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Emerson and the Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Amy Schrager Lang
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Extract

Professor Cornelius Felton of Harvard University, reviewing Emerson's Essays, First Series in 1841, predicted that self-reliance “if acted upon, would overturn society, and resolve the world into Chaos.” Since then a long line of Emerson critics have shared Felton's concern over Emerson's radicalism. The more temperate modern version of Felton's charge is that Emerson “brought to full consciousness … the antinomianism latent in the thought of his Puritan forbears.” According to these critics, Emerson is the spiritual descendant of Anne Hutchinson. Removed outside the constraints of seventeenth-century dogma and liberated by Romantic thought, he gives free play to the antinomianism she so cautiously denied. Antinomianism, in this view, lends unity to the disparate writers of the American Renaissance and continuity to the whole of early American literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 7 , October 1982 , pp. 229 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

NOTES

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48. Ibid., VII, 286.

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54. Ibid., III, 557.

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58. Ibid., II, pp. 118–19.

59. Federalist Papers (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 83.Google Scholar

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