Restoring Emerson’s Liberal Home
John Kaufman, “Restoring Emerson’s Liberal Home,” The Vital Center 1, no. 1 (Fall 2023): 64–69.
(To download the full issue, click here)
Liberal government, says Emerson, need not be “Big Government” but it does need to be good and moral government in the service of the “progress of thought.”
A snapshot of the author‘s visit to Emerson’s home in Concord, MA
When the Church is social worth,
When the state-house is the hearth,
Then the perfect State is come,
The republican at home.
—from “Politics” by Emerson
A few years ago, traveling through New England on a summer trip, my family and I stopped at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house in Concord, Massachusetts. There was no parking lot, no crowds of devoted fans as I found at novelist Louisa May Alcott’s childhood domain down the street. Emerson’s stately yet subdued clapboard and shuttered house bore only a small bronze plaque on the front façade announcing the historical and literary significance of the place. When my wife, daughter, and I knocked on the front door, hoping for at least a look around, a woman opened the door and told us that no tours were offered at the moment, but we were welcome to step into the great man’s study if we cared to.
In we went. Emerson’s study, right off the main entrance, is not a large room, but it is still furnished in a comfortable nineteenth-century style: an oval-shaped wooden table centered in the middle, a dark-mantled fireplace, and a well-stocked bookshelf taking up an entire wall. On the opposite wall between the windows sits a small desk. I think I recall a patterned rug of some sort on the floor. Four windows let in significant light and views of trees and lawn. It was thrilling to be in Emerson’s house, in the very room where he almost single-handedly created a transcendent American philosophy—spiritual and political—grounded in allegiance to nature and a democratic tossing-off of illiberal traditions.
There is a photograph of Emerson in his study in October of 1879, which he posed for when he was 76 years old. Emerson is seated in a rocking chair beside the oval table, ignoring the photographer, his old gray head bent down over a big book, light from the side windows illuminating his upper body in the dark room. Out the front windows behind him can be seen what looks like a gate post and a few significant trees, likely in autumn color which the photography of the time could not capture. There are many other photographs of Emerson in more self-conscious and striking poses, but I think this one captures best the essentially domestic, contemplative quality of his philosophy, including his thoughts on politics.
Emerson was no activist like Thoreau and others in his Concord community; he did, however, take public, political stands against slavery and war. But if we Americans are searching for a liberal, democratic present and future that are free of “neoliberalism” and “post-liberalism” and “progressive theology” and various socialist schemes, we can look again at Emerson’s self-reliant liberty, rather than to forced-commune Marx, for a buoyant and well-balanced sense of what a restored liberal democracy can do for our nation and the world.
“There is nothing inherently tyrannical about liberalism. As Emerson points out, it is nature that is the real despot, and one role of human politics and government is to ease the harsh rule of nature.”
In Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance,” he sets clear limits on what personal responsibility to the abstract “common good” can accomplish:
do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
Well, there is not much Christian charity or typical Great Society sentiment in these sentences. Here Emerson sounds more like a cranky libertarian than a bleeding-heart liberal. Emerson believed that a truly liberal individual is careful not to join too tightly with any mob or sect or party or state. For Emersonian liberals, charity can begin and end at home in his or her local sphere of influence where virtue and friendship must play a role. Government is necessary but is best when governs least, as his radical friend Thoreau put it.
Yet individual self-reliance should not be confused with what’s known today as “identity politics” or what I like to call the Autocracies of Self-Regard: everyone a king or queen by proclamation, a royal minority with the right to censor any dissent. Meanwhile, various “post-liberals” are fond of accusing liberalism of too much self-reliance, claiming it lacks a sense of truth because it is broadly secular and welcoming rather than sectarian and theologically exclusive. But in Emerson’s idea of liberal self-reliance, there is plenty of room for “God” and community and transcendental truth. Virtue is indeed a liberal quality, but it is not dogmatic because it springs not primarily from any holy book or religious tradition but from the source of all things—nature and the soul:
For the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.
Those with more doctrinaire or conventionally religious minds will not find Emerson’s intuitive transcendentalism very satisfying, of course. Conservatives dismiss such “pantheism” as pagan, and Emerson’s poetic, agnostic refusal to accept the divinity of Christ was a heresy for which he was effectively kicked out of the rather liberal Unitarian Church. Religious formalists tend to be political “conservatives” who used to pledge more allegiance to Church than State. But a new breed of political formalist (the “post-liberal” type) prefers to join the Church and State into one powerful entity that leaves little room for much democratic dissent.
If liberalism has created a decadent and elitist culture, what can save us—say the post-liberals like Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed—is a return to a traditional religious obedience enforced by Church and State. Deneen sees the “despotism of progress” in everything everywhere (even J. S. Mill was infected by it, Deneen claims), much as Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy could spy a Communist in every classroom and bedroom and boardroom. To replace supposedly despotic liberalism, the “post-liberals” would install a religious conservative elite, as has happened in Hungary and Poland.
Our post-liberals would have us believe that religion, especially Christianity, has played little part in the formation or ongoing character of American liberalism: as if black slaves and abolitionists were not consoled or instructed by the Bible; as if Martin Luther King Jr. learned nothing from the nonviolent example of Jesus; as if there are no Christians among Democrats and any liberal religious faith is heresy. Christianity certainly played a part in the education and writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as the liberal worldview of the Founders before him. Here is Emerson preaching gently in “Spiritual Laws”:
Belief and love,—a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the centre of nature, and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the universe. It has so infused its strong enchantment into nature, that we prosper when we accept its advice, and when we struggle to wound its creatures, our hands are glued to our sides, or they beat our own breasts. The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey.
Many conservatives, especially the religious formalists among us, have grown bolder in demanding that, despite what the Constitution makes clear, the United States ought to be a formally Christian nation. Such “Christian Nationalism” demands obedience to a white Christian “America First” sort of patriotism, a desire that Donald Trump exploited to get himself elected president.
To be liberal, of course, is to be a defender of liberty and democracy and a supporter of human rights around the world. The American Constitution is a liberal document and it remains the law of the land. It is not a perfect constitution, of course, but it has served us reasonably well so far. Has liberalism failed politically? Well, Social Security and Medicare are currently very popular programs, as are many other liberal reforms that have happened over the years. It was a good idea to abolish slavery and a good idea to allow women to vote. The federal government is not banning books. Religious freedom remains intact; worship as you see fit, as long as it doesn’t infringe on the unalienable rights of Americans who do not share your religious faith. Yes, we still suffer from war and poverty and pollution. But liberalism has not failed in America, despite the four-year travesty of the Trump administration. It was a liberal rebellion that ultimately sent him packing—a packing that included hoarding of classified documents.
So there is nothing inherently tyrannical about liberalism: its foundation is liberty after all. As Emerson points out in his essay simply titled “Politics,” it is nature that is the real despot, and one role of human politics and government is to ease the harsh rule of nature, to help make the humane and liberating society we can on this Earth:
What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures. The history of the State sketches in coarse outline the progress of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration.
Thus we ended slavery and segregation and wrote into law the civil rights of minorities. This “progress of thought” is a liberal movement, as are the various ways we have tried to regulate the economy to help those who lack the benefits of family wealth and inherited property. Not all progress in thought and politics is wise and beneficial, however. One can take the idea of personal liberty to an extreme that ignores responsibility and reality and harms both the individual and the greater good. Some traditions should be preserved; some new technologies and thoughts should be spurned. And that is what cultural debate is for, and cultural debate is best when all may speak and act freely within legal bounds and the liberal rule of law.
“The answer to corruption, according to Emerson, is not to turn to an enforced program of virtue or religious authority. To prevent and correct corruption, the State must educate wisely to help create wise, virtuous people.”
What corrupts democracy and political parties, according to Emerson, is the corrupt “personality” of leaders: “They reap the rewards of the docility and zeal of the masses which they direct.” The rise to power of Donald Trump is a fine example of such corruption, but the answer, according to Emerson, is not to turn to an enforced program of virtue or religious authority. To prevent and correct corruption, the State must educate wisely to help create wise, virtuous people. Emerson again in “Politics”:
To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy,—he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favorable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes.
Emerson does, admittedly, get poetically carried away here in his defense of self-government in “Politics,” but however much he comes across as an anarcho-libertarian, he really does not stray from a fundamental belief in a social foundation that can only be described as politically liberal:
The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints. The movement in this direction has been very marked in modern history. […] It separates the individual from all party, and unites him, at the same time, to the race. It promises a recognition of higher rights than those of personal freedom, or the security of property. A man has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried. We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion, if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in certain social conventions: nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured when the government of force is at an end.
“The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.” Nor has it been tried as the basis of an anti-war strategy for national defense. But Martin Luther King Jr. and other liberal activists have made use of the power of love, or nonviolent resistance, to generate sympathy and support for civil rights on a national level. And, generally speaking, we can say that the liberal tradition of culture and politics is the gradual “recognition of higher rights” for all, which are nothing more than what Thomas Jefferson called the “unalienable rights” we are all born with. A truly Christian or religious nation is a nation that would in fact trust in the power of transcendental love to be the primary power behind and beneath democracy. A government without laws would, of course, put too much power in the hands of greedy, ignorant, unloving individuals. But a government that tries to mandate or force people into any dogmatic or despotic sort of community by undermining their human rights is what Emerson calls a “bad State”: “there never was in any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude, to inspire him with the broad design of renovating the State on the principle of right and love. All those who have pretended this design, have been partial reformers, and have admitted in some manner the supremacy of the bad State.”
A new liberalism for the twenty-first century will seek to put an end to the “bad State” not by adopting any one religious tradition, joining Church and State, or by worshipping in cults of political personality or by “cancelling” books or people. The strength of liberal democracy is that it can find wisdom in many places and make a virtue, like nature does, of diversity for the sake of the health of all. But liberal virtues and human flourishing must start, as Emerson suggests, at home and in local communities; the best government governs locally through the democratic church of “social worth” and the statehouse of the hearth. Liberal government, says Emerson, need not be “Big Government” but it does need to be good and moral government in the service of the “progress of thought.”
