Emerson’s Market Forces

Abstract This essay draws on recent historiographies of capitalism to identify Emerson’s sustained interest in capitalist activities and institutions. Across his long career, Emerson imagined self-reliance as a form of risk-taking that gains legibility within nineteenth-century ideologies about the intersection of commerce and identity. From the perspective of the “new history of capitalism,” standard Emerson texts like “The American Scholar” (1837), “Self-Reliance” (1841), and “Wealth” (1860) take on new meanings as accounts of the modern self’s relation to capitalism. But business ideologies can also allow bringing less frequently studied texts to the fore. And in “Address on Education” (1837), “Prudence” (1841), “Perpetual Forces” (1862), and even Emerson’s abolitionist lectures, we see his Transcendentalism work itself out as a program for managing the turbulent “wave” of social life. Emerson thus approached commerce as yet one more path, as he put it in 1860, “on the way to the highest” good.