Did Emerson and the American transcendentalists transform society or merely sow the seeds of American individualism?
By Laura Miller Dec. 19, 2007 | Transcendentalism is the best-known American-bred philosophy, despite the fact that most well-educated Americans have no clear idea what it is. This haziness is nothing new — even in Transcendentalism’s heyday in the mid-19th century, people complained that it was hard to get a handle on. Was it even a philosophy at all, or just a crackpot religion? Hard to say, partly because Transcendentalism’s leaders were notorious for writing and talking in lofty abstractions; the Boston Post complained that the prose of Bronson Alcott (educational reformer, leading Transcendentalist and father of Louisa May) “resembled a train of 15 railroad cars with one passenger.” Then there was the habit among the most prominent Transcendentalists of denying that they were Transcendentalists at all, or that Transcendentalism, per se, existed — at the same time that other members of the movement quarreled about what the term really meant. Philip Gura’s “American Transcendental
