From Quietism to Quiet Politics: Inheriting Emerson's Antislavery Testimony

Abstract

While Ralph Waldo Emerson has been increasingly acknowledged as an American thinker influential in the evolution of nineteenth-century philosophy, his essays have largely failed to escape the charges of quietism and political apathy bestowed upon them in his lifetime. Yet if Emerson insisted on the importance of silence to the antislavery movement, it was perhaps due to his theory that one's deepest obligations become involuntarily part of the self and thus refuse to withstand representation in direct speech. My article reads Emerson's writing in this light, suggesting more broadly that the common notion that silence and politics are antithetical be reconsidered with regard to the possibility that what constitutes political speech need not be explicit -or even vocal.