Emerson, Labor, and Ages of Turbulence
I was born a seeing eye not a helping hand.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals (1837)
When the financial panic of 1837 devastated labor in the United States,1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, like so many antebellum commentators, reflected on this sobering loss in print. “Young men have no hope,” he observed in his May 1837 Journals. “Adults stand like daylaborers idle in the streets. None calleth us to labor.”2 As he probed the issue, however, he came to a surprising realization: although the crisis affected labor, it seemed to be caused by labor as well. He believed in particular that Americans had misunderstood the nature of their work; indeed, they had construed labor as a material—rather than an ideal—process whereby they created salable property. Emerson concluded that this pervasive error, which had turned man into a “money chest,” was the panic’s “causal bankruptcy” (JMN, 5:332). By August 1837, participating in what Nicholas Bromell has described as the era’s “broad cultural contestation of the meaning of work,”3 Emerson sought to reinvigorate labor—scholarly labor in particular—in his now iconic address “The American Scholar,” presenting his notoriously impracticable Transcendentalism as the “remedy” for the panic.4 [End Page 251]
The Times. Lithograph by Edward Williams Clay, Published by Henry R. Robinson, 1850.
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In our own age of turbulence, scholars’ vexed relation to the market drives debate in crisis-ridden humanities departments. A new field devoted to explicating the various crises afflicting the profession—what literary scholar Jeffrey J. Williams terms “critical university studies”—indeed has eclipsed critical theory as the ultimate form of intellection among humanists. Defined as a “gathering place” for work that “that focuses on [sic] the consequences of corporate methods and goals” on the university, especially “corrupting research and increasing managerial (as opposed to academic control)” and, more to the point, “cutting labor through reducing regular faculty positions (while increasing adjunct positions),” critical university studies takes an oppositional stance on these issues.5 Such works proceed in the mode of critique, exposing how corporate logic pervades university administration, research, and teaching. In my view, related to this criticism writ large, in Americanist literary scholarship there is also what David Zimmerman identifies as an ongoing “economic turn.” Commenting on a recent issue of American Literary History devoted to literature and economic crises, Zimmerman asserts that the financial crisis in 2008 has encouraged a revitalized economic criticism, one that seeks a more dynamic account of how economics impinges on literary production than allowed by the “complicity criticism” of the 1990s.6
What animates both the economic turn and critical university studies is a belief in critique’s social efficacy; as Zimmerman observes about Cecilia Tichi’s contribution to the issue, critics now invite “socially relevant economic criticism,” which recognizes that “literary texts are capable of performing [sic] socially progressive work.”7 Writing and lecturing in response to the severe dislocations caused by the panic in the late 1830s, Emerson had such critical ambitions in the antebellum era as well, unfurling an economic program rooted in philosophical Idealism not only in “The American Scholar” but also in several lesser-known addresses from his 1837 and 1838 lecture series. Historicizing Emerson’s panic-era work, in what follows I argue that his work from this turbulent era constitutes an attempt to critique political economy, showing how he imagined the discipline to shape the American [End Page 253] commercial psyche. Previous scholarship has demonstrated that, in Barbara Packer’s words, the 1837 panic led Emerson to explore the individual’s relationship to “his social and economic system,” but here I am interested in how Emerson theorized labor as a process with immaterial implications and I want to argue that Emerson’s panic-era writing sought to exalt in particular scholarly speculation as work.8
“The man of strong Understanding,” Emerson complained in his May 1837 Journals, “always acts unfavorably upon the Man of Reason, disconcerts, and makes him less than he is” (JMN, 5:331). He sought to right this apparent wrong by underwriting philosophically what would eventually become one of the chief “objects” of George Ripley’s Brook Farm experiment, as he expressed it in a letter to Emerson: “to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual.”9 As this passage from Ripley makes clear, Emerson was hardly alone in the battle to legitimate scholarly labor as productive; indeed, the latter’s economic commentary partook of a broader discourse populated by fellow Transcendentalists and Unitarian pastors who contributed to the flood of economic commentary in the nation’s periodicals and newspapers.10 In focusing on Emerson’s writing during a turbulent episode of economic history, however, we see how economics is no mere “context” for understanding his work; rather, this context reveals how an important literary figure grappled with the lively debates that attempted to redefine the economic during the market revolution.
In historicizing Emerson’s panic pedagogy, though, I want to resist an over-reliance on critique, which so clearly informs the two scholarly fields I reference above. Emerson and his contemporaries believed that critique might effect social change in a market society; work in critical university studies and the economic turn no doubt shares this desire. Such desire is entirely legitimate, but even while we are drawn to economic critique as a scholarly mode, we must heed Transcendentalism’s failure to solve the crisis in the 1830s. Indeed, as I will argue in the essay’s conclusion, critique of [End Page 254] panic conditions might very well obscure our own role in a crisis, the blind spots in our own attempts to expose the market in ways that alter it. It is in keeping in mind the barriers that Emerson’s political economy sought to circumvent and the challenges that the market continues to pose that we can articulate what value literary studies possesses in our own age of turbulence, our own prolonged moment of panic.
This essay seeks to distance itself from critique for another reason: it aims to avoid the polarized debate over Emerson’s—and our own—complicity or lack thereof with market capitalism. On the one hand, the move to read Emerson as a pure critic of the market oversimplifies Emerson’s stances toward capitalism.11 On the other hand, Christopher Newfield, an Emerson scholar and a critical university theorist, overstates the case when he indicts Emersonian Transcendentalism as a harbinger of neoliberalism, in essence providing an overcorrection to the Idealist reading.12 Richard Teichgraeber offers an elegant solution to the field’s polarization of Emerson’s relationship to market; accounting for the complexity of Emerson’s view, he describes Emerson as a “connected critic” who attempted to reform society from within its existing structures.13 Len Gougeon, in his recent parsing of Teichgreaber’s argument, insists that for Emerson democratic changes, in which government prioritizes people over property, “did not necessitate a radical alteration of the economic structure itself but rather of the spirit that informs it.”14 Indeed, in Emerson’s words, the point was to effect an alteration in the nation’s ethical priorities: “that the head should serve the feet,” that in pursuing his “vocation,” a man pursued first and foremost a knowledge of Reason.
In traveling the middle road hewn by Teichgraeber, I mean, first, to attend more closely to Emerson’s attempt to revise the market’s structure of feelings and, perhaps more provocatively, to focus on how Emerson’s desire for critique to solve a crisis in the value of scholarly labor resonates with our own crises in the academy, especially those dealing with the material and symbolic erosion of professorial labor. To put this another way, even if Americanist literary critics solve the problem of Emerson’s attitude toward the market [End Page 255] by arguing that he sought to change the market’s structure of feelings, we still do not escape the problem of the practicability of the Transcendentalist vision of labor. In his Journals, Emerson, warming to the idea of a panic pedagogy, writes, “Is it to be taken for granted [the Ideal] is impracticable?” (JMN, 5:332) For Emerson’s contemporaries, and indeed for modern Americans, the short answer is of course an emphatic “Yes.” Yet such a vision is not only flawed for the obvious reason that Transcendentalism cannot feed people. (The failure at Brook Farm would illustrate this point well enough.) More interestingly, it is also flawed for the reason that, in equating philosophy to labor, Emerson misconstrued the vector of labor history, which pointed away from “the ideology of artisan republicanism” and toward “new hymns to ‘free liberty’ that connected liberty not to the ancient traditions of the workshop, but to individual freedom to collect such wages as were offered.”15 Rooted in the idea that “to every man there is a profession which he will discharge without shame, and with inexpressible satisfaction” (EL, 2:237), Emerson’s economic theory thus, to present-day readers attuned to the degrading effect that corporate norms have had on the professoriate, registers as at best a dream and at worst a failure.
My point, however, will not be simply that Emerson’s political economy clung to an antiquated notion of vocation as a compensatory response to industrialization.16 Taking my cues from recent challenges to critique that invite us to explore how literature resonates transtemporally, I want to pursue an alternate route, forging a connection between a crisis of scholarly labor in Emerson’s age and a crisis of scholarly labor in our own age as well.17 What made Emerson’s economic program impracticable in the 1830s was not only the fact that Transcendentalism could not meet basic human needs but, in addition, its certainty that once someone realized his profession, he faced no material barrier in achieving his work. The ideological scandal at the heart of Emerson’s panic-era thought is that even as he sought to change capitalism from within by reclaiming the idea of speculation, he attempted to solve the problem of an ailing labor market by underestimating labor’s relation to the market in the first place. Working [End Page 256] in a mode of critique, Emerson then serves as both analogue and warning to contemporary critics: it is one thing to expose the truth—for instance, corporate norms—lurking beneath the surface of the university; it is another matter entirely, however, for critique to solve a crisis of our labor as literary scholars and teachers.
Panic Pedagogy: 1837
In early April 1837, a major financial crisis challenged Transcendentalism’s signature “optative mood” (CW, 1:207). The era’s newspapers described the dismay, with the Whig National Intelligencer revealing the widespread failure of business in an oft-reprinted report from April 7, 1837. There, the editors explained how the failure of one financial firm—a certain St. John & Co.—“carried with it twelve of fifteen houses in Pearl street and the neighborhood.” In addition, they opined, financial instruments like “[c]ommercial paper” and “[f]ancy stocks,” respectively, were “unsalable” and “ten to twenty percent lower than they ever were.”18 In the editors’ matter-of-fact style, it is hard not to read their fatigue over the “money market’s” collapse, a fatigue bordering on absolute resignation.
While the newspapers conveyed a sense of dismay, so too did Emerson—at least initially. Writing to his eldest brother and eventual debtor William in early April, Emerson confided, “I grieve at the calamitous times.” “I am no very good economist,” he continued, for “Economy is a science & must be devoutly studied, if you would know it.”19 Grief, however, was not long with Emerson; by late April, as he wrote in his Journals, he was ready to “teach my countrymen their office” (JMN, 5:302). He was prepared, in particular, to explain the relationship between Idealism and labor. On April 22, 1837, he reported that he “read in the papers” that “[s]ixty thousand laborers [are] to be presently thrown out of work.” Although Emerson’s concerns are less for the dispossessed than for the “rich & brave [and] the domestic government,” he nevertheless imagines the panic in terms of labor, especially [End Page 257] the material effects of unemployment.20 Yet, eventually going beyond a recitation of banking statistics or unemployment rates, by mid-May Emerson had begun to apprehend the crisis in symbolic terms: as an outward burst of subterranean energy that emanated from the “cruel oppression that the ideal should serve the actual” (JMN, 5:332). In an important passage from May 22, he considers the financial event as a geological rupture:
I learn geology the morning after an earthquake. I learn fast on the ghastly diagrams of the cloven mount & upheaved plain and the dry bottom of the sea. The roots of orchards and the cellars of palaces and the cornerstones of cities are dragged into melancholy sunshine. I see the natural fracture of the stone. I see the tearing of the tree & learn its fibre [sic] & its rooting. The Artificial is rent from the Eternal.
(JMN, 5:332-3)
Here Emerson uses the incipient language of geology to explain that in losing sight of the ethical priority of the “ideal” spirit over the material “actual” American laborers caused the crisis.21 This rupture is the consequence of the “[a]rtificial” pursuit of what he terms the Understanding (rather than the Reason, which Emerson associated with “the eternal”).22 The panic signals, in other words, that laborers had mistaken the end goal of labor to be the production of material capital that one then exchanges for material forms of value like money.
Predictably, Emerson’s Idealist explanation of the panic deviated from those of the political economists who understood it to interrupt the maximization of financial value. Henry Charles Carey, the most accomplished American political economist of the nineteenth century and leading Whig intellectual,23 analyzed the 1837 panic as one of the era’s “free-trade crises.”24 Carey’s textbook, Principles of Political Economy, published during the panic year of 1837, defines labor narrowly in terms of “production.” Echoing Adam Smith’s discussion of labor in The Wealth of Nations (1776), Carey explains, “To produce may therefore be defined [as] to occasion [End Page 258] an alteration in the condition of existing particles of matter, by which that matter may be rendered more useful, or agreeable, than in its present state.”25 John Locke uses the term “appropriation” in his Second Treatise of Government (1689) to capture this same sentiment, that the individual takes a natural resource, improves it with his labor, and thereby creates value in the form of portable property.26 Carey prefers protectionism (an economic policy that uses, for instance, import tariffs to restrain international trade, thereby nurturing domestic industry) to free trade (an economic policy that keeps barriers to trade at a minimum) precisely because he finds the former to maximize value. His Democratic opponents desired this same result, but they disagreed as to the best means to achieve it. Indeed, even though John O’Sullivan, the editor of The Democratic Review, advocates free trade over protectionism as the solution to the 1837 crisis, he does so because he likewise understands that system to maximize labor’s potential.27
Emerson makes no distinction between political economic schools of thought in his December 1837 address “Doctrine of the Hands,” wherein he criticizes the discipline in general, discrediting it as complicit with the reification of labor. “A man in the view of political economy,” Emerson explains, “is a pair of hands, a useful engine quite able to subdue the earth, to plant and build it over.”28 He appropriates this image of the work of the hands, which he finds epitomized in classical political economy, in order to advance his own polemic. For Emerson, such apotheosis always ends tragically, for even much vaunted objects elude one’s grasp; indeed, in “Experience,” he explains that death teaches us that “reality,” like property, “turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit.”29 He goes on to lament the “lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch the hardest” (CW, 3:29).30 Building an economic theory around the durability of objects, made and grasped by the hands, the political economist, to borrow from the 1837 “Address on Education,” thus “utterly fails in his office” (EL, 2:202).
Even while Emerson criticizes materialism, he seeks a balance between the strong emphasis on production and inactivity, when “the same hands … hang very long by the side quite [End Page 259] still.” In “Doctrine of the Hands,” he insists that “all such as have hands to know what is their law” (EL, 2:230-1). This critique of idleness more than simply indicates “a sustained hymn in praise of labor” that Neal Dolan finds in Emerson’s work “from early to late.”31 Rather, it conveys an essential point about Emerson as an economic theorist: his anti-materialism seeks, finally, to change—“alter,” in Gougeon’s idiom—the material conditions of labor by returning Americans’ “idle” hands to producing in rhythm with spiritual laws: to unite the spiritual and the material in the act of production.
The attempt to correct political economy by reconciling Idealism and materialism continues in “Trades and Professions,” a lecture Emerson delivered in the buildup to the 1837 panic in which he defines labor as the pursuit of one’s “foreordained” calling (EL, 2:113). He posits that if the laborer exhibits any self-awareness whatsoever, he will find that his true vocation is the one he already practices. Thus for Emerson, according to a logic that echoes the Calvinism of John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity, a person’s choice of profession is really no choice at all: one performs the work to which he has been “foreordained in his faculty” to perform, and this work constitutes one’s ideal profession (EL, 2:113). Given that the “brain and body of man is adapted to the work that is to be done in the world,” if “today you should release by an act of law all men from their contracts,” “tomorrow you should find the same contracts [sic] redrawn” (EL, 2:113-4).
Although the laborer pursues his foreordained calling in order to “relieve his hunger, his thirst, and his cold” (EL, 2:114), in appropriating nature he finds that he might do more than satisfy his needs: his labor might satisfy his wants as well. “But,” as Emerson says, “his wants are never the less,—always the greater. [sic] Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover” (EL, 2:114). Here, Emerson repeats the classical idea that man appropriates nature in order (to cite Carey’s definition of labor from the Principles) to “maintain and improve his condition.”32 Emerson, as Carey does, sees labor as both conservative and progressive. He, therefore, seems to endorse Carey’s materialist logic by recommending that the laborer attempt to close the gap between [End Page 260] “Want and Have,” yet he goes on to assert that both materialist and Idealist labor processes are coextensive. Thus in “Trades and Professions,” even though he concedes that labor is a material process with material results, he insists that those results are not ends themselves. He makes this point by asking, “What is labor but the act of the individual man going out to take possession of the world which the universal mind hath built,—finding in matter the impression of the same footsteps which it knows so well in morals, yes, and reading the same laws in a different text and character?” (EL, 2:115). In a tacit echo of his foundational treatise Nature (1836), wherein he urges the reader to comprehend the natural world as “the symbol of spirit” (CW, 1:17), he argues that the true payoff of labor is in fact knowledge of the Ideal.
What is at stake in Emerson’s turn to political economy is an urgent desire to define labor as an effortful mental process, which yields a transformation of capital per se. Adam Smith argues that the “real price of everything … is the toil and trouble of acquiring it”33; adopting this phrase in “Trades and Professions,” Emerson suggests that “[t]he real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, of which wealth and credit are signs” (EL, 2:127). Unlike Smith, Emerson means for Americans to understand that in laboring in order to satisfy their worldly desires they are simultaneously generating insights into Reason, a term by which he means the transcendent realm wherein men and nature cohere. In a move that anticipates critical university studies’ interest in scholarly labor, Emerson’s political economic project, therefore, is to reveal philosophical speculation—that is, the imaginative capacity to mine ideal capital—as part and parcel of any material labor process.
Significantly, imagining labor as the conversion of the “actual” into the “ideal”—“experience [into] thought,” as he puts it in “The American Scholar” (CW, 1:59)—Emerson seeks to overcome the central problem of economics: scarcity. Indeed, Emerson believes that the exclusive focus on converting scarce resources into property has transformed the laborer into a “money chest,” a phrase that he recycles in his June 1837 “Address on Education.”34 There, Emerson [End Page 261] explains that a laborer might work not on the finite resources of the world but instead on the infinite resources of the self. “It is not, believe me,” he urges, “the chief end of man that he should make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise to make fortunes”; rather, the chief end is “that he should explore himself—an inexhaustible mine—and external nature is but the candle to illuminate in turn the innumerable and profound obscurities of the soul” (EL, 2:199-200). Emerson’s controlling image here—the self as an “inexhaustible mine,” an “innumerable” resource with which to perform one’s ideal work—turns on the self’s presumptive lack of scarcity.35
Yet in theorizing ideal capital as infinite, Emerson not only wants to circumvent the problem of scarcity, but, equally important, a theory of value as well.36 This move is in keeping with his polemic, as he attempts to turn the laborer’s and the political economist’s attention away from strictly stockpiling value. In the “Address on Education,” continuing his diatribe against reification, he argues, “There are no men. Men are subject to things. [sic] He does not use learning as an instrument, but he looks upon learning as an established thing of good fame in society, and passively acquires all that is reputed such. So he regards wealth [sic] they are the goods which he is to get; they are the absolute value” (EL, 2:196). Infected by the “fever of the market,” laborers could not see “that sleep was creeping over the soul,” as they mistakenly apotheosized products as “the absolute value” (EL, 2:197).
Here, as he does elsewhere in the late 1830s, Emerson lodges what appears to be a hackneyed indictment of the capitalist system, which is less interesting than are his attempts to improve laboring conditions within this very system. His efforts to circumvent a theory of value work to this end. The same is true of his 1838 address “Ethics,” where, as if he is following up discussing the self as an “inexhaustible mine,” Emerson instantiates the self as a “workyard.” This address has proven noteworthy to critics who cite it as the first public expression of the idea of “Self-Trust,” the precursor to the more famous formulation, “self reliance.” The point I mean to emphasize, though, is the way in which Emerson exhorts his [End Page 262]
Specie Claws. A melodramatic portrayal of the plight of the tradesman during the Panic of 1837. Lithograph by Henry Dacre, published by H. R. Robinson, 1838 or 1839.
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audience to “self-trust” as a form of labor.37 He argues, “The place where you are is your workyard. The work you can do is your office” (EL, 2:151). Whereas in the “Address on Education,” Emerson tries to overcome the problem of scarcity by turning the self into an “inexhaustible mine,” in “Ethics” he seeks to overcome a different, but related issue—the actual problem of having nowhere to work, of having no market to determine that work’s value.
Emerson’s attempt to overcome what Michael Gilmore terms the “taint of the commodity” might well be critiqued as ideological.38 In assessing his labor theory, though, I want to emphasize its assumption that one’s vocation is “foreordained.” More particularly, the energy Emerson expends in re-theorizing fundamental economic concepts—scarcity and value—culminates in his desire to imagine the production of value without reference to a market. This move leads to the major flaw in his economic thinking, a flaw that he is forced to acknowledge and then (again) to overcome. In “Ethics,” Emerson tells us that “Each man has his own vocation,” that each man’s “call to do any particular work … is, his fitness to do that thing he proposes” (EL, 2:147). And in “Doctrine of the Hands,” he exclaims, “I must esteem this right and duty of choosing his pursuing one crisis in each man’s life. Nothing is more sacred” (EL, 2:237). At its core, Emerson’s thinking about labor, then, becomes an invitation for the laborer to “harmonize with the present,” to unite reality and expectation (EL, 2:237), a prospect that Emerson’s auditors and those in the present-day aspiring to the professoriate know to be an especially uncertain one. Assuming that the form of self-knowledge coincides with the enactment of its content, Emerson argues that once someone passes through such a crisis and understands his “own vocation,” he no longer suffers by the disparity between the actual and the Ideal, a gap that results in “waste strength in the world” (EL, 2:236).39
The urge to exhort young people to overcome such a crisis drives Emerson’s efforts to redefine labor in the late 1830s. Accordingly, his lecturing takes a specific turn, as he engages this problematic relation between self-actualization and one’s work: discussing labor as duty, Emerson seeks to override [End Page 264] widespread cultural prejudices against scholastic labor.40 Such a move would become something of a fetish among the Northeastern intelligentsia, as evidenced, to cite just one example, by the Unitarian pastor Orville Dewey, who lamented the fact that “even literary labour—labour of the mind, the noblest of all labour—had suffered under [the] disparaging estimate of work.”41 Emerson’s efforts to rehabilitate intellectual labor drive his engagement with both laborers’ and political economists’ exclusive focus on productive value.42 He contests, in particular, the dismissal of the scholar as unproductive. Thus in “The American Scholar,” Emerson seeks not only to assert the nation’s literary independence from Europe, but also the scholar’s independence from those “so-called ‘practical men’ [who] sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate … they could do nothing” (CW, 1:59).
Emerson’s rebuttal of these sneering “practical men” turns on the contrast between those who produce something and others, like scholars, who seem to produce nothing at all. To explode this binary, Emerson wields mechanical analogies to argue for the value of the scholar’s speculations.43 When he outlines his “theory of books,” for instance, he explains that the scholar, when left alone with his thoughts, eventually feels compelled to express them. The problem is that this knowledge cannot be translated efficiently into a comprehensive final form; the transaction is always infinitely deferred. Thus, Emerson concludes, the “process … of transmuting life into truth” is never “quite perfect”: “As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from this book, or write a book of pure thought that shall be as efficient, in all respects” in communicating Truth to a “remote posterity” (CW, 1:55-6). In likening scholastic production to a mechanical process, Emerson acknowledges the inevitable inefficiencies in moving from “active” thought to expression, but he nevertheless insists on the scholar’s production of value, the transmission of his ideas for posterity.44
Establishing the scholar’s productive value in terms of process rather than product allows Emerson to advance a polemical argument no doubt targeted at those sneering practical [End Page 265] men: the scholar is second to no one in terms of labor. Again, Emerson makes this point by way of a mechanical analogy, in a passage to which I refer above: “experience” is actually the “raw material out of which the intellect moulds [sic] her splendid products. A strange process too, this, by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours” (CW, 1:59). The scholar’s intellection converts experience into Truth as no other productive process can do. What we find in Emerson’s rhetoric of production is thus the desire to counter the “notion that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian,” the idea that the scholar is “unfit for any handiwork or public labor, as a penknife for an axe” (CW, 1:59).
In insisting on the scholar as a laborer, Emerson challenges those narrow-minded “practical men” who sneer at unproductive scholars as well as their intellectual counterparts—the political economists. He attacks, in particular, the latter group’s central complaint against what Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, terms the “unproductive labourer”; a passage from Book II provides the locus classicus for the distinction between productive and unproductive labor. “There is one sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed,” he writes:
there is another which has no effect. The former, as it produces a value, may be called productive; the latter, unproductive labour. Thus the labour of a manufacture adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master’s profit. The labour [sic] of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing.45
Smith defines productivity as the transformation of one thing into something else with more value—a mulberry leaf, perhaps, into satin.46 Unlike the “menial servant,” whose “services generally perish in the very instant of their performance,” the manufacturer creates a lasting product, some “vendible commodity” that will outlast the laborer’s own body. The [End Page 266] productive laborer, that is, leaves an enduring mark on the world, whereas the menial servant “seldom leave[s] any trace or value behind.”47
Unproductive labor, on the contrary, is defined as such because it “produces nothing for which an equal quantity of service can afterwards be procured.” The logic of Smith’s argument thus allows for no distinction among unproductive laborers: those who “protect the commonwealth,” who provide national defense, are just as unproductive as members of the more “frivolous professions,” lawyers, actors, and “men of letters of all kinds.” Smith of course degrades the unproductive laborer from the soldier to the singer since the product of his or her labor is so fleeting that it represents a net loss of value. At the end of the opera, the patron has spent money on admission but leaves with nothing to exchange for the value of the ticket—for shame, indeed, the patron leaves with nothing but a memory of the performance.48
Against Smith and his followers, Emerson posits Transcendentalism—an offshoot of what was known in the antebellum era as “speculative philosophy”—as an effortful process in which something of incalculable, immaterial value is produced.49 He undertakes this polemic in order to demonstrate that the scholar does not simply eschew life and work; rather, he asserts that the scholar works diligently to uncover Ideal laws. In fact, this insistence on the scholar’s effortful labor, as it did for Dewey, will become something of a fetish for Emerson, evidencing his desire to sear the image of the hard-working scholar in the minds of his contemporaries. In “Doctrine of the Hands,” he even imagines the scholar as the workaholic par excellence: “Nobody complains more of the want of time than the scholar, but do you suppose that he finds his most laborious days less pleasing than his days of recreation” (EL, 2:238).
Emerson’s urge to equate scholarship with labor reaches its zenith in “The American Scholar,” an address in which he seeks to spur the nation’s young people to adopt this strategic attitude toward scholarly work as well. To this end, Emerson would appeal to the dominant affect in antebellum America’s business culture—ambition. Indeed, when read as an attempt [End Page 267] to engage political economy in the aftermath of the 1837 panic, “The American Scholar” emerges as an invitation to undertake the ambitious work of the scholar. Emerson, to whose own ambition critics have long alerted us, advocated intellection as an ambitious form of labor at a time, as Scott Sandage explains, when ambition was becoming mandatory.50 By the time John Bartlett published his Dictionary of Americanisms in 1848, in fact, this ethos had been codified as the “goahead” spirit.51 Significantly, in Emerson’s view, the problem with such an ethos was not ambition itself; as he declares in the “Ethics,” “whoever is genuine, his ambition is exactly proportioned to his powers” (EL, 2:148).52 To be “genuine,” he would say, one must heed the call to “endless exertion” (EL, 2:147).
Emerson’s problem with ambition is not simply the traditional objects of ambition, money being a prominent one. Rather, echoing an oft-heard anxiety in the early republic, one that was then repeated in antebellum America, Emerson denigrated the haste with which one strived to gain so as to avoid the duty to work. To make this point in “Doctrine of the Hands,” Emerson, anticipating Max Weber by nearly 100 years, adduces Benjamin Franklin as the exemplar of this plodding way to wealth. “[T]he true way of beginning is by austere humility and lowness,” Emerson claims. “Leave far off the borrowed capital and raise an estate from the seed. Begin with the hands and earn one cent; then two; then a dollar; then stock a basket; then a barrow; … then a warehouse; and not on this dangerous balloon of a credit make his first structure.” This ideal, Emerson points out, is not “merely theoretical.” “It has been done. Franklin, William Hutton, and many of New England’s merchant princes are men of this merit” (EL, 2:242). The problem with credit in Emerson’s political economic imagination, then, is that, since it amounts to instant access to capital, it prevents one from laboring. In a vexed metaphor, to be sure, it prevents one from moving slowly, in accordance to spiritual laws, from a seed to a warehouse.
No cultural character embodied hasty ambition more than the financial speculator. This oft-maligned figure in Anglo-American culture represented the diametric opposite [End Page 268] of Emerson’s “speculative men,” insofar as we understand this opposition along an axis of speed. In The New-Yorker, Horace Greeley defined speculation “as the buying of an article, not for personal and immediate business use, but with the hope of selling it again at a profit.”53 Others were hardly dispassionate; they lambasted the practice outright as the excessive desire to enrich oneself quickly without the bothers of work. A group of businessmen’s “Report of the Committee,” a retrospective analysis of the 1837 crisis reprinted in the Niles’ Weekly Register, for example, finds that “among the causes of the ruinous results in which the business, the enterprise, the industry, and we may add the happiness of the country,” are “the extensive and rash contracts in the purchase of land, city stocks, and other property, in which men of limited resources, in their zeal ‘to make haste to be rich,’ have engaged.”54
In “The American Scholar,” however, we find Emerson’s attempt to legitimate the scholar’s ambitions, as he seeks to define philosophical speculation as a pain-staking process of self-discovery. Emerson’s contemporaries understood such an attempt itself as speculative in the sense that Greeley defines it above. Orestes Brownson, for instance, seemed to understand Emerson’s agenda in this way, warning Unitarian elders “to show how ‘freedom and life can be found elsewhere than in connection with the [philosophical] speculations of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or to Ralph Waldo Emerson they may rest assured their pupils will resort.”55 Brownson thus cautions that Emerson’s alluring style will lead to a future disaffection with Unitarianism among young men. Yet if Emerson attempts to recruit the scholars to adopt this view of labor, he describes the slow rhythm of the scholar’s labor in a rhetorically risky way. “Long must [the scholar] stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead,” he proclaims:
Worse yet, he must accept—how often! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, [End Page 269] the frequent uncertainty and loss of time which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society.
(CW, 1:62)
Emerson’s image of the solitary scholar, the object of social scorn, no doubt contrasts both with the occasion of his commencement address and with his desire to win recruits to his views on labor. But such melancholy actually functions in tandem with his polemic; he argues that in undertaking selfreliant work, one resists both the “vulgar prosperity” of the age and the great hastiness of the typical American worker.56 Self-reliant labor, he asserts, is for the truly ambitious—for the person who seeks to “exerci[se] the highest functions of human nature” (CW, 1:62). This ambition, Emerson concedes, requires sacrifices: “In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself … patient of reproach; and bide his own time.” But for the person who exhibits both ambition and patience, “Success treads on every right step” (CW, 1:63).
What makes this vision of labor interesting is the same thing that, as I suggest above, constitutes its flaws: Ideal labor provides the rising generation with a chance to attain “success” even when the labor market is in ruins. A labor crisis that featured high unemployment numbers, the 1837 panic had foreclosed opportunities to actualize one’s ambitions through work. The consequences of this affective foreclosure, as Emerson well knew, were dire. One highly visible outcome was an increase in suicides, a historical fact that gives heightened poignancy to the concluding moments of “The American Scholar,” where Emerson avers that young men “are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust—some of them suicides” (CW, 1:69). Suicide was in fact an “epidemic” in antebellum America: “Disrupting traditional behavior,” Charles Sellers writes, “the market revolution evoked collective repression by impelling the [End Page 270]
Uncle Sam Sick with La Grippe. Lithograph by Edward Williams Clay, Published by Henry R. Robinson, 1837.
[End Page 271]
stressed into seeming epidemics of escapist addiction, insanity, suicide, and prostitution.”57 An article in Greeley’s The New-Yorker even cited failure in business as one of the “various modern causes of suicide,” referring the reader to the case of “[a] merchant, aged 32, who had lost his fortune, and was left without resources,” and thus determined to commit suicide.58
When Emerson refers to the self as a “workyard,” then, he identifies outlets for ambition to exist even during times of severe unemployment. Not obviously “practicable,” this strategy nevertheless represents Emerson’s desire to negate the ill consequences of labor’s loss, of hands hanging idle by one’s side. He seeks to work around, that is, dominant assumptions about the relationship between self-worth and production.59 Overemphasizing the production of value in the form of property, those “[y]oung men of the fairest promise”:
did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience—patience;—… for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world.
(CW, 1:69)
Clearly, Emerson understood exchange as necessary to the scholar’s circulation of Ideal capital, a point evidenced in this passage from “The American Scholar.”60 Yet even while this passage evidences Emerson’s reliance on a logic of exchange, it conveys a more fundamental point regarding Emerson’s vision of labor: preaching, once again, the slow-pacing of ideal labor, Emerson nicely contrasts the self-reliant scholar, “the single man,” with the herd of workers, “crowding to the barriers for the career.” Why seek for a career, one measured by “vulgar” “prosperity,” and likely to induce one to “sleepwalk,” when one can set up shop (to recall the metaphor from “Ethics”) “on his instincts”? While the unemployed masses [End Page 272] clamored for work in the aftermath of the panic, in August 1837 Emerson exhorts scholars not just to work—but to work truly, thereby “conver[ting] [sic] the world.”
Panic Pedagogy: 2014
“Crowding to the barriers for a career” seems aptly to describe those teachers and scholars aspiring to join the ranks of the professoriate, those very laborers who both play such a vital role in university in the form of adjunct instruction and loom so largely in the critical university studies’ imaginary. To adopt Emerson’s thinking about labor in the aftermath of the 1837 panic here, then, would be to recommend forbearance—“patience”—as well as to advocate laboring without reference to the market. Of course, Emerson’s logic, as I have described it here, presents an easy target for ideology critique: in valorizing what Orville Dewey calls “literary labor,” Emerson’s panic-era work eschews the possibility of collective action, exalting instead the solitary work of the scholar as the panacea to panic. Rather than pursue such a line of critique, however, I mean to conclude this essay by asking a different set of questions about Emerson’s and our ages of turbulence, one that takes its cues from recent developments in social theory. The development I have in mind is the challenge to critique that Bruno Latour has recently lodged, perhaps most polemically, in his essay “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”; there Latour imagines a reinvigorated criticism as an enterprise that no longer oscillates between the “limited choice” that either the subject or the context is the sole determinant of meaning.61 It is in fact a kind of “limited choice” in Emerson studies against which Teichgraeber protests, a choice between viewing Emerson as either complicit or resistant to the marketplace. This bifurcated structure, in my view, is largely repeated in critical university studies, a body of critique that attributes the crises in higher education either to the encroachment of corporate norms into university administration or to the failure of faculty to advocate for the value of their labor. [End Page 273]
Inspired by Latour, we see that the more pressing critical act in response to a crisis in the value of scholarly speculation, however, is not to unveil the mechanisms of power but, instead, to explore “how many participants” attend such crises.62 Latour’s approach promises an expansive account of what constitutes a phenomenon like a crisis. The point I mean to emphasize—one that turns on the transtemporality of crises in scholarly value from Emerson’s age to our own—is that just as labor was for Emerson, literary scholarship and teaching is for us an essential participant in its own crisis. Yes, scholars working in critical university studies and, more locally, in the economic turn, have registered solutions to the crisis, working to wield the power of critique to revivify humanistic inquiry. With Latour’s writing in mind, however, we might question the efficacy of critique when it comes to ending the fact that market forces—whether in the antebellum era or in the present day—have undermined the value of scholarly speculation. Indeed, it suggests the limits of critique and invites us to recognize the array of phenomena that create, and sustain, crises.
In accordance with the “limited choice” that structures criticism of Emerson and the market, in addition to the broader inquiries into the humanities and the market, if critique unveils the extent to which the university (or literature) is beholden to power, other responses seek to liberate humanistic inquiry from the market entirely. Mary Poovey, in a formulation that to my mind recalls Emerson’s attempt to circumvent established theories of value, argues that humanists must take a “risk,” justifying their value in terms independent of the market: we must identify “some alternative to market values,” which accounts for the “goods” in which we traffic, “that do[es] not derive from the market.”63 What at first seems to be a complete disavowal of the market, however, finally becomes not “a radical alteration of the economic structure itself but rather of the spirit that informs it.”64 (Isn’t “risk,” after all, the quintessential market act?) Importantly, Poovey seeks to alter the spirit of humanistic inquiry in the university through pedagogy, precisely that form of labor that unites material and speculative work. “In order to realize this norm [the idea that “the function of the humanities in the [End Page 274] university is to preserve, nurture, analyze, interrogate, and interpret” human culture],” she argues, “humanities disciplines would have to support a pedagogy that makes the risk they inevitably exact tolerable for those who embark on humanities work.”65 There must be a way to reduce, to use Emerson’s term, the “waste” of humanities training, to honor the “risk” that we take in pursuing humanities work.
In response to a labor crisis, humanities academics must still struggle to succeed where Emersonian Transcendentalism failed: to insure a future in which one can “discharge” her or his pursuit of knowledge “without shame, and with inexpressible satisfaction” (EL, 2:237). Here, then, is an imagined future, in which there is an outlet for humanistic training, one that extends from “success” in the classroom, from the idea that, as Emerson argues in “The American Scholar,” scholars in “American colleges … [can] set the hearts of their youth on flame” (CW, 1:58).66 We literary critics and teachers must ourselves become speculators, imagining what role our pedagogy can play in resolving a crisis in the value of our work. We must become ambitious as Emerson enjoined, but with a sense of the market as well: seeking a solution that neither wholly caves to the market nor totally ignores it but instead seeks to alter the conditions that define the value of our labor from within the system itself.
Andrew Kopec is Senior Lecturer in English at the Ohio State University, where he recently completed his doctorate in 2013. His work on the intersection of economics and literature appears in the journals Early American Literature and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “Economic Crisis and American Literature: Authorship in an Age of Panic, 1819-1857.” In Fall 2014, he will join the faculty at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne as Assistant Professor of English.
Notes
1. Robert Sobel estimates that after the crisis “200,000 New Yorkers were without adequate means of support” (Panic on Wall Street [New York: Macmillan, 1968], 67). In addition, Robert Sampson usefully synthesizes the panic’s effects on labor when he explains, “In New York City alone, six thousand construction artisans were thrown out of work. By September it was thought that nearly all of the East Coast’s embryonic factories had closed. Clerks and salesmen in Philadelphia endured unemployment rates estimated at between one-half and two-thirds. Mothers begged in the streets of New York City for scraps to feed their children as poorhouses overflowed. Workers’ wages dipped [End Page 275] from one-third to one-fifth 1836 levels” (John L. O’Sullivan and His Times [Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2003], 17). See also John Lauritz Larson, The Market Revolution in America (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 92-3.
2. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, 1835-1838 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, Belknap Press, 1960-82), 5: 331-2; further references to this text will hereafter be abbreviated JMN and cited parenthetically.
3. Nicholas K. Bromell, By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1993), 2.
4. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, et al., (Cambridge: Harvard UP, Belknap Press, 1960-82), 1: 69; further references to this text will hereafter be abbreviated CW and cited parenthetically.
5. Jeffrey J. Williams, “Deconstructing Academe: The Birth of Critical University Studies,” chronicle.com, Feb. 19, 2012, http://chronicle.com/article/An-Emerging-Field-Deconstructs/130791/. Williams’ article includes a full bibliography of works he considers to exemplify “critical university studies.” I have been especially influenced by the following pieces: Frank Donoghue, “The Uneasy Relationship between Business and the Humanities,” American Academic 1 (2004): 93-109; Christopher Lorenz, “If You’re so Smart, Why are You Under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism and New Public Management,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 599-629; Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc. (New York: Basic Books, 2005); and Jeffrey Williams, “Teach the University,” Pedagogy 8, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 25-42.
6. David Zimmerman, “Commentary,” American Literary History 23, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 58.
7. David Zimmerman, “Commentary,” 59.
8. Barbara Packer, Emerson’s Fall (New York: Continuum, 1982), 98. See also Michael Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1985), 19.
9. George Ripley to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nov. 9, 1840, quoted in Sterling F. Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004), 34. For the important differences between Emerson and Ripley’s visions of this synthesis, see Bromell, By the Sweat of the Brow, 71. [End Page 276]
10. Stewart Davenport, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815-1860 (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2008), 23.
11. In addition to Vernon L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought, other arguments in favor of the idealist interpretation include Alexander Kern, “Emerson and Economics,” New England Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1940): 678-96 and John C. Gerber, “Emerson and the Political Economists,” New England Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1949): 336-57.
12. Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996). For Newfield’s work in critical university studies, see Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008).
13. Richard F. Teichgraeber, Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom: Situating Emerson and Thoreau in the American Market (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995).
14. Len Gougeon, “Politics and Economics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, ed. Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionus, and Laura Dassow Walls (New York: Oxford UP, 2010), 139.
15. John Lauritz Larson, The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good, 111-2.
16. For an example of the kind of New Historicist reading I have in mind, which finds in Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables a compensatory response to industrialization, see Walter Benn Michaels, “Romance and Real Estate,” in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987), 85-112. This kind of reading, from which I have profited greatly, undertakes to demonstrate how Emerson sought to reconcile the paradox that obtained between liberal Christianity (and Transcendentalism) and capitalism.
17. For a recent critique of historicist literary studies, see Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!,” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (Autumn 2011): 573-91. Hitching her wagon to the increasing authority of Bruno Latour, Felski makes a provocative case for transtemporal literary studies. More on Latour below.
18. “Money Market,” Daily National Intelligencer (April 11, 1837): n.p.
19. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 64. Subsequent references to this volume will be cited parenthetically.
20. Emerson’s attitude toward class politics during the panic is the subject of Charvat’s important essay, “American Romanticism and the Depression of 1837.” There, Charvat argues that the panic led Emerson [End Page 277] not to advocate for the poor but to chasten instead the emergent middle class’ get-rich-quick mentality. Emerson critiques the upstart class, in Charvat’s view, precisely because it threatened the hegemony of Boston’s old guard, among whom Emerson himself figured prominently. Emerson’s inability to sympathize with the poor during the late 1830s and 1840s, furthermore, among other conservative features of his thought, has been the object of severe critique, especially from some of his postmodern readers. For one such instance, see Newfield, who locates Emerson at the origins of a political tradition that emphasizes not radical change but adherence to the rule of law.
21. Emerson’s idea of the panic as a geological event developed in the context of the contemporaneous rise of modern political economy and geology. The nineteenth-century’s most important geologist, and a major influence on Darwin, Sir Charles Lyell published his groundbreaking Principles of Geology in 1830. In that book Lyell defined geology as “the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature; it enquires into the causes of these changes, and the influence which they have exerted in modifying the surface and external structure of our planet” (Sir Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 5). Significantly, according to Lyell, the Principles aimed to demonstrate that “the state of the natural world is the result of a long succession of events”; “if we would enlarge our experience of the present economy of nature, we must investigate the effects of her operations in former epochs” (5). Lyell’s text included an extended analysis of earthquakes in order to demonstrate this point, which he terms the “principle of uniformity.” Geology, in short, endeavored to penetrate outward phenomena, in order to explain their unseen, internal causes. For Emerson’s critique of the Principles as a mere “catalogue of facts,” see Letters, 2:41. For a powerful reading of this journal passage in the context of geology, a science that “was busily destroying the ontological foundations of Biblical revelation,” see Packer, Emerson’s Fall, 99.
22. In Nature Emerson had warned his readers against following the dictates of the Understanding rather than of the Reason, categories which he distinguishes by explaining, “Every property of matter is a school for the understanding … The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds everlasting nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these [End Page 278] lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind” (CW, 1:23).
23. Although Marx finally dismisses Carey as an ideologue of manufacturing interests in America, in the Grundrisse he calls Carey “the only original economist among the North Americans” (Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus [Vintage: New York, 1973], 884).
24. Henry Charles Carey, Financial Crises: Their Causes and Effects (1864), 23.
25. Henry Charles Carey, Principles of Political Economy, vol. 1 (1837), 2.
26. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in Reflections on Commercial Life, ed. Patrick Murray (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 137.
27. Although O’Sullivan is best known for coining the phrase “manifest destiny,” he also wrote an important analysis of the 1837 crisis, in which he explains the event as a perversion of free trade doctrine. See his editorial in the October 1837 issue of The Democratic Review, “The Moral of the Crisis.”
28. The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, 1836-1838 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, Belknap Press, 1960-82), 2: 230-1; further references to this text will hereafter be abbreviated EL and cited parenthetically.
29. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, et al., (Cambridge: Harvard UP, Belknap Press, 1960-82), 3: 29; further references to this text will hereafter be abbreviated CW and cited parenthetically.
30. The entire passage reads: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition” (CW, 3:29). Stanley Cavell has produced powerful insights into Emerson’s relationship to continental philosophy, perhaps none more so than his reading of Emerson and this particular passage. See Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1990).
31. Neal Dolan, Emerson’s Liberalism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2009), 114.
32. Carey, Principles of Political Economy, 2.
33. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 30.
34. F.O. Matthiessen pointed out this characteristic habit long ago: “All of Emerson’s books can be reduced to the same underlying pattern. They are hardly constructed as wholes. Even Representative Men (1850) [End Page 279] and English Traits (1856) are collections of essays, written originally as lectures. Every lecture in turn, from The American Scholar to those published after his death, was made up by grouping together sentences from his journals” (American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman [New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1941], 64). What this habitual recycling tells us about Emerson’s own labor practice is a suggestive topic that, nevertheless, remains outside the scope of this essay.
35. Emerson’s argument is striking—and indeed polemical—given the importance of scarcity to the political economic tradition, which accepts, as Wai-Chee Dimock remarks, that “scarcity is very much a given” (Wai-Chee Dimock, “Scarcity, Subjectivity, and Emerson,” boundary 2 17, no. 1 [Spring 1990]: 86). Dimock’s analysis of scarcity follows very closely Harold J. Barnett and Chandler Morse, Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Availability (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1963).
36. In claiming that Emerson finds in the self a lack of scarcity, I am making the opposite argument from Dimock, who argues that Emerson “aligns [scarcity] instead with subjectivity” (“Scarcity, Subjectivity, and Emerson,” 90). One way to think about these two arguments is to remember that Dimock’s evidence begins with “Experience,” that is, with the onset of the increasingly pessimistic Emerson, who abandons the “optative mood” after the death of his son Waldo (CW, 1:207). Another way is to consider our arguments as versions of the same point: that Emerson outlines a theory of labor that allows the individual to remain devoted to ideal work. Theorizing the self an infinite resource or as a scarce resource might well have the same rhetorical effect. See also Bromell, 71.
37. George Kateb captures this idea when he terms self-reliance “one’s real work” (Emerson and Self-Reliance [London: Sage, 1995], 162).
38. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace, 29.
39. Emerson’s use of the term “waste” is relevant to an especially provocative text of critical university studies; see Marc Bousquet, “The Waste Product of Graduate Education: Toward a Dictatorship of the Flexible,” Social Text 70, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 81-104.
40. Although he focuses on Emerson’s later work, Thomas Augst makes a similar point in his thorough study of nineteenth-century young men and their efforts at self-culture. “Emerson invokes business,” he writes, “not to make a religion of money but to illustrate how vocation [End Page 280] is a secular form of devotion” (The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003], 125).
41. Orville Dewey, Moral Views of Commerce, Society, and Politics in Twelve Discourses (1838), 81.
42. See Bromell, By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America, 9. Linking Emerson’s Transcendentalism with his “own psychological anxieties and … gender uncertainties,” Bromell extends the work of Joel Porte (Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson and His Times [New York: Oxford UP, 1979), Leverenz, and Henry Nash Smith’s classic work (“Emerson’s Problem of Vocation—A Note on ‘The American Scholar,’” The New England Quarterly 12 [1939]: 52-67).
43. Here we see Emerson attempting to subvert “mechanical metaphors,” which his friend and correspondent Thomas Carlyle worries will “imprison us” (Richard Bronk, The Romantic Economist: Imagination in Economics [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009], 24).
44. See Packer, Emerson’s Fall, 116.
45. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 314-5.
46. Smith’s theory of value is the object of strenuous critique in the early and late writings of Marx. Marx argues that what Smith posits as the production of value is always the production of surplus-value. In Capital (1867) Marx writes, “That labourer [sic] alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital.” When Smith glorifies the productive laborer over the unproductive laborer, he glorifies the production of surplus-value over and against the net loss of value. To add value to an object is to enrich the capitalist not the self. And, accordingly, to labor under this actual regime means that “[t]o be a productive labourer [sic] is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune” (1:418). Despite his critique of Smith, though, Marx’s preference for productive labor is actually not so different than Smith’s. Tracking this debate’s discursive history, Hannah Arendt has demonstrated the unspoken affinities between Smith and Marx, in her phrase, “the two greatest theorists in the field” (The Human Condition, [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958], 87).
47. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 314-5.
48. In his Principles Carey, an eventual apostate from British classical political economy, attempted to undermine Smith’s distinction between productive and unproductive labor. To this end, he approvingly cites the work of Nassau William Senior (3). In “perfect[] accord” with [End Page 281] Senior, Carey sees no reason to distinguish between labor that results in an artifact—his example is that of a shoemaker—and labor that results in an alteration of that artifact—his example is that of a shoeblack (3). This political economic squabble, I hasten to add, amounts to an argument over how to define “products”—either as things made or as things altered. Whereas Smith ignores service work entirely, Carey tries to salvage it under the banner of production. Despite his apostasy from Smith in this regard, then, as one of Carey’s biographers puts it, “In Adam Smith’s emphasis on improving production as the key to economic betterment, Carey readily acquiesced” (A.D.H. Kaplan, Henry Charles Carey: A Study in American Economic Thought [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1931], 28).
49. For a contemporaneous genealogy of American Transcendentalism, in particular, its relation to the speculative tradition, see James Murdock, Sketches of Modern Philosophy (1846). Philip Gura offers an essential modern account of Transcendentalism’s genealogy in American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).
50. For Emerson and ambition, see Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1971), 72.
51. John Russell Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms (1848), 157.
52. Emerson’s views on ambition perhaps are best illustrated in his eulogy of Thoreau, a man whom the English novelist George Eliot saw to embody, as she has it in her review of Walden, “not the ‘go ahead’ species, but its opposite pole” (George Eliot, [Review of Walden] Westminster Review 65 [1856]: 302-3. Reprinted in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, ed. William Rossi [New York: Norton, 1992), 319-320). On the whole, in his eulogy Emerson remembers his “best friend” fondly, as he calls him the “true[st] American” ever to live. But he could not help dwelling on Thoreau’s one tragic flaw. “He seemed born for great enterprise and command,” Emerson explained, but for all this promise, Thoreau’s life had amounted to a mere pile of “beans.” And with this failure in mind, Emerson explained, “I cannot help counting it a fault that he had no ambition” ([R.W. Emerson], “Thoreau,” Atlantic Monthly 10 [August 1862]: 248).
53. “The Downfall of Speculation,” The New-Yorker (October 12, 1839), n.p. Significantly, Greeley’s article is no screed against speculation but a reasoned analysis of the costs and benefits associated with this practice. For more on the complex ways in which Americans viewed [End Page 282] speculation, see Samuel Rezneck, Business Depressions and Financial Panics: Essays in American Business and Economic History (New York: Greenwood, 1968), 84-7.
54. “Convention of Business Men,” Niles’ Weekly Register (August 12, 1837), n.p. Just as contemporary Americans clearly worried about speculators’ zeal to “go ahead,” so too did foreign observers. One of Emerson’s acquaintances, the British sociologist Harriet Martineau, expresses this very anxiety in her Society in America, a text published in the panic year of 1837. Although Martineau praises the possibilities of work in America, she ultimately tempers her enthusiasm. “Where there is hasty enterprise,” she writes, “there is usually much conceit. The very haste seems to show that the man is thinking more of himself than of the subject on which he is employed” (Society in America [New York: Anchor, 1962], 238). Significantly, even though Martineau’s argument dovetails with Emerson’s critique of the speculator’s haste for profits, it is clearly not Emersonian, as Martineau critiques the egoism that is in fact central to self-reliance. An excessive egoism, in Martineau’s view, seems to preclude one from maximizing production; Emerson, on the contrary, believes that ideal labor must be apprehended as an intense, but slow process that requires the laborer to mine the vast plenitude of the self.
55. Orestes Brownson, Early Works, (Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 2000), 4:51-2, quoted in Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History, 95-6.
56. Lawrence Buell picks up on this same theme, writing, “Overall [in The American Scholar] [Emerson] seems more anxious to warn scholars against acting hastily rather than to exhort them to act” (Emerson [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003], 244).
57. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 261.
58. “Remarkable Suicides,” The New-Yorker (December 7, 1839), 180.
59. In Born Losers, Sandage links the rash of suicides with antebellum American culture’s increasingly aggressive identity mandates; according to these mandates, the ambitious capitalist was the “only identity deemed legitimate.” Given the force of this identity imperative, it is an unfortunate fact of history that “American men started jumping out of windows long before the Great Crash [of 1929]” for reasons related to failure in business (Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP], 2005), 5, 7. [End Page 283]
60. Howard Horwitz, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 81.
61. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 244.
62. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?,” 246.
63. Mary Poovey, “The Twenty-First Century University and the Market: What Price Economic Viability?” differences 12, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 12.
64. Gougeon, 139.
65. Poovey, “The Twenty-First Century University and the Market: What Price Economic Viability?,” 13. Williams makes a less abstract—and, in my view, a more compelling—argument in “Teach the University”; there, in response to the decline in the value of humanistic training, he recommends: “Rather than meeting these changes with chagrin, resignation, or antidepressants, one thing that we can do [sic] is to teach the university [sic] to teach courses foregrounding the literary, cultural, and social history of the university” (25). Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” in addition to his other commencement addresses, is part of that history. For more on Emerson’s work with the genre of the commencement address, see Lawrence Buell, “Individualism, Natural Law, Human Rights: Emerson on ‘The Scholar’ vis-à-vis Emerson on Reform,” in New Morning: Emerson in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Arthur S. Lothstein and Michael Brodrick (Albany: State U of New York P, 2008).
66. It is hardly a coincidence that we find versions of this very point about pedagogy as a panacea to panic in work done by 19-century Americanists. See Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012); Delbanco’s text is in fact littered with references to Emerson, including the one I end with here. See also Elizabeth Renker, “What is American Literature?” American Literary History 25, no. 1 (2013), 255. [End Page 284]
