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Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner (born 26 November 1940, ) is the
Professor of the Humanities at
Quentin Skinner was born the second son of Alexander Skinner, CBE (died 1979), and Winifred Rose Margaret, née Duthie (died 1982). Educated at
and , he was elected into a Fellowship there in 1962 upon obtaining a
in , but immediately gained a teaching Fellowship at , where he remained until moving to the
in 2008. He is now an
of both Christ's College and Gonville and Caius College.
In the middle 1970s he spent four formative years at the
in . It was there that he met , later a colleague at Cambridge. Together with
Skinner has been said to have founded the "" of the . In 1978 he was appointed to the chair of Political Science at the , and in 1996 he was appointed . He was pro-vice-chancellor of Cambridge in 1999. In 1979 he married Susan James, Professor of P they have a daughter and a son. He was previously married to Patricia Law Skinner, who was later married to Bernard Williams.
Skinner has delivered lectures at the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton (1980), the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford (1980), the
(1983), the
(1984), the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Kent (1995), the
at Oxford (2003), the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford (2011), the Clark Lectures at Cambridge (2012), the Academia Sinica Lectures in Taiwan (2013) and the Spinoza Lectures at University of Amsterdam (2014).
Skinner was Distinguished Visiting Professor at
academic year, and has been Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary since October 2008. In 2014 he held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the
Skinner is a fellow at the , the , the , the
and the . He has won the
(1979); the Sir
Prize of the British Political Studies Association (2006); the Benjamin Lippincott Award (2001) and the David Easton Award (2007) of the American Political Science A the Bielefelder Wissenschaftspreis (2008); and a
(2006). He holds honorary degrees from Aberdeen, Athens, Copenhagen, East Anglia, Chicago, Harvard, Helsinki, Leuven, Oslo, Oxford, Santiago and St Andrews. Since 2009 he has been a member of the
Committee.
Skinner's historical writings have been characterised by an interest in recovering the ideas of Early Modern and previous political writers. This has been spread over Renaissance republican authors (see in Principal publications below, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought [1978]), the 'pre-Humanist' dictatores of later medieval Italy, , and more recently (in Liberty before Liberalism [1998]) the English republicans of the mid-seventeenth century (including , , and ). The work of the 1970s and 1980s was in good part directed towards writing an account of the history of the modern idea of the . In more recent publications he has preferred the more capacious term 'neo-Roman' to 'republican'.
Skinner is influenced by historian J.G.A. Pocock's The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957), the work of , and by Laslett's edition of 's Two Treatises of Government (1960) which Skinner read as an undergraduate in his second year at Cambridge.
Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock are principal members of the '' of the study of the , best known for its attention to the 'languages' of political thought and the contextual focus. Skinner's contribution was to articulate a theory of interpretation which concentrated on recovering the 'speech acts' embedded in the 'illocutionary' statements of specific individuals in writing works of political theory, particularly in the works of , , and . This work was based on Skinner's study of the philosophical preoccupations of
and the later . One of the consequences of this account of interpretation is an emphasis on the necessity of studying less well-known political writers as a means of shedding light on the classic authors—although it also consciously questions the extent to which it is possible to distinguish 'classic' texts from the contexts, and particularly the arguments, in which they originally occurred and as such it is an attack on the uncritical assumption that political classics are monolithic and free-standing. In its earlier versions this added up to what many have seen as a persuasive critique on the approach of an older generation, particularly on that of . The methodology of Skinner is also applicable to various textual studies domains that are informed by the procedures of historiography and philology, including an approach to classical and medieval texts.
Skinner's longstanding concern with the speech acts of political writing helps explain his turn at the beginning of the 1990s towards the role of neo-classical
in early modern political theory, which resulted in his study of Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996). Skinner has since returned to what has often been seen as an enduring interest to the Regius Professors of History at the University of Cambridge (not least ), the history of
and particular developing what he has articulated as a 'third form of liberty'. This can most effectively be described as a form of
(or neo-Roman) which is characterised however by the active participation in government to remain free from interference and the slavery caused by succumbing to an arbitrary power. Recently (2008) he published an analysis of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes as a polemical retort to those who, in the English civil war, espoused precisely such a 'neo-Roman' concept of human freedom. Currently he is working on a monograph on
and Rhetorical Invention for
to be published in 2014 which develops his lectures of the same name presented at Oxford and Cambridge in 2011 and 2012.
In an interview with Professor Alan Macfarlane of King's College, Skinner revealed that he was a member of the , a secret society of Cambridge University. He also revealed that
was a fellow member at this time. He commented they were both 'outed' some time ago.[]
On 6 October 1995, Skinner's two-volume The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978) appeared on
"100 Most Influential Books Since World War II".
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume I: The Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1978)
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume II: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 1978)
Machiavelli (Oxford University Press, 1981)
Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Visions of Politics: Volume I: Regarding Method (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Visions of Politics: Volume II: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Visions of Politics: Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
L'artiste en philosophie politique (Editions du Seuil, Paris, 2003)
Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Vilk? essays om politisk frihet (Forlaget Res Publica,Oslo, 2009)
Visionen des Politischen (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 2009)
Staten og friheten (Forlaget Res Publica, Oslo, 2011)
Uma Genealogia do Estado Moderno (Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, Lisbon, 2011)
Die drei K?rper des Staates (Wallstein, G?ttingen, 2012)
La vérité et l'historien (Editions EHESS, Paris, 2012)
Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2014)
(Co-editor and contributor), Philosophy, Politics and Society: Fourth Series (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1972)
(Co-editor and contributor), Philosophy in History (Cambridge University Press, 1984)
(Editor and contributor), The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 1985)
(Co-editor and contributor), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1988)
(Co-editor), Machiavelli, The Prince (trans. Russell Price) (Cambridge University Press, 1988)
(Co-editor and contributor), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
(Co-editor and contributor), Political Discourse in Early-modern Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
(Co-editor) Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
(Co-editor and contributor), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, Volume I: Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
(Co-editor and contributor), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, Volume II: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
(Co-editor and contributor), States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
(Co-editor), Thomas Hobbes: Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right (The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, Volume XI) (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2005)
(Co-editor and contributor), Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
(Editor) Families and States in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
(Co-editor and contributor), Freedom and the Construction of Europe, Volume I: Religious Freedom and Civil Liberty (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
(Co-editor and contributor), Freedom and the Construction of Europe, Volume II: Free Persons and Free States (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
1997: 'An Interview with Quentin Skinner', Cogito 11, pp. 69–78
2000a: 'Intervista a Quentin Skinner: Conseguire la libertà promuovere l'uguaglianza', Il pensiero mazziniano 3, pp. 118–22
2000b: 'Entrevista: Quentin Skinner' in As muitas faces da história, ed. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, Brazilia, pp. 307–39
[Trans. in The New History: Confessions and Conversations, ed. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, Cambridge, 2003 ]
2001: 'Quentin Skinnerin haastattelu', Niin & N?in 31, pp. 8–23
2002: 'Encountering the Past: An Interview with Quentin Skinner' Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought [Redesciptions Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory] 6, pp. 32–63
2003: 'La Libertà Politica ed il Mestiere dello Storico: Intervista a Quentin Skinner', Teoria Politica 19, pp. 177–85
2006: 'Historia intellectual y acción política: Una entrevista con Quentin Skinner', Historia y Política 16, pp. 237–58
2007a: 'Neither text, nor context: An interview with Quentin Skinner', Groniek: Historisch Tijdschrift 174, pp. 117–33
2007b: 'La Historia de mi Historia: Una Entrevista con Quentin Skinner', El giro contextual: Cinco ensayos de Quentin Skinner y seis comentarios, ed. Enrique Bocardo Crespo, Madrid, pp. 45–60.
2007c: 'Intellectual History, Liberty and Republicanism: An Interview with Quentin Skinner', Contributions to the History of Concepts 3, pp. 102–23
2008: 'Concepts only have histories', interview with Quentin Skinner by Emmanuelle Tricoire and Jacques Levy, EspacesTemps, document 3692
2009a: 'Making H The Discipline in Perspective: Interview with Professor Quentin Skinner', Storia e Politica, 1, pp. 113–34.
2009b: 'Wie frei sind wir wirklich?' Fragen an Quentin Skinner', Zeitschrift f?r Ideengeschichte 3, pp. 5–21.
2012a: . "Approaching political theory historically: an interview with Quentin Skinner.". In Browning, G Dimova-Cookson, M Prokhovnik, Raia. Dialogues with contemporary political theorists. Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 181–196.  
2012b : 'On Politics and History: A Discussion with Quentin Skinner, Francisco Quijano and Georgios Giannakopoulos, Journal of Intellectual History and Political Thought 1.1, pp. 7–31   [Spanish: 'Historia y política en perspectiva: Entrevista a Quentin Skinner', Signos Filosóficos, 15 (29):167-191  ]
2013: ‘An Interview with Professor Quentin Skinner’ conducted by Jeng-Guo Chen and Carl Shaw, Intellectual History 2, pp. 239–62
1988: James Tully (Editor), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Polity Press and Princeton University Press)
1995: M. Edling and U. Morkenstam, 'Quentin Skinner: From Historian of Ideas to Political Scientist', Scandinavian Political Studies 18, pp. 119–32
1996: 'Dossier Quentin Skinner', Krisis 64.
2001: 'Quentin Skinner og Intellektuel Historie', Slagmark: Special Number (33)  
2003a: Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity Press)
2003b: Kari Palonen, Die Entzauberung der Begriffe: Das Umschreiben der politischen Begriffe bei Quentin Skinner und Reinhart Koselleck (Münster)
2006: Annabel Brett and James Tully (Editors), Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
2007a: Emile Perreau-Saussine, 'Quentin Skinner in context', Review of Politics, 68, pp. 106–122
2007b: Enrique Bocardo Crespo (Editor), El giro contextual: Cinco ensayos de Quentin Skinner y seis comentarios (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos)
2007c: Michael Drolet, 'Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on Power and the State', History of European Ideas, 33, pp. 234–55
2008: Ryan Walter, 'Reconciling Foucault and Skinner on the state: the primacy of politics?' History of the Human Sciences, 21, pp. 94–114
2009a: Richard Fisher '"How to do things with books": Quentin Skinner and the dissemination of ideas', History of European Ideas 35, pp. 276–80
2009b: Frank Beck Lassen and Mikkel Thorup (Editors), Quentin Skinner: Politik og historie: En tekstsamling (Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag)
2010: Marco Geuna, 'Quentin Skinner e Machiavelli' in Anglo-American Faces of Machiavelli, ed. A. Arienzo and G. Borrelli, Milano, pp. 577–622
2012a: Salvatore Muscolino, Linguaggio, storia e politica: Ludwig Wittgenstein eQuentin Skinner (Palmermo: Saladino)
2012b: Journal of the History of Ideas Symposium: On Quentin Skinner, from Method to Politics
2014: Marcus Erben, Begriffswandel als Sprachhandlung: Der Beitrag Quentin Skinners zur Methodologie und Funktionsbestimmung der p?dagogischen Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt)
source: University of London site at .
, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: 1987); .
See for example .
Quentin Skinner (2008). , Cambridge.
Wikiquote has quotations related to:
Queen Mary University of London School of History: Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities
A lecture delivered at a conference at the Ruhr-University Bochum on 18 November, 2014.
', Journal of Intellectual History and Political Thought 1.1, pp. 7–31
Radio interview explains some of concepts regarding freedom and democracy that earned the recognition of 2006 Balzan Prize, in
referenced in a Google cached page from
dated 14 December 2006 at dataset 15.12.21.
– An interview with Quentin Skinner by Petri Koikkalainen and Sami Syrj?m?ki.
. A discussion with Quentin Skinner by Sami Syrj?m?ki.
, , , 1984
(May 2011). . Contemporary Political Theory 10 (2): 273–285. :.
An academic discussion on the problem of anachronism including a large exposition of Skinner's methodological views by Sami Syrj?m?ki.
: Hidden categories:Transcendentalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism is an American literary, political, and philosophical
movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo
Emerson. Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau,
Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, and
Theodore Parker. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the
Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of
Hume, the transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was
at hand. They were critics of their contemporary society for its
unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in
Emerson's words, &an original relation to the universe& (O, 3). Emerson
and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in
their writing. By the 1840s they, along with other transcendentalists,
were engaged in the social experiments of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and
W and, by the 1850s in an increasingly urgent critique of
American slavery.
What we now know as transcendentalism first arose among the liberal
New England Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinism
in two respects: they believed in the importance and efficacy of human
striving, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and
inescap and they emphasized the unity rather than
the &Trinity& of God (hence the term
&Unitarian,& originally a term of abuse that they came to
adopt.) Most of the Unitarians held that Jesus was in some way
inferior to God the Father but still great a few
followed the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley () in
holding that Jesus was thoroughly human, although endowed with special
authority. The Unitarians' leading preacher, William Ellery Channing
(), portrayed orthodox Congregationalism as a religion
of fear, and maintained that Jesus saved human beings from sin, not
just from punishment. His sermon &Unitarian Christianity&
(1819) denounced &the conspiracy of ages against the liberty of
Christians& (P, 336) and helped give the Unitarian movement its
name. In &Likeness to God& (1828) he proposed that human
beings &partake& of Divinity and that they may achieve
&a growing likeness to the Supreme Being& (T, 4).
The Unitarians were &modern.& They attempted to reconcile
Locke's empiricism with Christianity by maintaining that the accounts
of miracles in the Bible provide overwhelming evidence for the truth
of religion. It was precisely on this ground, however, that the
transcendentalists found fault with Unitarianism. For although they
admired Channing's idea that human beings can become more like God,
they were persuaded by Hume that no empirical proof of religion could
be satisfactory. In letters written in his freshman year at Harvard
(1817), Emerson tried out Hume's skeptical arguments on his devout and
respected Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and in his journals of the early
1820's he discusses with approval Hume's Dialogues on Natural
Religion and his underlying critique of necessary
connection. &We have no experience of a Creator,& Emerson
writes, and therefore we &know of none& (JMN 2, 161).
Skepticism about religion was also engendered by the publication of an
English translation of F. D. E. Schleiermacher's Critical Essay
Upon the Gospel of St. Luke (1825), which introduced the idea
that the Bible was a product of human history and culture. Equally
important was the publication in 1833&some fifty years after
its initial appearance in Germany&of James Marsh's translation
of Johann Gottfried van Herder's Spirit of Hebrew Poetry
(1782). Herder blurred the lines between religious texts and
humanly-produced poetry, casting doubt on the authority of the Bible,
but also suggesting that texts with equal authority could still be
written. It was against this background that Emerson asked in 1836, in
the first paragraph of Nature: &Why should we not have
a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a
religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs& (O,
5). The individual's &revelation&&or
&intuition,& as Emerson was later to speak of it&was
to be the counter both to Unitarian empiricism and Humean
skepticism.
An important source for the transcendentalists' knowledge of German
philosophy was Frederic Henry Hedge (1805&90). Hedge's father
Levi Hedge, a Harvard professor of logic, sent him to preparatory
school in Germany at the age of thirteen, after which he attended the
Harvard Divinity School. Ordained as a Unitarian minister, Hedge wrote
a long review of the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge for
the Christian Examiner in 1833. Noting Coleridge's fondness
for &German metaphysics& and his immense gifts of
erudition and expression, he laments that Coleridge had not made Kant
and the post-Kantians more accessible to an English-speaking audience.
This is the task&to introduce the &transcendental
philosophy& of Kant, (T, 87)&that Hedge takes up. In
particular, he explains Kant's idea of a Copernican Revolution in
philosophy: &[S]ince the supposition that our intuitions depend
on the nature of the world without, will not answer, assume that the
world without depends on the nature of our intuitions.& This
&key to the whole critical philosophy,& Hedge continues,
explains the possibility of &a priori knowledge& (T, 92).
Hedge organized what eventually became known as the Transcendental
Club, by suggesting to Emerson in 1836 that they form a discussion
group for disaffected young Unitarian clergy. The group included
George Ripley and Bronson Alcott, had some 30 meetings in four years,
and was a sponsor of
The Dial and Brook Farm. Hedge was a vocal opponent of
slavery in the 1830's and a champion of women's rights in the 1850's,
but he remained a Unitarian minister, and became a professor at the
Harvard Divinity School.
Another source for the transcendentalists' knowledge of German
philosophy was Madame de Sta&l (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker)
(), whose De l'Allemagne (On Germany)
was a favorite of the young Emerson. In a sweeping survey of European
metaphysics and political philosophy, de Sta&l praises Locke's
devotion to liberty, but sees him as the originator of a
sensationalist school of epistemology that leads to the skepticism of
Hume. She finds an attractive contrast in the German tradition that
begins with Leibniz and culminates in Kant, which asserts the power
and authority of the mind.
James Marsh (), a graduate of Andover and the president
of the University of Vermont, was equally important for the emerging
philosophy of transcendentalism.
Marsh was convinced that German
philosophy held the key to a reformed theology. His American edition
of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1829) introduced
Coleridge's version&much indebted to Schelling&of
Kantian terminology, terminology that runs throughout Emerson's early
work. In Nature, for example, Emerson writes: &The
Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of
the material world& (O, 25).
German philosophy and literature was also championed by Thomas
Carlyle, whom Emerson met on his first trip to Europe in 1831.
Carlyle's philosophy of action in such works as Sartor
Resartus resonates with Emerson's idea in &The American
Scholar& that action&along with nature and &the
mind of the Past& (O, 39) is essential to human education. Along
with his countrymen Coleridge and Wordsworth, Carlyle embraced a
&natural supernaturalism,& the view that nature, including
human beings, has the power and authority traditionally attributed to
an independent deity.
Piety towards nature was also a main theme of William Wordsworth,
whose poetry was in vogue in America in the 1820s. Wordsworth's
depiction of an active and powerful mind cohered with the shaping
power of the mind that his collaborator in the Lyrical
Ballads, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, traced to Kant. The idea of
such power pervades Emerson's Nature, where he writes of
nature as &obedient& to spirit and counsels each of us to
&Build & your own world.& Wordsworth has his more
receptive mode as well, in which he calls for &a heart that
watches and receives& (in &The Tables Turned&), and
we find Emerson's receptive mode from Nature onward, as when
he recounts an ecstatic experience in the woods: &I become a
transparent eyeball. I I The currents of the
universal being circulate through me.& (O, 6).
Emerson's sense that men and women are, as he put it in
Nature, gods &in ruins,& led to one of
transcendentalism's defining events, his delivery of an address at the
Harvard Divinity School graduation in 1838. Emerson portrayed the
contemporary church that the graduates were about to lead as an
&eastern monarchy of a Christianity& that had become an
&injuror of man& (O, 58). Jesus, in contrast, was a
&friend of man.& Yet he was just one of the &true
race of prophets,& whose message is not so much their own
greatness, as the &greatness of man& (O, 57). Emerson
rejects the Unitarian argument that miracles prove the truth of
Christianity, not simply because the evidence is weak, but because
proof of the sort they envision embodies a mistaken view of the nature
of religion: &conversion by miracles is a profanation of the
soul.& Emerson's religion is based not on testimony but on a
&perception& that produces a &religious
sentiment& (O, 55).
The &Divinity School Address& drew a quick and angry
response from Andrews Norton () of the Harvard Divinity
School, often known as the &Unitarian Pope.& In &The
New School in Literature and Religion& (1838), Norton complains
of &a restless craving for notoriety and excitement,&
which he traces to German &speculatists& and
&barbarians& and &that hyper-Germanized Englishman,
Carlyle.& Emerson's &Address,& he concludes, is at
once &an insult to religion& (T, 248) and &an
incoherent rhapsody& (T, 249).
An earlier transcendentalist scandal surrounded the publication of
Amos Bronson Alcott's Conversations with Children Upon the
Gospels (1836). Alcott () was a self-taught
educator from Connecticut who established a series of schools that
aimed to &draw out& the intuitive knowledge of
children. He found anticipations of his views about a priori knowledge
in the writings of Plato and Kant, and support in Coleridge's Aids
to Reflection for the idea that idealism and materiality could be
reconciled. Alcott replaced the hard benches of the common schools
with more comfortable furniture that he built himself, and left a
central space in his classrooms for dancing.
The Conversations
with Children Upon the Gospels, based on a school Alcott (and his
assistant Elizabeth Peabody) ran in Boston, argued that evidence for
the truth of Christianity could be found in the unimpeded flow of
children's thought. What people particularly noticed about Alcott's
book, however, were its frank discussions of conception, circumcision,
and childbirth. Rather than gaining support for his school, the
publication of the book caused many parents to withdraw their children
from it, and the school&like many of Alcott's projects,
Theodore Parker (1810&60) was the son of a farmer who attended
Harvard and became a Unitarian minister and accomplished linguist.
published a long critical essay on David Friedrich Strauss's Das
Leben Jesu, and translated Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de
Wette's Introduction to the Old Testament, both of which cast
doubt on the divine inspiration and single authorship of the Bible.
After the publication of his &A Discourse Concerning the
Transient and Permanent in Christianity& (1841) he was invited
to resign from the Boston Association of Ministers (he did not), and
was no longer welcome in many pulpits.
He argued, much as Emerson had
in the &Divinity School Address,& that Christianity had
nothing essential to do with the person of Jesus: &If Jesus
taught at Athens, and not at J if he had wrought no miracle,
and none but the human nature had ever
Old Testament had forever perished at his birth, Christianity would
still have been the Word of God & just as true, just as
lasting, just as beautiful, as now it is&& (T, 352).
Parker exploited the similarities between science and religious
doctrine to argue that although nature and religious truth are
permanent, any merely human version of such truth is transient.
religious doctrines especially, there are stunning reversals, so that
&men are burned for professing what men are burned for denying&
Surveying the scene in his 1842 lecture, &The
Transcendentalist,& Emerson begins with a philosophical account,
according to which what are generally called &new views&
are not really new, but rather part of a broad tradition of
idealism. It is not a skeptical idealism, however, but an
anti-skeptical idealism deriving from Kant:
It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism
of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use
of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg [sic], who replied to the
skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing
in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the
senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or
imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which
exp that these were intuitions of the mind
and he denominated them Transcendental forms (O,
Emerson shows here a basic understanding of three Kantian claims,
which can be traced throughout his philosophy: that the human mind
&forms& that the existence of such mental
operations is a c and that
&transcendental& does not mean &transcendent&
or beyond human experience altogether, but something through which
experience is made possible. Emerson's idealism is not purely Kantian,
however, for (like Coleridge's) it contains a strong admixture of
Neoplatonism and post-Kantian idealism. Emerson thinks of Reason, for
example, as a faculty of &vision,& as opposed to the
mundane understanding, which &toils all the time, compares,
contrives, adds, argues&.& (Letters, vol. 1,
413). For many of the transcendentalists the term
&transcendentalism& represented nothing so technical as an
inquiry into the presuppositions of human experience, but a new
confidence in and appreciation of the mind's powers, and a modern,
non-doctrinal spirituality. The transcendentalist, Emerson states,
believes in miracles, conceived as &the perpetual openness of
the human mind to new influx of light and power&& (O,
Emerson keeps his distance from the transcendentalists in his essay by
speaking always of what &they& say or do, despite the fact
that he was regarded then and is regarded now as the leading
transcendentalist.
He notes with some disdain that the
transcendentalists are &'not good members of society,&
that they do not work for &the abolition of the
slave-trade& (though both these charges have been leveled at
him). He closes the essay nevertheless with a defense of the
transcendentalist critique of a society pervaded by &a spirit of
cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates a frightful
skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim&
(O, 106). This critique is Emerson's own in such writings as
&Self-Reliance,& and &The American Scholar&;
and it finds a powerful and original restatement in the
&Economy& chapter of Thoreau's Walden.
The transcendentalists had several publishing outlets: at first
The Christian Examiner, then, after the furor over the
&Divinity School Address,& The Western Messenger
(1835&41) in St Louis, then the Boston Quarterly Review
(1838&44). The Dial (1840&4) was a special case,
for it was planned and instituted by the members of the Transcendental
Club, with Margaret Fuller (1810&50) as the first
editor. Emerson succeeded her for the magazine's last two years. The
writing in The Dial was uneven, but in its four years of
existence it published Fuller's &The Great Lawsuit& (the
core of her Woman in the Nineteenth Century) and her long
review of Goethe' prose and poetry by E Alcott's
&Orphic Sayings& (which gave the magazine a reputation for
silliness); and the first publications of a young friend of Emerson's,
Henry David Thoreau (1817&62). After Emerson became editor in
1842 The Dial published a series of &Ethnical
Scriptures,& translations from Chinese and Indian philosophical
Margaret Fuller was the daughter of a Massachusetts congressman who
provided tutors for her in Latin, Greek, chemistry, philosophy and,
later, German. Exercising what Barbara Packer calls &her peculiar
powers of intrusion and caress& (P, 443), Fuller became friends with
many of the transcendentalists, including Emerson. She organized a
series of popular &conversations& for women in Boston in the winters of
1839&44, journeyed to the Midwest in the summer of 1843, and published
her observations as Summer on the Lakes. After this publishing
success, Horace Greeley, a friend of Emerson's and the editor of the
New York Tribune, invited her to New York to write for the
Tribune. Fuller abandoned her previously ornate and
pretentious style, issuing pithy reviews and forthright criticisms:
for example, of Longfellow's poetry and Carlyle's attraction to
brutality.
Fuller was in Europe from 1846&9, sending back
hundreds of pages for the Tribune. On her return to America
with her husband and son, she drowned in a hurricane off the coast of
Fire Island, New York.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a revision of her
&Great Lawsuit& manifesto in The Dial, is
Fuller's major philosophical work. She holds that masculinity and
femininity pass into one another, that there is &no wholly
masculine man, no purely feminine woman& (T, 418). Women are
treated as dependents, however, and their self-reliant impulses are
often held against them. What they most want is the freedom to unfold
their powers, a freedom Fuller holds to be necessary not only for
their self-development, but for the renovation of society. Like
Thoreau and Emerson, she calls for periods of withdrawal from a
society whose members are in various states of
&distraction& and &imbecility,& and a return
only after &the renovating fountains& of individuality
have risen up. Such individuality is necessary in particular for the
proper constitution of that form of society known as
marriage. &Union,& she holds, &is only possible to
those who are units& (T, 419).
Henry Thoreau studied Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, and
Spanish at Harvard, where he heard Emerson's &The American
Scholar& as the commencement address in 1837. He first published
in The Dial when Emerson commissioned him to review a series
of reports on wildlife by the state of Massachusetts, but he cast
about for a literary outlet after The Dial&s failure in
1844. In 1845, his move to Walden Pond allowed him to complete his
first book, A Week on the Concord and the Merrimac Rivers. He
also wrote a first draft of Walden, which eventually appeared
Nature comes to even more prominence in Walden than in
Emerson's Nature, which it followed by eighteen years. Nature
now becomes particular: this tree, this bird, this state of the pond
on a summer evening or winter morning become Thoreau's
subjects. Thoreau is receptive. He finds himself &suddenly
neighbor to& rather than a hunter of birds (W, 85); and he
learns to dwell in a house that is no more and no less than a place
where he can properly sit. From the right perspective, Thoreau finds,
he can possess and use a farm with more satisfaction than the farmer,
who is preoccupied with feeding his family and expanding his
operations.
In Walden's opening chapter, &Economy,& Thoreau
considers the trade-offs we make in life, and he asks, as Plato did
in The Republic, what are life's real necessities. Like the
Roman philosophers Marcus Porcius Cato and Marcus Varro he seeks a
&life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust&
(W, 15). Considering his contemporaries, he finds that &the mass
of men lead lives of quiet desperation& (W, 8).
&experiment& at Walden shows that a life of simplicity and
independence can be achieved today (W, 17). If Thoreau counsels simple
frugality&a vegetarian diet for example, and a dirt
floor&he also counsels a kind of extravagance, a spending of what
you have in the day that shall never come again. True economy, he
writes, is a matter of &improving the nick of time& (W,
Thoreau went to Walden Pond on the anniversary of America's declared
independence from Britain&July 4, 1845, declaring his own
independence from a society that is &commonly too cheap.&
It is not that he is against all society, but that he finds we meet
too often, before we have had the chance to acquire any &new
value for each other& (W, 136).
Thoreau welcomes those visitors
who &speak reservedly and thoughtfully& (W, 141), and who
preserve an appropria he values the little leaves
or acorns left by visitors he never meets. Thoreau lived at Walden for
just under three years, a time during which he sometimes visited
friends and conducted business in town.
(It was on one such visit, to
pick up a mended shoe, that he was arrested for tax avoidance, an
episode that became the occasion for &Resistance to Civil
Government.&)
At the opening of Walden's chapter on &Higher Laws& Thoreau
confesses to once having desired to slaughter a woodchuck and eat it
raw, just to get at its wild essence. He values fishing and hunting for
their taste of wildness, though he finds that in middle age he has
given up eating meat. He finds wildness not only in the woods, but in
such literary works as Hamlet and the I and even
in certain forms of society: &The wildness of the savage is but a faint
symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet&
(&Walking& (1862), p. 621). The wild is not always consoling or
uplifting, however. In The Maine Woods, Thoreau records a
climb on Mount Ktaadn in Maine when he confronted the alien materiality
and in Cape Cod (1865), he records the
foreignness, not the friendliness, of nature: the shore is &a wild,
rank place, and there is no flattery in it& (P, 577).
Although Walden initiates the American tradition of
environmental philosophy, it is equally concerned with reading and
writing. In the chapter on &Reading,& Thoreau speaks of
books that demand and inspire &reading, in a high sense&
(W, 104). He calls such books &heroic,& and finds them
equally in literature and philosophy, in Europe and Asia: &Vedas
and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and
Shakespeares&& (W, 104). Thoreau suggests that
Walden is or aspir and indeed the
enduring construction from his time at Walden is not the cabin he built
but the book he wrote.
Thoreau maintains in Walden that writing is &the work
of art closest to life itself& (W, 102). In his search for such
closeness, he began to reconceive the nature of his journal. Both he
and Emerson kept journals from which their published works were
derived. But in the early 1850s, Thoreau began to conceive of the
journal as a work in itself, &each page of which should be
written in its own season & out of doors or in its own locality
wherever it may be& (J, 67). A journal has a sequence set by the
or what order it has emerges in the
writer's life as he meets the life of nature. With its chapters on
&Reading,& &Solitude,& &Economy,&
&Winter,& and &Spring,& Walden is
more &worked up& in this sense, Thoreau
came to feel, it is less close to nature than the journal.
The transcendentalists operated from the start with the sense that the
society around them was seriously deficient: a &mass& of
&bugs or spawn& as Emerson put it in &The American
Scholar&; slavedrivers of themselves, as Thoreau says
in Walden. Thus the attraction of alternative life-styles:
Alcott's ill-fated F Brook Farm, planned and organized by
the Transcendental C Thoreau's cabin at Walden. As the nineteenth
century came to its mid-point, the transcendentalists' dissatisfaction
with their society became focused on policies and actions of the
United States government: the treatment of the Native Americans, the
war with Mexico, and, above all, the continuing and expanding practice
of slavery.
Emerson's 1838 letter to President Martin Van Buren is an early
expression of the depth of his despair at actions of his country, in
this case the ethnic cleansing of American land east of the
Mississippi. The 16,000 Cherokees lived in what is now Kentucky and
Tennessee, and in parts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia. They
were one of the more assimilated tribes, whose members owned property, drove
carriages, used plows and spinning wheels, and even owned slaves.
Wealthy Cherokees sent their children to elite academies or
seminaries.
The Cherokee chief refused to sign a &removal& agreement
with the government of Andrew Jackson, but the government found a
minority faction to agree to move to territories west
of the Mississippi. Despite the ruling by the Supreme Court under
Chief Justice John Marshall that the Cherokee Nation's sovereignty had been violated, Jackson's policies continued to take effect. In 1838, President Van Buren, Jackson's former Vice-President and approved successor, ordered the U. S. Army into the Cherokee Nation, where they rounded up as many remaining members of the tribe as they could and marched them west and across the Mississippi.
Thousands died along the way. In his letter to President Van Buren, Emerson calls this &a crime that really deprives us as well as the Ch for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our
country, any more?& (A, 3).
Slavery had existed in the United States from the beginnings of the
country, but when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed by the United
States Congress in 1850, it had dramatic and visible effects not only
in Georgia or Mississippi but in Massachusetts and New York. For the
law required all citizens of the country to assist in returning
fugitive slaves to their owners. This extension of the slave-system to
the north, the subject of Thoreau's &Slavery in
Massachusetts& (1854), was on public view when an escaped slave
named Anthony Burns was captured in Boston, tried by a Massachusetts
court, and escorted by the Massachusetts militia and U. S. marines to
the harbor, where he was taken back to slavery in Virginia. His owner
placed him in a notorious &slave pen& outside Richmond,
where Burns was handcuffed, chained at the ankles and left to lie in
his own filth for four months. Thoreau denounced the absurdity of a
court in Boston &trying a MAN, to find out if he is not really a
SLAVE,& when the question has already been &decided from
eternity& (R, 92). In his &Lecture on Slavery& of
1855, Emerson calls the original 1787 Constitution's recognition of
slavery a &crime& (A, 100), and he contrasts the written
law of the constitution with the &Laws& and
&Right& ascertained by Jesus, Menu, Moses, and
Confucius. An immoral law, he holds, is void.
The distinction between morality and law is also the basis for
Thoreau's &Resistance to Civil Government& (1849). Thoreau
was arrested in 1846 for nonpayment of his poll tax, and he took the
opportunity presented by his night in jail to meditate on the
authority of the state. The government, Thoreau argues, is but an
expedient by which we succeed &in letting one another
alone& (R, 64). The citizen has no duty to resign his conscience
to the state, and may even have a duty to oppose immoral legislation
such as that which supports slavery and the Mexican War. Thoreau
concludes: &I cannot for an instant recognize that political
organization as my government which is the slave's government
also& (R, 67). Slavery could be abolished by a &peaceable
revolution,& he continues, if people refused to pay their taxes
and clogged the system by going to jail (R, 76). Although Thoreau
advocates nonviolent action in &Resistance to Civil
Government,& he later supported the violent actions of John
Brown, who killed unarmed pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, and in 1859
attacked the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. In &A
Plea for Captain John Brown,& Thoreau portrays Brown as an
&Angel of Light& (R, 137) and &a transcendentalist
above all& (115) who believed &that a man has a perfect
right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue
the slave& (R,132). In early 1860, just months before the
outbreak of the Civil War, he and Emerson participated in public
commemorations of Brown's life and actions.
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