Mr. Emerson's Revolution

In Mr Emerson's Revolution, Jean McClure Mudge and a team of leading Emerson scholars tell the story of Emerson's life and work as one of serial moral-political change. They give us a multi-perspectival but thematically unified recounting of the whole arc of Emerson's career from the point of view of his evolving orientation towards abolition, women's rights, and social reform more generally. [...] Mudge's probing treatment of the crisis provoked by Fuller's forceful emergence into Emerson's life provides one of the book's most original sections. [...] In classical Republican thought the term 'revolution' suggested circular turning rather than linear forward movement. With this in mind it becomes possible to see both trajectories in play over the long course of Emerson's political (r)evolution as described here by Mudge et al. Emerson's constant moving forward, we learn, like that of his country at its best, was paradoxically enabled by no less constant recourse to a stable set of emancipatory moral principles.