FORMS OF POWER

In placing Emerson at the head of an American pragmatist tradition, Cornel West has described him, tellingly, I believe, as an “organic intellectual,” one whose intellectual career expresses itself through an engaged commitment to the guidance and healing of society and its constituent individuals. As West frames the issue, Emerson's connection to American pragmatism is less a question of doctrinal continuity than of ethical orientation – to what moral or political end is my thinking? Emerson is therefore crucial for the way he “enacts an intellectual style of cultural criticism.” The decade following the second English journey of 1847–8 is perhaps the most crucial for Emerson's testing and enactment of the public role of the intellectual. Not only was his public stature higher then, but his concerns were fundamentally directed toward the moral questions of social life. His increasing orientation toward the ethical and pragmatic, catalyzed, as we have seen, by the antislavery crisis, became the focus of his lecturing in the 1850s. These concerns are captured in the title of the book he published on the eve of the Civil War: The Conduct of Life (1860).

Emerson calls attention to the shift in intellectual orientation that the title signifies, in an ironically self-reflexive opening comment: “It chanced during one winter a few years ago, that our cities were bent on discussing the theory of the Age.”