[Download] "Emerson, American Democracy, And "Progress of Culture"." by Nineteenth-Century Prose * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

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eBook details

• Title: Emerson, American Democracy, And "Progress of Culture".
• Author : Nineteenth-Century Prose
• Release Date : January 22, 2003
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 198 KB

Description

Emerson's second Phi Beta Kappa Address at Harvard, now little known, was delivered in 1867, and has been regarded both in his day and ours as a conspicuous failure. In "Progress of Culture" Emerson spoke as a prominent, even revered, public figure, an American scholar and poet who had become an American patriot and an international sage. The historical characterization of the failure of Emerson's address is, however, derived largely from the circumstances of its performance, not from its now forgotten message. Emerson recognized in "Progress of Culture" that American culture was at a moment of crucial transition, under great challenge to sustain the costly but vital momentum for democratic social progress that was the potential legacy of the antislavery movement and the Civil War. Emerson attempts to tie the current historical moment in America to a larger philosophy of history which was consistent with a concept of social progress. Emerson had come to see the Civil War as a decisive moment, a turning point not only for America, but for the fortunes of progressive democracy. The lesson of the war was thus encapsulated for Emerson in a broader axiom about the nature of historical advance: "Mind carries the law; history is the slow and atomic unfolding" (W 8:223). But this is a fundamentally problematic proposition because of its implied determinism. In "Progress of Culture" Emerson seems at some moments to be proposing a version of history in which laws and principles, divorced from human actions, execute themselves, making progress the inevitable fulfillment or a preexisting transcendent order. Yet much of the energy of his address resists this deterministic theory of inevitable progress, insisting that human effort and accomplishment is the central fact of history. I

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