| Social Reforms, Transcendentalism and Utopian Communities (1824-1854) |
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Sections:- Robert Owen, “Oration Containing a Declaration of Mental Independence" (July 4, 1826)
- William Maclure's letter to the New Harmony Gazette (May 17, 1826)
- Bronson Alcott's Maxims on Education: Transcription from The Orchard House (1826-1827)
- Orestes Augustus Brownson’s “New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church” (1836)
- Ralph Waldo Emerson “Man the Reformer” (January 25, 1841)
- Ralph Waldo Emerson “The Transcendentalist” (January 1842)
- Margaret Fuller “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women” (July 1843)
- Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Tragic” from his Uncollected Prose, Dial Essays (1844)
- John Humphrey Noyes’ "Bible Communism" (Feb. 1849)
- Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Comments on the Brook Farm taken from his "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England"
- Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Criticism of Socialism from his “Lectures Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England”
- Henry David Thoreau “Civil Disobedience” (1849)
- Henry David Thoreau’s "Walden," Chapter II: What I Lived For (1854)
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| Historical Context
A pioneer of the early socialist movement, Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a British utopian thinker and is widely regarded as the father of the Co-operative movement. During the early industrial revolution, a competitive atmosphere of unrestrained free-enterprise (laissez faire) capitalism prevailed and many workers were exploited with long hours and low pay. Other abuses included the employment of children in mines and the existence of deplorable working conditions. As an entrepreneur and a humanitarian, Owen purchased the New Lanark Mills in Scotland and established a model factory for his workers. At his factories, he paid fair wages, employed no child under ten, arranged for free medical services, built workers' housing at moderate rents, and established schools for children and adults as well as providing religious instruction and recreational facilities. Thus, Owen was one of the few in industrial Britain to demonstrate genuine concern for the welfare of workers. Many leading industrialists visited Owens’s factories and some even adopted parts of Owens’s system.
Attached Documents
In an attempt to extend his ideas into into agriculture, Owen moved to the United States in 1824 and established collective farming at New Harmony, Indiana. The farm covered over 20,000 acres. In this speech, Robert Owen commerorates the Fourth of July by calling for a revolution in Western thought. Criticizing fundamental principles, Owen asks for his followers at New Harmony to replace old ways of thinking with more enlightened views and practices.
Questions to Consider
1. In Owen’s opinion, what was the most important consequence of the American Revolution?
2. According to Owen, what is the next goal? What risks does this entail?
3. What are the three components making up Owen’s trinity of evil that enslaves people?
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| Historical Context
Although Owen's project began well, disputes arose concerning the structure of the community and about religion, all of these factors contributing to an abandonment of the communal principle after two year. Josiah Warren, a participant at the New Harmony Society, declared that the community was doomed to failure due to a lack of individual sovereignty and private property. He says of the community: "We had a world in miniature. --we had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result. ...It appeared that it was nature's own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us ...our "united interests" were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation..."
By 1828, Owen's ambitious experiment at New Harmony consumed almost four-fifths of his personal wealth and eventually it was abandoned. Viewed as a failure, he returned to England in 1829. Nevertheless, he persisted in his efforts to better the lives of the working poor. In the process, Owen left a lasting influence on the development of socialist thought.
Attached Documents
In this letter to the people of New Harmony, William Maclure, a Scottish geologist, businessman and leader in the New Harmony community, discusses the problem of some doing more work than others within the community, and the inability for some to feel themselves equal to those of a different class. As a solution to these problems, the community is divided into subcommunities. This division of the community foreshadows the eventual failure of Owen's New Harmony project.
Questions to Consider
1. What is the goal of McClure’s economic organization of New Harmony? How does he propose to organize the settlement?
2. What is needed to make McClure’s system work?
3. Although the economy is divided into departments, what other areas of society remain open to all members?
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Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), a teacher and writer, was associated with the Transcendentalist movement. Among the Transcendentalists, Alcott was unique in that he attempted to embody his ideals. In his schools he introduced art, music, nature study, field trips, and physical education into the curriculum, while banishing corporal punishment. He encouraged children to ask questions and taught through dialogue and example. He founded a Utopian community, Fruitlands, in Harvard, Massachusetts, which only lasted a short time.
Bronson Alcott's Journals display his wit and his unyielding optimism. Perhaps the best example of this is when, in 1826-7, Alcott wrote his "General Maxims" for teachers. Remembered as a philosopher, reformer and lecturer, Alcott's early and most lasting contributions were in the field of education. Alcott was among the first to assign a great measure of respect and dignity to this profession, and he attempted many practices which today would be considered quite commonplace, but in his time were seen as dangerous.
Attached Documents
His maxims represent cautions and advice to teachers as to their role in and influence upon young minds in the classroom. They display Alcott's love for and devotion to children, and his belief in the ability of children to think for themselves.
Questions to Consider
1. Which of Alcott’s maxims do you think are most important? Why?
2. Of Alcott’s maxims, which do you think are most widely used today? Which are least used?
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| Historical Context
A philosopher, minister, essayist, and reviewer, Orestes Augustus Brownson was one of the most enigmatic Americans of the 19th century. Largely self-taught, he became a prolific writer and an influential commentator on social and religious questions. In his twenties, Brownson became an active democrat.
By the age of thirty, Brownson became a Universalist preacher and the editor of the Universalistic theological journal, Gospel Advocate. He published The Boston Quarterly and wrote his articles there along with such Transcendentalists as Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and George Ripley.
His own articles were of a literary, philosophical and political nature. His articles also appeared in the Transcendentalist magazine, the Dial. With other Transcendentalists he participated to some degree in the Brook Farm experiment. Unlike the Transcendentalists he thought that men were sinful. For awhile, Brownson took exception to many tenets of the Christian faith, writing in 1840, that Christianity ought to be “abolished.”
Yet by 1844, Brownson reconsidered his brief adversion to Christianity. Instead of re-adopting his liberal Unitarian views, Brownson became conservative and adoptd Catholicism. He repudiated his earlier Fourierist and Owenite ideas, now criticizing socialism and utopianism as vigorously as he had once promoted them. Many of the Transcendentalists were taken back by his conversion and began describing him as an "unbalanced mind.” After that, the Transcendentalists ignored him.
Brownson's life-long suppositions were in the classical mode; that is, he did not think that the major problems of the American experiment had to do with lack of liberty but with its abuse. From this premise, he was concerned with virtue above all and with the relation of religion to the probability of anyone actually being virtuous. In an almost pure Platonic phrase, Brownson wrote in 1864, "If you would make a man happy, study not to augment his goods; but to diminish his wants."
Attached Documents
During the period Brownson was a Unitarian, he was influenced by the French philosophers Benjamin Constant and Victor Cousin. In 1836 he also organized the Society for Christian Union and Progress and published his seminal New Views of Christianity, society, and the Church.
Questions to Consider
1. According to Brownson, how has knowledge progressed since Antiquity? How has liberty progressed?
2. Why should materialism and spiritualism be reconciled? According to Brownson, why can’t one or the other predominate in the world?
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| Historical Context
Unquestionably, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) is at the center of the American transcendental movement. According to many, he is the major American philosopher of the nineteenth century and in some respects the central figure of American thought since the colonial period. Born in 1803 to a conservative Unitarian minister and graduating from Harvard in 1821, Emerson became interested in European idealism. In September 1835, Emerson and other like-minded intellectuals founded the Transcendental Club and began associating with noteables like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Hoar and Margaret Fuller. In 1836, Emerson outlined most of the basic tenets of Transcendentalism in his small book, Nature, which represented ten years of intense study in philosophy, religion, and literature.
In 1840, Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and George Ripley founded the magazine, The Dial, with Margaret Fuller editing. Conceived as "a medium for the freest expression of thought on the questions which interest earnest minds in every community," the Dial became the leading mouthpiece for the transcendental movement. Emerson, its editor for two years, began publishing his poems and essays in the magazine. By the 1840s, Emerson became recognized as the leader of the Transcendental movement.
In addition to his writings, Emerson made a living as a popular lecturer in New England and the rest of the country outside of the South. He spoke on a wide variety of subjects. Many of his essays grew out of his lectures. Audiences were captivated by his speaking style, even if they didn't always follow the subtleties of his arguments. Emerson emphasized self-reliance and nonconformity, he championed authentic American literature, and insisted that each individual find their own relation to God. His greatest legacy, however, is a relentless optimism that permeates his work and that is best reflected in his belief that "life is a boundless privilege.”
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Emerson’s lecture “Man the Reformer” was read before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association in Boston on January 25, 1841. In it, Emerson argued that people should do everything themselves, that they should collect nothing. Instead, they should become creators because the divine is found not in relics, but in action. Indeed, people should live in the moment and never replace the now with thoughts of the past or future. When looking at things, he argued that the whole should be emphasized instead of its parts. Most importantly, it is through experience and labor that the individual finds virtue.
Questions to Consider
1. How does Emerson characterize the modern reformer?
2. According to Emerson, why are young men forced to give up their ideals & dreams when entering the workforce?
3. In Emerson opinion, how does the modern trade system corrupt all who benefit from it? To what extent is this still true today?
4. How do most people deal with the guilt of benefiting from economic injustice done to others?
5. Why does Emerson reject the notion that we must renounce our accumulated wealth and begin anew?
6. What is Emerson’s view about modern luxuries?
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| Historical Context
Influenced by his early reading of the French essayist Montaigne, Emerson developed a distinctly American strand of philosophy that emphasized optimism, individuality, and mysticism. Although he never read Immanuel Kant, the great German Transcendental philosopher, his work is reflective German idealism. Emerson’s Transcendentalism also resembled British Romanticism in his belief that a fundamental continuity exists between man, nature, and God, or the divine.
In religious matters, Emerson rejected the belief in a personal God and developed non-traditional ideas of soul and God. He asserted in the essential unity of all thoughts, persons, and things in the divine whole. For Emerson, traditional values of right and wrong, good and evil, appear in his work as necessary opposites. Matter and spirit are not opposed but reflect a critical unity of experience.
Throughout his life, Emerson championed the centrality of the individual in existence and believed in the primacy of the individual’s experience. He asserted that, in the individual, all truth can be discovered. He emphasized individualism and each person's quest to break free from the trappings of the world of the senses in order to discover the godliness of the inner Self. He also stressed self-reliance and independence and his emphasis on non-conformity profoundly effected Henry David Thoreau.
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Nature was also essential to Transcendentalism. According to Emerson, what is beyond nature is revealed through nature; nature is itself a symbol, or an indication of a deeper reality. Like Buddhism, all things exist in a ceaseless flow of change, and “being” is the subject of constant metamorphosis. Ultimately, however, one had to trust oneself and follow their inner promptings. For him, the development of the individual leads to the highest degree of consciousness obtainable in this life.
Questions to Consider
1. How have thinkers typically been divided? What are the characteristic views of each group? Into which group does Emerson place Transcendentalism?
2. What is the other nature that defines an idealist? How does this effect how an idealist views the world?
3. What are some transcendentalist beliefs? How does a Transcendentalist typically live?
4. Why do Transcendentalists tend to live in isolation?
5. What is the role of Beauty to a Transcendentalist? What is the role of Nature?
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| Historical Context
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), a journalist, critic and women's rights activist, holds a distinctive place in the cultural life of the American Renaissance. She was a transcendentalist, literary critic, editor, journalist, teacher, and political activist, ultimately turned revolutionary. Her father, a prominent lawyer & Congressman, provided Fuller with an intellectually rigorous classical education; teaching her Greek, Latin, German and Italian. After teaching for two years, she organized a series of "Conversations" or seminars for women, which she offered in Boston from 1839-1844.
Fuller became increasingly linked to the Transcendentalist movement and befriended most of the leading intellectuals of Boston and Concord, most notably Emerson. From 1840 to 1842, she served with Emerson as editor of The Dial a literary and philosophical journal for which she wrote many articles and reviews on art and literature. In 1844, Fuller became a book review editor for the New York Tribune and was quite successful, branching into art and cultural reviews. In 1845 she expanded her Dial essay and published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which became a classic of feminist thought.
In 1846, Fuller became a foreign correspondent for the Tribune and traveled to Europe. There, she sent back articles about letters and art in Europe, meeting many well-known European writers and intellectuals. In Italy, she became involved with revolutionaries and decided not to return to America for a while. She fell in love with Marchese Giovanni Angelo d'Ossoli, a much younger man of the petty nobility and a fellow revolutionary. They had a child a year later, a son named Angelo, and perhaps married the following year. She participated in the Revolution of 1848. After the revolt was suppressed by conservative forces, she, Ossoli and their son decided to return to America in May of 1850. Tragically, the ship they were traveling on struck a sandbar and slowly sank just off Fire Island New York. Fuller, Ossoli, and their son drowned.
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Published in 1843, Fuller’s essay "The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men, Woman versus Women" made a compelling case for women's equality. Indeed, the book was her major literary gift to the times. A manifesto for the women's rights movement, it revealed Fuller's enormous knowledge of literature and philosophy as she described the oppression of the female sex through history and advocated equal status for women. Years later Horace Greeley wrote, "If not the clearest and most logical, it was the loftiest and most commanding assertion yet made of the right of Woman to be regarded and treated as an independent, intelligent, rational being, entitled to an equal voice. . . hers is the ablest, bravest, broadest, assertion yet made of what are termed Woman's Rights."
Questions to Consider
1. In Fuller’s opinion, why is extension of freedom in the United States inevitable?
2. In the event that a man dies without a will, what role does his wife have over his property?
3. According to Fuller, what would happen if women were granted the same freedoms as men?
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In this essay, published in 1844, Emerson outlines the tragic elements of human life. According to Emerson, people should accept the fact that life contains pain, disappointment and frustration. Yet it is possible to obtain happiness despite life’s tragic moments. For Emerson, the development of personal consciensceness yields perspective and ultimately personal contentment.
Questions to Consider
1. According to Emerson, what is the role of pain in life?
2. What is Emerson’s opinion about those who believe in Fate?
3. In Emerson’s view, what is the true source of tragedy for people?
4. How should people achieve equilibrium? How should they behave towards nature?
5. What is the role of the intellect in human life?
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| Historical Context
John Humphrey Noyes (1811 – 1886) was an American utopian socialist and the founder of the Oneida Community. Noyes, whose father was a congressman and who was a cousin of President Rutherford B. Hayes, studied at Dartmouth College, Andover Theological Seminary, and Yale Theological College. At Yale, Noyes discovered the idea of Perfectionism. The idea was that it was possible to be free oneself of sin and achieve spiritual perfection. In 1834, he declared himself Perfect and free from sin which outraged others and his license to preach was revoked.
Meanwhile, Noyes experienced a religious conversion during a period known as Second Great Awakening. As a reaction to the tremendous social and political changes taking place in the United States in the early 19th century, the Second Awakening looked back with nostalgia to the simpler time before the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Like the First Great Awakening, many tried to create a community of believers at a time when the traditional communal bonds were being broken down.
While Noyes became intensely concerned about God's will for him, he came to believe that Christ’s second coming was near and that the Kingdom of Heaven could in fact be created on earth. He wrote in 1847: "The church on earth is now rising to meet the approaching kingdom in the heavens, and to become its duplicate and representative on earth." He returned to Putney, Vermont, where he continued to preach and began organizing a community of followers. As his Putney community began to form, Noyes began further studying the ideas of complex marriage, male continence and striving for Perfection.
In 1847, Noyes was arrested for adultery. After several supporters were also arrested, Noyes left Vermont for Oneida, New York. The Oneida Community would survive until 1879 and grow to a membership of over 300. In order to support itself, the Community had many successful industries. They manufactured animal traps and silk thread, and raised and canned fruits and vegetables. Smaller industries included the manufacture of leather travel bags and palm-leaf hats. Although the Oneida Perfectionists had a very different vision of utopian life than the Shakers and the Puritans, all three communities shared structural and ideological similarities including a belief in a special covenant with God, that the individual was to be sublimated to the community as a whole, and that an authoritarian figure should govern the community’s interests. In June 1879, Noyes faced arrest for statutory rape and fled to Canada. He never returned to America.
Attached Documents
In his essay “Bible Communism,” Noyes outlines the most important aspects of his religious philosophy. Important to Noyes’ belief was that all members were equal and that the economy of the community must be communist. But the most famous rule that Noyes imposed was based on Christ's teaching that there would be no marriage in Heaven. Therefore, Noyes asserted that on earth all men were married to all women, and that the men and women in the community should be sexually intimate with a variety of partners. The document provides the best outline of Noyes’ radical views.
Questions to Consider
1. What is the basis of Noyes’ belief? How is this reflected in “Bible Communism”?
2. Why does Noyes abolish marriage? How does he justify this?
3. What is the role of private property in Noyes’ system?
4. In the place of traditional marriage, what does Noyes offer?
5. What system of birth control does Noyes suggest?
6. What is the role of work in Noyes’ system?
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One of America's most famous utopian experiments was the Brook Farm, located on a 200-acre dairy farm in Roxbury, Massachusetts, 9 miles outside of Boston. Founded as a transcendentalist Utopian experiment by George Ripley, the Brook Farm lasted from 1841-1847. The Brook Farm was conceived as an agrarian and pastoral utopia and was organized along the ideas of Charles Fourier, a French socialist thinker who argued that a utopian society could be created in which people would jointly share in the development of the whole community. Accordingly, the project was financed by a joint-stock company with 24 shares of stock at $500 per share and each member was to participate in the manual labor in an attempt to make the group self-sufficient. Whereas the Oneida community focused on manufactured consumer goods like furniture, the economy of the farm was based primarily on agriculture.
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The Brook Farm was of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. Consequently, the Brook Farm experienced a intellectually stimulating atmosphere in which such luminaries as Nathaniel Hawthrone, John S. Dwight, Charles A. Dana, and Isaac Hecker resided and giants as Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. Channing, Margaret Fuller, Horace Greeley, and Orestes Brownson visited frequently. Despite enthusiasm for the project, however, the Brook Farm imploded due to financial stress after only six years of operation. In this essay, Emerson offers a first hand account of the workings of the community and the causes of its ultimate failure.
Questions to Consider
1. How does Emerson describe the Brook Farm?
2. Why did the participants want to start the Brook Farm venture? What were the motives? How does Emerson feel about the experiment in better living?
3. What was the typical age of the Brook Farm participants? What other attributes characterized the group? What was the outcome of their efforts? What was the effect on the members?
4. What was the role of education at the Brook Farm? What effect did education have on those who labored?
5. What wages did a ploughman receive compared with an artist? What is Emerson’s opinion about this arrangement?
6. Although the project was ultimately unsuccessful, why doesn’t Emerson consider the Brook Farm a failure?
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At the beginning of the 19th century, American intellectuals came under the sway of European socialist thinkers. In particular the ideas of the French utopian socialist thinker, Charles Fourier (1772-1837) who advocated the extension of women’s rights and the adoption of workers’ cooperatives, and the British industrialist Robert Owen (1771-1858) were considered by many Americans to offer a better method for organizing society. However, Emerson, the leading American intellectual, took exception to what he considered the rigidity of socialist thought. Although he admired both Fourier and Owen for the novelty of their thought, he nevertheless considered socialism impractical. Above all, he saw the greatest danger of socialism in its inherent stifling of individuality. Attached Documents
In this essay, Emerson outlines what he considers both the stregthes and weaknesses of socialism.
Questions to Consider
1. According to Emerson, how had the human mind developed and what conflicts arose because of this?
2. How does Emerson characterize those who belong to the Dial?
3. Which socialist thinkers does Emerson mention? What have they contributed to socialist thought?
4. What is the goal of socialism? What does it seem to offer?
5. According to Emerson, what one thing did Fourier fail to consider when developing his socialist theories? Why would this one fact prevent any rigid implementation of socialism practice?
6. What did Thoreau do to refute socialist theory? How did Thoreau live?
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As a philosopher, poet and environmental scientist, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was one of the best known transcendentalist thinkers of his age. Perceiving little difference between his writing and his life, Thoreau was also an extremely complex literary figure of many talents who turned to nature in a life-long quest for ultimate Truth. Thoreau was well-read in classical Greek and Roman philosophy, as well as being familiar with the major philosophers of his own time. Moreover, he was fond of the Hindu classic Bhagavad Gita and frequently read the latest work of the naturalists Humboldt and Darwin.
Thoreau was educated at Harvard and, after graduation, he taught for a few years. From 1837-38, Thoreau worked in his father's pencil factory. Later, he met Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became a patron and advisor to him and who introduced him to the leading transcendental thinkers of the day. Through Emerson, Thoreau contributed essays and poems to “the Dial.” Although he could never make a living from his writings, Thoreau’s work now comprises over 20 volumes. His writing is rich and complex and intended to nudge readers to reconsider the beliefs that make up their lives. Likewise, Thoreau spent the majority of his time rethinking his own values and continuously enhanced his own life’s intensity and meaning through an examination of his relationship with nature. He died of tuberculosis in 1862, at the age of 44.
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Politically, Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist. He opposed to the U.S government’s war against Mexico, which he believed was merely a ruse to extend slavery, and he supported John Brown's efforts. In 1846, Thoreau was imprisoned after he refused to pay taxes in protest against the Mexican War. Consequently, he wrote “Civil Disobedience” where he justified nonviolent resistance to the government out of moral principles. For him, morality was more important than society’s laws at any given time and political institutions should be considered with skepticism. This essay provides an outstanding example of a pacifist’s belief in nonviolent protest and has thus served as an inspiration to 20th revolutionary movements and leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Questions to Consider
1. What does Thoreau mean by the statement the “government is best which governs least"?
2. What is Thoreau’s opinion about the Mexican-American War?
3. According to Thoreau, why can a government that is based on the rule of the majority not necessarily be based on justice? What should people obey instead of society’s laws?
4. How do most men serve the state? What examples does he use?
5. Why should Americans of Thoreau’s day be ashamed of their government? What widespread practice does Thoreau reject? Although many share this objection, what do most Americans, according to Thoreau, do?
6. What is Thoreau’s opinion about modern voting? According to Thoreau, when will slavery be abolished? Why does this lack virtue?
7. Although Thoreau does not believe it is possible for one person to completely dedicate themselves to correcting every wrong, what should the individual make certain of regarding his actions and their relation to others?
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From 1845-1847, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living by living in an isolated log cabin on land owned by Emerson. For Thoreau, his intent was to isolate himself from society in order to reexamine its values and practices and his role within it. While at Walden, Thoreau did an incredible amount of reading and writing, yet he also spent much time "sauntering" in nature. While at Walden, Thoreau lived a life of simplicity, supported himself through his own labors, and widely read the classics of world literature.
In 1854, Thoreau published an account of this period entitled “Walden,” which became one of the great classics of American literature; indeed of world literature. It offers a social critique of the West with its emphasis on consumerism and its widespread destruction of the natural environment. Additionally, Thoreau gives philosophical speculation intertwined with his observations of a concrete place. He states that “if a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears the beat of a different drummer.” The book invites one to the examine one’s life and to the realization of one's potential. At the same time, Thoreau outlines his transcendentalist view of the world by proffering a religious vision of the human being and the universe.
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In this excerpt, taken from the second chapter "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," Thoreau discusses how he came to live on Walden, discovered pleasure in nature and simplified his life. He encourages the reader to trudge to the core of our reality and to concern oneself with only the most essential things in life. In the process, Thoreau critiques values of Industrial society emerging around him.
Questions to Consider
1. How does Thoreau describe his natural surroundings? What strikes him about Walden Pond?
2. According to Thoreau, why is the morning hour so important?
3. Why did Thoreau chose to live in the woods?
4. In Thoreau’s opinion, most people live like what insect? Why? In what ways do people waste time and eventually their lives?
5. How does Thoreau regard the daily news?
6. Why is the present moment so important to Thoreau? According to him, at what age do people usually appreciate the Now?
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