, but selection and tenure in office were thought to be important to limiting abuses of power.

By design, the judiciary is meant to be independent from politics and thereby free from factional pressures. The power to review legislative and executive as well as state government actions for constitutionality is essential to controlling abuses of power and democratic excesses that infringe on individual rights. While the federal courts have generally performed these responsibilities well, the politization of judicial appointments combined with liberal standing requirements and reliance on an assortment of balancing tests that require policy judgments have invited factional pressures in the form of lawsuits. At the same time, a presumption of constitutionality has served to counter the Framers’ constraints on democratic excess and the abuse of power.

Representation was believed to serve as a filter on the passions and excesses of direct democracy, but representatives could be influenced and even become the leaders of political factions. A central concern was to assure that representatives were insulated from such influence and focused on the public interest. As with the selection of executive and judicial officials, the questions that most occupied the Framers were the method of selection of representatives (appointment or popular election) and their term of service and eligibility for reelection.

The means by which factions persist are many, including political parties, lobbying, partisan media, passion and prejudice, rent-seeking, the permanent campaign, the politics of identity and principle, and today’s high-tech political campaigns.

Federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism, the electoral college, judicial review, constitutionally guaranteed rights, and the relative difficulty of amendment have all helped limit the influence of political factions.

Failure to adequately constrain factions is reflected most prominently in partisan gridlock in Congress, Congressional abdication of constitutional authorities and responsibilities, the political divide in the appointment of federal judges, the perception of partisan influence on judicial decisions, and the growth of the administrative state.

The principle of popular sovereignty allows for only democracy as a form of government. But democracy produces the political factions that can corrupt government unless constrained. Beginning with the corrupting influence of factions in the state governments after the Revolution, the chapter discusses the Framers’ understanding of why human nature leads to factions.

The interplay of life, form, and power is central to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay, “Experience.” It also comes to mark his mature articulations of metaphysics and philosophy, nature and history, and politics and ethics in essays like “Power,” “Success,” or his lecture “Powers of the Mind.” Power is a key theme across Emerson’s relentlessly eclectic thinking – from the creative potentialities of the imagination and the intellect, and the deforming forces of love and loss, to the conditions that embolden individual selves to mastery, invention, and success. The impulsive, circulatory, transitory, depersonalizing, and yet aggrandizing modes of power that emerge in Emerson’s thinking – the powers of the heart and the powers of the mind – point to a vitality that not only appears as the content of his essays and lectures but is at once stylistically performed by them.

Emerson’s poetry has been somewhat of an enigma for readers and critics alike, who have often found it thematically opaque and stylistically unwieldy. Many have concluded that he was incapable of writing “better” verse, a conclusion predicated upon the assumption that he intended to do otherwise but couldn’t. This essay takes as a starting point the idea that the roughness of Emerson’s poetic style was intentional and that his metric irregularities are not accidents. After analyzing the style, rhetoric, and prosody of the poems, this essay contextualizes these elements within Emerson’s metaphysics. It argues that Emerson’s poetry reveals the crumbling of meter that led to the modernist revolution and free verse; poetic style did not suddenly jump from Longfellow to Whitman, but rather meter was stretched and strained before it was broken.

This chapter examines Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seemingly contradictory relation to European Romanticism. Focusing on the concepts of genius, idealism, and originality in key works (Nature, English Traits, and Representative Men), it argues that Emerson’s admiration for English and German Romantic writings was not at odds with his call for cultural independence. Because Emerson understood the genius to be a teacher who empowers his students to reject him, he could imagine any reliance on Coleridge, Wordsworth, or Carlyle as ultimately enabling independence. The philosophical idealism essential to Emerson’s call for cultural independence, moreover, was a mode of perception that defied national categorization and so did not threaten the distinctive American culture he hoped to inaugurate. In his later writings, Emerson also came to clarify a concept of originality that involved the adaptation of inherited forms rather than the invention of new ones. Because borrowing became a precondition for innovation, intellectual debts did not undermine autonomy.

Before his rehabilitation got under way in the late 1970s, had Emerson really been the object of “repression” by the American philosophical establishment? The validity of the historical claim put forward by Stanley Cavell has always seemed doubtful. In point of fact, Emerson turns out to have, from his day to ours, a largely unbroken chain of legitimate heirs among American philosophers. This chapter, which builds on previous scholarly efforts to correct and complete the record, notably by historians of pragmatism, continues the work of recovering the Emersonian legacy in American philosophy. The multiform nature of that legacy, which extends to pedagogical theory and classroom practice in American schools, raises important questions for historiographers as they deal with changes in cultural and institutional reception over time. Of particular importance is the question raised by Cavell’s own contribution to Emerson studies: what is philosophy’s relation to the broader literary culture?

Emerson’s aesthetics addresses fundamental philosophical questions on the reality of beauty, experience, and the nature of art and creativity. A central thread running throughout his aesthetic views is the love of beauty, which celebrates a felt appreciation for the diverse beauties found in nature and society in and for themselves. The experiential self as it exists in a connatural relationship with its surroundings has the potential to enjoy such deep folds of qualitative significance. Emerson, moreover, theorizes the existence of an absolute form of beauty having a metaphysical primacy. Beauty exists as the ultimate ideal of human conduct and thought and as the primordial ground or first cause of the universe. In this aesthetic cosmology, art through its imaginative symbolic appropriations of its environment shares in the greater metamorphic processes of a creatively polyphonous and open universe.

This chapter explores Emerson’s lifelong ambivalence about the development of new scientific disciplines and the goals of empirical research. Beginning with his famous epiphany at the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in 1833, Emerson’s writing career reflects both intense fascination with and wariness about the trajectories of professional science. With obvious enthusiasm, he tracked developments in astronomy, chemistry, comparative anatomy, embryology, entomology, geology, hydraulics, optics, meteorology, molecular physics, physiology, and zoology. But Emerson’s insistence that empirical observation should align with philosophical intuition, for instance, also generates critiques of the pragmatic instrumentalism and gradual pace with which those emerging fields assembled accretive models of the physical world. Tracing this tension in his thought, driven by an effort to unify increasingly disparate modes of empirical inquiry, reveals Emerson’s unsettled negotiation with the transformative potential he finds in modern science.