Dilemmas of American Transcendentalism

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Climate change and environmental destruction, police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement, economic collapse, fear of epidemic disease: these may seem like new problems, but they have deep roots. Starting in the 1830s, a generation of young revolutionaries--rebels, dreamers, and freethinkers all--banded together under the name "the Transcendentalists," determined to remake America into a beacon of justice for the world. Inspired by the American Revolution and European Romanticism, these men and women--including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Orestes Brownson, Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May Alcott--launched a daring movement to reinvent American literature, religion, and philosophy, abolish slavery, found women's rights, and fight against economic inequality, social injustice and environmental destruction. Did they succeed? Yes! Their legacy is everywhere in our literature, politics, education and environmentalism. Did they fail? Yes, that too: the Civil War they themselves helped ignite destroyed their dreams and discredited their idealism. That's the dilemma: both answers are correct. We live today with the consequences of both their failures, and their successes. How can their works and dreams speak to us now, in our own moment, when the problems they faced seem all the more intractable?