MORALITY IS INNATE AND TRANSCENDENT

EMERSON’S PHILOSOPHY LEGITIMIZES RUTHLESS POWER AND COMPETITION

1. EMERSON SAW CAPITALIST IMPERIALISM AS THE UNFOLDING OF DIVINE WILL

Robert Milder, Professor of English at Washington University of Saint Louis, THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1999, p. 68.

Emerson was not “co-opted” by liberal capitalism so much as he hastened to join it, since aligning himself with the divinely empowered forces of the age was always the condition for a living philosophy. “The Young American” (1844)—Emerson’s “battle cry for the new era of industrial expansion and manifest destiny,” as his editors call it—is therefore less an apology for Laissez-faire capitalism than an attempt like Henry Adams’s sixty years later to plot the lines of force that were remaking contemporary society. The difference is that where Adams the ironist would dwell on multiplicity and a vertiginous acceleration of energies without immanent purpose or foreseeable end, Emerson the seeker of unity is at pains to assimilate the new forces to a cosmic and social teleology—to survey history for the perspective of the “over-god” of the Channing ode and, in doing so, “marry Right to Might.”

Daniel Aron, philosopher, EMERSON: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS, 1962, p. 90.

Emerson’s respect for power and its achievements is even more glowingly expressed in two others essays, “Power” and “Wealth.” Here he reiterates his preference for the “bruisers” and “pirates,” the “men of the right Caesarian pattern” who transcend the pettiness of “talkers” and “clerks” and dominate the world by sheer force of character. “Life is a search after power,” he announces, and the successful men who understand the laws of Nature and respond to the godhead within themselves, who convert “the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design,” are unconsciously fulfilling the plan of a benevolent providence. In these essays and elsewhere, Emerson was not only synchronizing the predatory practices of the entrepreneur with the harmony of the universe and permitting merchants (as Bronson Alcott shrewdly said) to “find a refuge from their own duplicity under his broad shield”; he was also outlining a code of behavior that the superior man must follow, and sketching the ideal political economy under which the superman might best exercise his uncommon talents.
3. EMERSON’S PHILOSOPHY LEGITIMIZES UNCHECKED CAPITALIST EXPLOITATION

Robert Milder, Professor of English at Washington University of Saint Louis, THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1999, pp. 68-69.

By emphasizing the “anti-feudal power” of trade, which displaces the “physical strength” of kings and aristocrats and “installs” the enlightened forces of “computation, combination, information (and) science, in its room.” Emerson can associate capitalism with “amelioration in nature, which alone permits and authorizes amelioration in mankind.” Implicit in his words are the notion that the civic world is part of nature and subject to its processes and that advancement occurs by cooperating with these processes rather than directing them toward immediate human ends. The political corollary to this belief is an almost unmitigated laissez-faire: “Trade is an instrument of that friendly Power which works for us in our own despite…Our part is plainly not to throw ourselves across the track, not to block improvement, and sit till we are stone, but to watch the uprise of successive mornings, and to conspire with the new works of new days.”