Abstract

Emerson's critique of liberalism is fundamental to his writings as a whole. This dissertation explores the function of "race" in the sustained critique of liberal ideals that forms the basis for Emerson's construction of American identity. Emerson has been described by critics either as antinomian or as an ideologue--as subversive of all institutional controls or as an apologist for capitalism. Neither of these approaches does justice to the complexity of his outlook. Emerson opposes the conceptual premises of liberalism while simultaneously promoting liberal norms. At the same time that he affirms the significance of racial ties and demonstrates the insufficiency of the liberal framework to represent a cohesive model of national identity, Emerson also insists upon the necessity of rights as barriers to social injustice. Drawing on seventeenth-century emblem poetry, social contract theories, and nineteenth-century nationalist treatises, I situate Emerson's writings within a Protestant literary and philosophical tradition, and suggest that his critique of liberalism results in a model of American national identity which is both infinitely expansive and racially cohesive. I conclude by showing that Emerson's grappling with the premises of liberalism, his attempt to reconcile the contradictory claims of race and rights, opens the conceptual possibility for critique and the emerging theory of Afro-American identity as "double-consciousness" in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois