Ralph Waldo Emerson Transfigured

Abstract This afterward considers two assessments of Emerson’s career and its meaning offered at the 1903 centenary of Emerson’s birth: the first in a lecture given by William James, and the second an address by John Dewey. Pointing out that both of these public statements, which insisted upon Emerson’s abiding relevance to the justice struggles of the early twentieth century, “both ring true and ring hollow” in light of Emerson’s own limitations as proponent for reform and the potential to outfit Emerson’s works as forms of “weaponry” for social or economic change.