Adam Smith

Adam Smith

Adam Smith was the founder of the laissez-faire school of economics and traditional economic liberal theory. A graduate of Oxford University in 1746, he continued his studies in his home of Kilcaldy, Scotland.

In 1751 he became a professor of logic at the University of Glasgow and in 1752 the head of the department of moral philosophy. By 1760 his emphasis was on jurisprudence and political economy. By then he had become a charter member of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Influenced by Scottish writers such as David Hume, he believed that natural laws regulate human activities. Therefore, all forms of human endeavor could be understood by analyzing universal laws. If human institutions respected the laws of nature, all would go well. People would be guided to the goal by the application of reason.

In 1763 and 1765 Smith came into contact with the physiocrats of France, who rebelled against economic absolutism in the form of mercantilism, which put economic institutions at the disposal of the state and indicated that wealth equals power. One physiocrat, François Quesnay, compared the circulation of money to the circulation of blood.


Mercantilist controls, to him, acted like a tourniquet on the circulation of money, which cut off a natural life-giving flow. Jacques Turgot, another physiocrat, said that natural human behavior guided by national self-interest in search of a profit would result in the best service and the most goods for society.

After traveling in France, Smith published his great work, Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations. The work, known by its shortened title, the Wealth of Nations, became the dominant theory of economic liberals in the 19th century and economic conservatives in the 20th century. Under this theory, the state was basically a “passive” policeman who intervened only when the marketplace collapsed.

Smith maintained that increased production depended on a national division of labor and specialization. Trade, therefore, was to be encouraged, as it increased specialization to meet its demands, which in turn led to greater production.

This growing value of trade also depended on personal liberty; each person should be free to pursue his or her individual self-interest. When buyer and seller met in the marketplace, they would be guided by an “invisible hand,” which basically was the law of supply and demand, where the results of buyers and sellers would be optimized.

In general Adam Smith deplored all forces that interfered with this enlightened self-interest. Therefore, he opposed all economic controls in the form of the state government, guilds, or unions as harmful to the exchange of goods and services or trade.

To him mercantilism, whether if favored gold and silver bullion for its own sake, surplus exports over imports—which weakened your neighbor’s economic status—or state control of an essential item to use as a weapon, was wrong. Ideally trade should be for everyone’s benefit. This would be the natural result of free trade unencumbered by protective tariffs.

Therefore in such a natural and free market, the prosperity of each nation would be dependent on all nature. He also departed from traditional mercantile economic theory, which regarded colonies as an economic asset; he saw them as liabilities.

This work, upon its publication in 1776, was an instant success. After being lionized for the next two years, Smith retired to live in Edinburgh. He died there in 1790. He requested at his death that all manuscripts on which he had worked be destroyed, except for his Theory of Moral Sentiments, which posited that moral sympathy derives from human sympathy. The Wealth of Nations remains his major work.

Social Darwinism and Herbert Spencer

The term Social Darwinism emerged in the mid-19th century and came to be associated most closely with the philosopher/sociologist Herbert Spencer. Spencer was born in Derby in the English industrial heartland. He was a descendent of a family of religious nonconformists with strong individualist traits and utilitarian views based on those of social reformer Jeremy Bentham.

Spencer’s childhood ill health led him to be homeschooled by his father until age 13, when he moved to Bath for further education by his uncle, a clergyman who was a social reformer with radical views for the time. His education was geared to math and science and less to Latin and Greek. Spencer did not progress to university but in 1837 joined the London and Birmingham Railway as an engineer.

He was not seen as a cultivated gentleman in terms the existing society. He became interested in radical issues in the 1840s and started writing for the Non-Conformist. He came to view government as a threat to freedom and the individual. Although he returned to the railroad for temporary employment, he secured an editorial job with the London Economist in 1848, which secured a steady income.


Spencer lived at a time when Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species introduced evolutionary theory as an explanation for the development of plants and animals. Such evolutionary thoughts had previously influenced Spencer’s speculations on society itself, and he had earlier in Social Statics come to believe that competition in human society also led to social advancement.

Spencer’s application of Darwinism to his own ethical and social thought came to be known as Social Darwinism. What emerged from this conviction in a simplified form was a notion of the survival of the fittest, a phrase Darwin never used.

Darwin’s struggle in nature could be transferred to society, and the strongest or fittest would and should dominate the poor and weak because they were more adaptable. The weak should ultimately disappear, for they could only reproduce those unfit for the competition of life.

Spencer’s theory in its most basic form led some to believe that natural selection, when applied to societies and government, meant that there was a natural dominance in the world that allowed certain races (principally European Protestants), individuals, and nations to dominate because they were superior in the natural order.

In political and economic terms, competition and self-interest advanced the social order. Competition could cure social ills without the need for government social programs or intervention. In society, a liberal economic laissez-faire approach was best.

Some have also come to see 19th-century Social Darwinism as the intellectual rationale behind European colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism itself. This might be labelled the “might makes right” school of thought. A nation is strong because it is the fittest in the struggle for survival and has made the necessary adaptations to become superior.

Spencer’s works gained popularity outside of Britain and had a great influence in the United States. Often Spencer’s ideas were simplified to the point of absurdity, and much like Darwin, he was summarized and not read. He influenced Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist, and helped shape his philanthropic efforts.

The most prominent American convert was William Graham Sumner, and then during the 1890s, historians such as John Fiske, who influenced Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and naval planner Alfred Thayer Mahan. The consequence of this influence was for some a justification of American imperialism.

The publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man saw concepts of natural selection applied to humans, and this gave further impetus to Spencer’s ideas. Other thinkers, primarily biologists such as Sir Francis Galton, entered the fray. Heredity, according to Galton, meant that biology was more important than environment in shaping human destiny.

Nevertheless, Herbert Spencer’s rational utilitarianism did have appeal and influence, and works such as his Principles of Sociology had significant impact on his era. He did define a system of moral rights, and he divorced himself from many, if not most, aspects of popularized Social Darwinism.

To achieve the greatest happiness and to develop their talents Spencer’s humankind needed maximum individual freedom without the heavy hand of government interference, and this did not mean that the fittest were necessarily the best.

Socialism

Socialism was a term first used in the early 19th century in western Europe. Its exponents were primarily French and British.

The Industrial Revolution changed Europe by making the aristocracy largely irrelevant, raising the capitalist bourgeoisie into wealth and power and moving the old peasant class into industrial labor. Unlike the agrarian society it overturned, where wealth depended on a finite quantity—land, in the industrial capitalist system wealth was limitless, at least in theory, and untied to the old feudal order.

The Industrial Revolution also overturned the old sense of noblesse oblige. Capitalists were comfortably, guiltlessly, rich and powerful, full of pride, and without a sense of obligation to the poor or their own competition. These were the people who took power from the aristocrats and created the early capitalist democracies, political systems in the image of their economic and political interests.


Freed from the nobility, they had guarantees of property rights and the ability to pursue more property. These 19th century “liberals” agreed that only the economically independent and secure could be politically free. Thomas Jefferson exemplified this concept, using it as justification for his desired nation of small farmers.

He also agreed that liberty was not the product of Christian thought but of natural law; without theological justification, there was no basis for censure. Some 19th-century liberals even praised greed as the motivator for economic growth and prosperity.

Unlike feudalists, capitalists defined dependency as self-destructive; for their own well being, the poor had to work, and if they did not do it voluntarily, the system would force them. In Britain poor laws, which seem to be based on this philosophy, could be quite harsh.

Capitalist Problems

The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau contended that democracy could not survive with a wide disparity between the rich and poor. Other critics of the system worried about more basic problems with rule by “benign” capitalists.

They pointed out that the system—in England, Germany, and other early industrializing countries—had taken the old feudal protections that had ameliorated the lot of peasants limited in space and wealth. As near property without rights of mobility or much else, peasants did have reasonable protection against starvation and homelessness.

Capitalism’s exploited factory workers lacked even the basics, being “free.” They could be fired and hired at will from jobs whose pay was set by a going rate pegged to competition with hordes of other displaced peasants desperate for a wage.

The new workers faced factory employment that included 12-hour shifts seven days a week in inhumane conditions. This applied to women and children, often preferred because they worked for much less than men. Early capitalism produced lowered standards of living and declines in educational levels in many areas.

The new industries also lacked compunctions about polluting the environment or maiming or killing the workers. Factory town food was commonly inferior and often scarce. Even some of the well off began feeling twinges of guilt, spurred in part by the works of Charles Dickens.

Of more concern to the middle classes was the business cycle. Under the feudal system, aside from the occasional plague, war, drought, or famine, life was mostly predictable. Capitalism from the beginning featured booms and busts out of human control. Life would sail along for a period, with growth, prosperity, increases in jobs and wages.

Then, inexplicably, the system would collapse: Profits and wages would fall, millions would be either out of work or poor, and even some of the rich might fall a class or two toward poverty. Capitalists thought to stabilize the system by regulating maximum wages and prohibiting unions. They also regulated imports and combined into trusts to thwart competition. The crashes persisted.

The Basics of Socialist Thought

Although critical of liberalism, socialism shared the idea of progress and the end of aristocracy. Socialists repudiated liberalism as a facade for greed. Rather than looking back to a better yesterday, the proto-socialists analyzed industrialism and defined principles for making it tolerable (given that it was here to stay.)

They shared the outrage at capitalism’s abuses expressed by 19th-century liberals such as Honoré de Balzac, Thomas Carlyle, and Benjamin Disraeli. They were distinct from these conservatives and the anarchists seeking to revert to an agrarian idyll in that they were optimistic and positive about industrialization.

Some began to suggest that the system was inherently flawed. What was needed was a system that controlled greed and lifted the masses from poverty—socialism. Socialism, broadly defined, dated back at least to early Christianity, with Christians sharing among themselves from the beginning and with the rise of monasticism, which entailed community ownership of everything. Socialism as a political force dated to the Industrial Revolution.

Socialism is often a derogatory term for anything an opponent dislikes. Disregarding the animus, socialism includes a democratically controlled economy operated for the good of all members. Rather than unchecked competition that characterizes capitalism, it relies on cooperation, and it involves government planning to stabilize the economy and reduce or eliminate the business cycle.

Socialists may share property in common and prohibit private ownership of land and industry, but they may also simply advocate publicly financed social programs and heavy state regulation of industry and property.

Socialists generally agreed that wealth was the product of working men and women and that capitalists had wrongfully taken it. To alleviate poverty and misery, they sought to bring about a system characterized by cooperation, democracy, equality, and prosperity for all.

Other Philosophies

Other groups shared the socialist ideals—anarchists and communists. Anarchists rejected even the socialist democratic government. They viewed government as inherently tyrannical and wanted maximally decentralized government incapable of tyrannizing the people.

They were ineffective because peaceful anarchists lacked the power to change much and violent anarchists generally provoked more hostility against themselves than against the government they wanted to end. Communists could occupy the extreme wing of socialism—with community ownership of everything, perhaps in the manner of the early and monastic Christians.

They could also be Marxists. Marxists see socialism as an interim arrangement that reorganizes society into the form that withers away until a modified anarchism appears—a society without money or market forces, with worker ownership of property, with production for the producers only, and with no state. This communism has never developed.

Early Socialism

In the 19th century capitalism was new, and socialism seemed a reasonable system to replace it. The early socialists knew that economic systems were not inevitable or eternal; feudalism died within their memories. Capitalism could wither away as well.

The early socialists included Henri de Saint-Simon, François Marie-Charles Fourier, and Louis Blanc of France and Robert Owen of Wales. Not politically astute, they were Enlightenment idealists who thought that people of good will could voluntarily bring about a better society. Fourier and Saint-Simon’s ideas remained theoretical, but Owen, the wealthy industrialist, founded several communities, particularly in the United States, but failed to make a go of any of them.

These social critics thought to reform poverty and inequality by redistribution of wealth and the creation of a society of small, utopian communities without private property. The early critics made no distinction between socialism and communism. A perception developed in Europe that socialism was more amenable to religion while communism was atheistic. In Britain, communism sounded too much like communion, and thus was viewed as being too Catholic.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was actually an anarchist. His slogan “property is theft” reflected the common socialist hostility to capitalism. He was not extreme, however, allowing for individual ownership of one’s home and domestic goods. He opposed property that took its wealth from the labor of others. Property of this sort included factories, mines, railroads, and the like.

Karl Marx was generally in accord with Proudhon, whom he met in Paris in the 1840s. Marx’s opponent, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, was also influenced by Proudhon. Proudhon was more influential in socialist circles than Marx and Engels, even when they published The Communist Manifesto.

The utopian socialists came later to be known by scientific socialists under terms such as proto-socialists, Fruhsozialismus, pre-Marxian socialists, and the like. After experimentation with the small utopian communities, some socialists shifted to direct political action. Marx and Engels regarded themselves as scientific socialists, setting themselves apart from the utopian socialists.

The United States was a hotbed of experimentation, home to dissenters and creators of new religious groups, as well as immigrants dissatisfied with what they had left behind. It was large, and there was room for just about anyone to adopt whatever ideology seemed reasonable.

Utopias flourished during the 19th century, but mostly the blooms proved short-lived when expectations were set too high. Many fell to internecine jealousies, preferential treatment of some over others, unnatural restrictions on competition and personal relationships, and other misreadings of what proved too often to be less than perfect human nature.

Examples include the Amana Society, the Shakers, Separatists of Zoar, the Oneida and Wallingford Perfectionists, the Aurora and Bethel Communes, and the Icarians. Descendant utopias, as the hippie communes and remnants of some 19th-century utopian communities, remain to the present day.

Marx, Engels, and Communism

Marx and Engels enunciated a theory of history as exploitation. History occurred in stages, each better than its predecessor, each with its appropriate economic system, with change triggered by class conflict that each economic system bred within itself. The 19th-century world was in a capitalist stage, but inevitably capitalism would give way to another economic system with another dominant class.

As feudalism had brought about the rise of capitalists who overthrew feudalism in favor of capitalism, so capitalism was creating a working class that would overthrow capitalism in favor of a worker-run economy, the extreme form of socialism known as communism.

Marx and Engels had trouble being taken seriously. The entire socialist intellectual movement, composed of middle- and capitalist class idealists and intellectuals, lacked the numbers to generate a serious socialist movement. That came from the working people, enamored of simplified versions of the socialist ideas.

Probably the majority of the 19th-century labor movements were socialist in aims, using unionism as a means to an end. Even 20th-century labor unions—even in the United States—had elements of socialism in their platforms, but they gained only small victories. They had little success in nationalizing mines, railroads, and other industries.

Capitalists reinforced the labor-socialist tie by attempting to suppress all labor movements, rather than drawing distinctions between the milder forms of labor organizing and the socialist movement. Socialists and communists welcomed the capitalist accusations that they were revolutionaries.

This oppression would encourage the poor, insecure, workers, downtrodden by the capitalist business cycle, to join forces and press for radical change. Numbers alone would make them a force the capitalist rulers would have to confront and suppress, probably by abandoning all pretense of democracy. The masses would rise and overthrow the capitalist system. At least that was the Marxist dream.

The revolutions never happened. Despite the odds, labor movements fought the uphill battle against capitalists, governments, militaries, and police—some died, but the others won the shorter working day, higher wages, and better working conditions.

The average worker had a stake in the system rather than a desire to overthrow it. It did not help that capitalism became more adept at producing cheap and abundant-if-inferior goods and brought about a higher standard of living.

Most workers in the second half of the 19th century were living better than their parents. Revolutions did break out in 1848, but they were not socialist. The International Working Men’s Association (the First International) came into being only in 1864. Strongly Marxist, it was dominant in European socialism.

Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association had its first meeting at Geneva in 1866. This was the first major international socialist meeting. It reflected the general socialist tendency to disagree on strategy. Marx and Engels and British and exiled continental labor leaders created the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864.

It was a committee, and about as effective as committees normally are—it included British reformists, continentals of more radical persuasion, and anarchists of several types. Marx relocated headquarters to New York to strip away the anarchists. The IWA dissolved in 1876. By century’s end, Marxist socialism was the leading ideology of working-class parties in all but the Britain and the United States.

Socialism rose from a small intellectual movement to a large mass working-class political movement coincident with the industrialization of Europe, particularly between 1870 and 1890, which created the great proletariat.

The centenary of the French Revolution in 1889 was the occasion for socialists and social democrats to meet in Paris and form the Second International. The Second International was a confederation of centralized national parties. The approach was popularized by Engels, August Bebel of the German Social Democratic Party, and Karl Kautsky.

Socialism had a shining moment from March 18 to May 28, 1871, when the Paris Commune arose in the aftermath of France’s loss to Prussia and the collapse of the Second Empire. The city’s citizens elected a radical government composed of old Jacobins from 1789 and Proudhonites.

Communes arose in Toulouse, Marseille, Saint-Etienne, and Lyon but were suppressed quickly. The Versailles government sent the army against Paris and repressed the Commune. The Commune accomplished little but became a symbol remarked on by Marx; it was evidence to many socialists that the working class was ready for the revolution.

American Socialism

The U.S. Socialist Labor Party of America came into being in 1877. Already small, it fragmented in the 1890s. In 1901 the Socialist Labor Party’s moderate faction and the Social Democratic Party and Eugene V. Debs put together the Socialist Party of America.

American socialism differed from European and British socialisms because Americans’ experiences were not those of the old countries. The American labor movement struggled in the 19th century, even later when industrialism was rampant and highly exploitive, because American workers were slow to acknowledge that they were no longer free agents, self-employed craftsmen and entrepeneurs in the making.

Socialism’s emphasis on cooperation rather than rugged individualism seemed un-American. Socialism’s American beginnings were imported, primarily from Germany. It remained strongly influenced by immigrants—Milwaukee’s gas and water socialist Victor Berger, the leadership of the anarchist Industrial Workers of the World, and many of the national party leaders.

Where socialism had native roots, it tended to arise from populist farmers whose socialism tracked more closely with their Christianity than with any imported European ideas. When Oklahoma voted for socialists before World War I, it did so because of agricultural conditions in Oklahoma, not out of commitment to the Second International.

European Socialism

Eduard Bernstein and the social democrats Vladimir dominated the Second International in 1889 in Paris. Vladimir Lenin and Germany’s Rosa Luxemburg led the radicals. Karl Kautsky led a smaller faction. The anarchists were left out and split from the socialist movement.

In 1884 British middle-class intellectuals formed the Fabian Society, which laid the basis for the Labour Party in 1906. Jean Jaurès founded the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière in 1905. Under Juarès and later Léon Blum the SFIO kept Marxist theory while in practice becoming reformist.

In Germany, Ferdinand Lassalle advocated voluntary worker cooperatives rather than Marx’s revolution. Marx was scornful, but Lassalle’s cooperatives were the beginnings of today’s credit unions, mutual insurance companies, food cooperatives, and similar institutions. They have never altered capitalism but have found a niche within it.

The German Social Democratic Party, founded on the ideas of Marx and Lassalle, was for decades the world’s leading socialist organization. By 1891 it had a million and a half members and was beginning to enjoy reasonable electoral success.

Although Karl Kautsky kept the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party Marxist in doctrine, in practice the party became reformist rather than revolutionary. Success meant that, despite rhetoric of revolution, the party found itself absorbed into the conventional political process.

In Great Britain, the Marxist critique failed to take hold. Rather the approach was “Gas and Water Socialism,” under the Fabian Society. It began on January 4, 1884, when members of the Fellowship of the New Life took a political approach to the Fellowship’s goal of the transformation of society by setting an example of simple, clean living.

The Fellowship faded, and the Fabians drew members such as Sidney and Beatrice Potter Webb, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw. These were elite reformers who felt that socialism could transform society by slow penetration of its principles into the fabric of capitalist society.

They had no interest—and perhaps no true awareness—of class politics, including labor unions and labor parties. The driving force was the Webbs, who wrote the bulk of the studies of Britain’s industrial system and alternative policies for capital and land.

The Fabian Society was named for Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, “Cunctator” or “Delayer,” who fought through harassment and attrition rather than head on confrontations. Fabians were against free trade but supported nationalist foreign policy in South Africa.

They were significant in the establishment of the Labour Party in 1900. They advocated government ownership of utilities and land and other resources, but they insisted that all changes come through law rather than revolution.

Socialism and Nationalism

In the late 19th century the various socialist groups became increasingly nationalistic. Universal male suffrage became common in the western world during the first decades of the 20th century. Socialism became increasingly tied to labor unions and labor parties, which increasingly mobilized the working class vote.

As socialists got access to power, they became more pragmatic, recognizing that they still needed the middle and wealthy classes to achieve their aims. Those classes still owned the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. And the welfare state made the workers’ lives better, delaying the revolution.

The involvement of socialists with government split the parties into moderates and radicals in the 20th century. Eduard Bernstein represented the moderates who thought that the reforms could come through the democratic political process.

This was the basic social democracy. Communists in countries without a parliamentary democracy argued for revolution; Vladimir Lenin argued this path. In 1903 the Russian social democrats split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

By the early 20th century, Germany’s Social Democratic Party had abandoned the revolutionary goal completely and backed Kaiser Wilhelm, in the process destroying its credibility with foreign socialist movements.

The other socialist parties backed their governments one by one, destroying the international working-class movement in a wave of nationalism. The American Socialist Party was the exception in refusing to back the war, but it was a weak organization nationally and internationally, never able to win more than 6 percent of the vote.

Marx and other socialists ignored or discounted working-class differences of nationality, religion, ethnicity, and gender. These were factors that the capitalists exploited to divide and weaken the workers. For socialists, the real division was between a unified, homogeneous working class and a unified capitalist class.

As reality intruded during the 19th-century era of socialism, intrusion of nationalism and other differences forced the socialists to adjust their doctrine to keep it relevant to workers who were also male and female members of ethnic, national, and religious communities.

Socialism won out over anarchism and other ideas within the working-class movement because it was better organized and had a more realistic political strategy. It fit nicely with the alienated workers of the large factories and plants of 19th-century capitalism, workers more prone to alienation and more susceptible to pitches about solidarity than were the workers of the small crafts industries of early industrialism.

Socialism also deemphasized millenarianism, stressing instead a better tomorrow in the here and now with tangible bread and butter results. Until the Russian Revolution, no one had any way of measuring the validity or effectiveness of the socialist promises of economic equality and fairness for all.

Social democrats had better success than socialists did. They were more gradualist, advocating high taxes to promote relative equality, government regulation, nationalization as necessary, and social welfare. Scandinavia was most successful with this approach, but other European countries adapted some elements. Late in the 20th century and early in the 21st, governments began dismantling at least parts of these social democracies.

Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism

In its 1836–46 heyday, the New England–based religious, intellectual, and social movement known as transcendentalism fostered a truly American literature and inspired important social reforms, including abolition of slavery and new roles for women. Although it was never a mass movement, its adherents’ attempts to harmonize human freedom with religious belief, social responsibility, and the natural order continue to resonate in today’s American culture.

Transcendentalism was deeply influenced by the romantic movement that swept Europe in the wake of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Young Americans—children of the early 19th century—found themselves drawn to new ideas about how to interact with nature and find personal authenticity and wholeness.

In so doing, they challenged old-line religious beliefs, questioned the growing Industrial Revolution, and energized emerging notions of American democracy. Well educated (many were Harvard graduates) and more urban than most Americans of their time, most who called themselves transcendentalists were clergy, writers, and teachers living in and near Boston.


Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the beginning what became known as transcendentalism was mainly a revolt against many of the teachings and assumptions of the New England religious establishment. As Massachusetts, established as a Puritan “City on a Hill” in the early 17th century, evolved toward Unitarianism in the early 19th century, some church leaders and members came to see their modern creed as excessively rationalistic and inadequate to modern challenges.

Bostonian Ralph Waldo Emerson was destined to follow in his Unitarian minister father’s respectable footsteps. When his 20-year-old wife died of tuberculosis in 1831, the young Harvard graduate was plunged into doubt, finding his own preaching of religious certitude of little comfort.

Resigning his ministry at Boston’s Second Unitarian Church, Emerson went to Europe, learning French, German, and Italian and meeting such key romantic advocates as essayist Thomas Carlyle and poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

By the 1830s the former minister was traveling the American lyceum circuit, preaching lay sermons to men and women seeking moral and intellectual improvement. In his famous 1841 lecture, “Self-Reliance,” Emerson urged people to think, and rethink, for themselves, saying “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines ... To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Revered and attacked, admired, imitated, and sometimes mocked as a disembodied “transparent eyeball,” Emerson was the intellectual and personal center of the coterie of like-minded thinkers and doers who were the transcendentalists. He is generally considered to be America’s first public intellectual and first philosopher of the evolving republic.

Other Important Trancendentalists

Emerson’s circle was marked by deep intellectual and personal friendships that could at times become competitive or even petty. Transcendentalism tried to unleash human potential rather than codify it, and transcendentalists tended toward independence rather than orthodoxy. In the process, adherents made important contributions to the slavery and labor questions of their day and rethought education and women’s rights.

Henry David Thoreau

The person most closely associated with Emerson, Thoreau is best known for his two-year experiment in natural living at Walden Pond and his formulation of “civil disobedience,” the idea that free people of conscience can, and indeed must, refuse to go along with unjust government actions. A Harvard graduate like his mentor, Thoreau worked to develop practical skills and showed a real talent for making do with available resources.

In important ways, he embodied the self reliant man of Emerson’s orations. Thoreau wrote his essay, “Resistance to Civil Government,” after he was arrested at Walden in 1846 by Concord’s sheriff for refusing (for a sixth time) to pay a poll tax because he felt it aided Massachusetts’s participation in the Mexican-American War, a war that many believed was being fought to preserve and expand slavery.

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them ... ?” Thoreau asked. “The authority of government ... can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.” He served a night in jail; the essay became an inspiration for later activists.

Margaret Fuller

Cofounder with Emerson of the influential but shortlived quarterly The Dial, Fuller was later an assistant editor and foreign correspondent for the New-York Tribune and one of America’s earliest exponents of women’s rights. In her essays and an influential 1845 book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller argued that the kinds of self-realization and personal fulfillment advocated by transcendental thinking must also be available to women.

“As men become aware that all men have not had their fair chance,” she wrote in the July 1843 Dial, “they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair chance.” Fuller died in a shipwreck near New York as she returned from Italy with her husband and young son, who both also drowned.

Theodore Parker

Parker, a controversial minister, was forced out of the Unitarian Church. Although he had doubts about the intellectual equality of black people, he became an enthusiastic transcendentalist and a leader of the antislavery movement. A foe of the Mexican War like Thoreau, Parker led opposition in the Boston area to federal efforts to enforce the new Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, going so far as to hide an escaped slave in his home.

Even more controversially, he helped finance arms purchases that helped antislavery zealot John Brown and others fight slaveholding settlers in the disputed Kansas-Nebraska Territory and enabled Brown to launch his failed raid on a U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.

Orestes A. Brownson

Born in Vermont, Brownson was a lifelong religious seeker who ultimately became a Roman Catholic. During his years as an important transcendentalist, Brownson focused on inequitable treatment of workers, both free and enslaved. A socialist and editor of his own Boston-based journal, Brownson saw the gap between the wealthy and laboring classes growing disastrously in violation of God’s law and the supposed equality promised by American democracy.

“What in one word is this American system?” he asked in 1840. “Is it not the abolition of all artificial distinctions, all social advantages founded on birth or any other accident, and leaving every man to stand on his own feet ... ?”

Bronson Alcott

Best known today as the often-absent father of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott, the self-educated Alcott pioneered new educational methods, some of which have continued to influence American schooling. Children, he believed, should not be forced to learn a rigid curriculum but taught ways to open their minds to a world of knowledge.

The child, he wrote, “is the Book. The operations of his mind are the true system.” Although his ideas were controversial, partly because he disdained corporal punishment, Alcott was eventually appointed superintendent of Concord’s public schools.

Less successful was Fruitlands, the agricultural community Alcott and a British friend founded in a rural Massachusetts town in 1843. It lasted just six months, done in by rules that included cold-water showers, strict vegetarianism, sexual abstinence, and opposition to animal exploitation so strict that colonists could not use horses or oxen to clear land for farming.

George Ripley and the Brook Farm Experiment

Brook Farm, an experiment in communal living on a transcendental plane, proved more durable than Alcott’s Fruitlands but collapsed in 1847 after six years of financial struggle, infighting, a disastrous fire, and a smallpox outbreak. Located on a 200-acre West Roxbury, Massachusetts, dairy farm, the “colony” was the brainchild of Unitarian minister George Ripley, his wife, Sophia, and other committed transcendentalists.

In the wake of 1837’s socially destructive U.S. financial panic, ideas of economic self-sufficiency, the ennoblement of manual labor, and the in-gathering of likeminded intellectuals seemed especially appealing. Brook Farm’s founders were also influenced by the social thought of Frenchman Charles Fourier, whose American adherents would eventually gain control of this experiment in group living.

Although Emerson was unenthusiastic about Ripley’s proposed “city of God,” planning proceeded apace in 1840–41. During a very cold and wet spring, the Ripleys and a dozen supporters—most lacking any agricultural experience whatsoever—took up residence at the farm. In 1842 a school of college-preparatory caliber was established at Brook Farm, attracting some of the cream of New England society as students and teachers.

The settlement quickly became a magnet for tourists, transcendentalists, and Fourierists, but its poor soil and inadequate financing, as well as a series of disasters, led to its demise. As the community failed, George Ripley auctioned off his personal library in a vain effort to save the foundering utopian enterprise.

Literary Renaissance

Emerson immersed himself in the ideas, poetry, and literature of early 19th-century Europe, but he and other transcendentalists were also convinced that their countrymen and -women must and could create a uniquely American voice in all the arts, especially fiction and poetry. Eventually, writers who were not always best sellers in their own time would be canonized by 20th-century critics and are still considered among the most important the United States ever produced.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

An early settler and major investor in Brook Farm, Hawthorne was the descendant of Puritan elders, among them participants in the Salem witch trials. In 1852, 10 years after he spent more than six months milking cows and spreading manure, he satirized Brook Farm in his novel The Blithedale Romance. More important were novels such as The Scarlet Letter and short stories, including “Young Goodman Brown,” in which Hawthorne examined darker aspects of theology and human behavior.

Herman Melville

A strong admirer and interpreter of Hawthorne’s work, Melville, a New Yorker, first gained notice as the writer of popular seafaring stories based on his own experiences. His later stories and novels, including “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Benito Cereno, and Moby-Dick (dedicated to Hawthorne) were much bleaker, exploring issues of slavery, race, and madness before and after the Civil War. His sales languished during his lifetime but were revived by positive critical attention in the 1920s and later.

Walt Whitman

Born on a failing Long Island farm, Whitman was an itinerant teacher, printer, and editor whose poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, later much expanded, burst on the scene in 1855. “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” Emerson wrote to the previously unknown poet days after its publication. Emerson viewed Whitman as the ideal poet he had proposed in an 1844 essay. An active opponent of slavery, Whitman used his poetry to mourn the violence of war as he nursed injured Union soldiers.

His poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” lamented Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Whitman’s poetry celebrated ordinary men and women. That, and his radical use of free verse—characterized by some as “barbaric yawp”—became key aspects of his truly “American” poetics.

Enduring Significance

Always controversial in its own time, transcendentalism gained new respect and importance in the 20th century, as educators, literary critics, and social activists found in its teachings and experiments new energy and new lessons for the United States and other societies.

In Thoreau, such social critics as Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and American anti-Vietnam war protestors found inspiration and justification for their opposition to colonialism, racism, and arrogant political power. Educational programs that seem to borrow from the child-centered focus of Alcott and others have met both praise and scorn in America and Europe.

Emersonian concepts of self-reliance and personal fulfillment, sometimes credited with improving American public life, have also been blamed for encouraging a “culture of narcissism.” Transcendentalism continues to transcend its own historical place and time.

Women’s Suffrage, Rights, and Roles

Women's suffragists parade in New York City in 1917

Against the background of the Enlightenment and American, French, and Industrial Revolutions, Western women’s lives changed dramatically, although not until the 20th century would most gain the right to vote. By 1900 Western societies had become accustomed to women’s participation in public affairs, even if governments, and many individual men and women, still questioned its appropriateness.

The profound changes reshaping European and North American women’s lives were not examples of unfettered progress toward equality but, rather, a series of challenges to, and compromises with, ancient traditions of female inferiority and dependency.

Although there had long been women of distinction and even importance—queens, priestesses, scholars, and saints—the first influential proponent for all women was Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft. A former governess who supported the French Revolution and collaborated with Thomas Paine, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Women, said Wollstonecraft, were equal to men in their ability to reason. Therefore, women must be treated as reasonable and equal members of the human race.


Female Education

At a time when the “female” brain was perceived as feebler and less focused, Wollstonecraft proposed free public school systems to equally educate boys and girls together in intellectual, physical, and vocational pursuits. The reality of the times was otherwise.

In the 18th century and later, many women educated themselves by sneaking books from male family members or secretly listening in on brothers’ lessons. Some were lucky to be encouraged by fathers or brothers, or had access to rigorous schools led by female teachers, like Emma Willard of New York, who had themselves achieved a decent education.

Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller of Massachusetts was educated in Greek and Latin by her lawyer father and later learned German and Italian. In 1839, she organized a series of meetings, mainly for women, to discuss intellectual and political issues.

Hers was an Americanized version of the European salon that flourished, especially in France, in the late 18th century. Unlike those salons, organized by well-educated women but dominated by men, Fuller’s gatherings were a form of female adult education.

Proponents of female education were not necessarily feminists. Catharine Beecher championed improved teacher training for women and helped develop home economics as a science, not because she approved of female equality, but because she believed that women needed to do their traditional work more efficiently. In Britain Isabella Beeton likewise advised women on cooking and home management.

Ohio’s new Oberlin College opened its doors to a few women in 1833. But women only colleges seemed to offer a more acceptable solution. Founded in Massachusetts in 1837 by Mary Lyon, a chemist, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was the first.

In Britain, Frances Mary Buss founded a college preparatory school for girls in 1850, and in 1871 Britain’s Shirreff sisters, Maria and Emily, themselves self-taught, created the National Union for Promoting the Higher Education of Women. Some all-male institutions added adjunct female colleges as did Harvard University in 1879, establishing Radcliffe College.

Coeducation for children older than 10 was extremely controversial, for both pedagogic and moral reasons, but grew as public education expanded. This did not mean that female students were warmly welcomed by their male classmates and professors, or afforded equal accommodations.

Despite some concessions to female students, neither Oxford nor Cambridge Universities offered women full academic privileges until well into the 20th century. Likewise, Paris’s Sorbonne let women audit courses long before granting them degrees.

Economic Rights and Work Options

In the preindustrial economy, distinctions between men’s and women’s work were far less clear than they became in the 19th century. Women’s work (except in the upper classes) had always included cleaning, food preparation, and child care, but men and women, boys and girls, often labored side-by-side on their farms, or made products like brooms and shoes at home for sale to local distributors.

As the growing market revolution displaced local commerce, and manufacturing migrated from home work to factories, female labor was redefined. Woman’s sphere would be the home exclusively; women would no longer produce for their family but consume goods made by the new economy. Too delicate and refined for the public fray, the true woman, as “angel of the house,” would make home a refuge for her husband and children.

This vision, often called the cult of domesticity, excluded millions of poor and enslaved women in Europe and North America. Unmarried women, deserted women, women whose husbands struggled to support their family all found most kinds of paying work closed to them. There were some new opportunities: In New England, growing textile factories, desperate for labor, encouraged farm parents to send their young daughters to work.

Carefully supervised and poorly paid, “mill girls” were expected to leave their jobs for marriage. Most did; many also enjoyed new self-sufficiency. Paid work for respectable lower-class women was primarily domestic service. “Angels of the house” exploited large staffs of female servants.

Middle-class women or poor but educated women could become governesses or schoolteachers, but almost had to quit when they married. Some women chose spinsterhood over married dependency. Many pushed the boundaries of female opportunity by taking up work related to women’s lives and needs.

Born in England, Elizabeth Blackwell taught school in Cincinnati before overcoming fierce opposition to become an physician. Blackwell argued that women and children were better served by female doctors who could alleviate their pains without compromising their modesty.

Her contemporary, Briton Florence Nightingale, professionalized nursing during and after the Crimean War, giving new respectability to women’s traditional caregiver role. Dorothea Dix, who made her name in prison and mental-health reform, and nurse Clara Barton played similar roles in America’s Civil War.

More controversially, others entered, or tried to enter, male domains. An estimated 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. In 1872 the U.S. Supreme Court denied Myra Bradwell a license to practice law in Illinois, saying “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.”

Victoria Woodhull, an activist U.S. journalist and stockbroker, attempted a run for president on a third-party ticket in 1872. Later, married to an Englishman, she backed Britain’s woman suffrage movement.

A traditionally male undertaking in which women excelled was writing for pay. New England writer Nathaniel Hawthorne famously blamed the popularity of novels by “scribbling women” for his relative difficulty in reaching a mass audience.

For activists including Clara Zetkin and Louise Otto Peters of Germany, writing was a way to earn money while gaining political support. Both France’s George Sand and England’s George Eliot were authors who adopted male names to protest the female condition and achieve stronger sales of their works.

Marriage and Child-Rearing

Unmarried women were objects of pity and scorn who often lived with their parents, but married women were more dependent on men for their very lives. The ancient tradition of couverture defined married women as legally incompetent minors. It was not abolished in Britain until 1870.

A husband was the undisputed head of the household, controlling absolutely his property, his children, his servants, his wife, and whatever resources she might have brought into the marriage. Extreme cruelty was considered bad form, but moderate beatings were sanctioned by law and religion.

Nevertheless, after 1750 there were indications of new and more equal kinds of relationships between men and women. In Europe and America, so-called companionate marriages that allowed for romantic love began to replace or augment unions arranged by parents.

In the United States, the “republican” mother responsible for future generations of free citizens was accorded some respect. Experiments in “free love” and multiple marriage scandalized but provided alternatives for adventurous women and men.

The lives of women’s rights advocates would have been even more difficult without such husbands as Henry Blackwell, whose wife, Lucy Stone, kept her own name, and English philosopher John Stuart Mill, who actively promoted female equality alongside his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill.

Even with the best of husbands, married life was difficult. Wives endured many pregnancies; infant and maternal deaths were common. Despite servants, the care and feeding of large households severely limited middle-class women’s ability to gain education or take on a job or career. Birth control methods were rudimentary and generally considered sinful.

Lacking property rights, married women were at the mercy of an economic system over which they had no control. To satisfy creditors, a husband could sell his wife’s belongings, down to her clothes and cookware. A husband was not required to consider his wife’s wishes when disciplining, educating, or apprenticing their children.

If a wife ran off, or obtained a rare divorce, she might never again see her children. In 1848 New York’s Married Woman’s Property Act gave wives some control of their own resources. This initiative, however, as often protected the property interests of a father or brother as those of the wife.

Political Rights

The political ferment that brought about the American Revolution and continued in America and Europe until about 1850 inspired new hopes of freedom among women and other oppressed groups. Enthusiasm aroused by such stirring calls for freedom as America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence would harden into an often angry struggle for women’s political recognition later in the 19th century.

Abigail Adams, wife of president John Adams, was not the only woman to ask her nation to “remember the ladies.” Between 1776 and 1807 a few women actually voted in New Jersey, where the state’s new constitution had failed to specify that only males were entitled to the franchise.

From 1809 to 1849 when the word male was inserted, Québec’s female property owners voted in municipal and provincial elections. But in France, both Revolutionary-era rulers and Napoleon I’s regime curbed women’s search for freedom with stricter laws.

The cause that galvanized America’s organized woman suffrage movement was the battle to end slavery. Many middle-class women, horrified by the plight of slave mothers and children, found common cause in abolition and began comparing their own restricted freedoms to slavery’s chains.

Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who grew up attended by slaves on a South Carolina plantation, came north to aid the abolitionist cause. By 1836 they were writing and speaking against slavery, first only to women but soon to mixed audiences, outraging many Protestant clergymen.

In 1840 Quaker antislavery leader Lucretia Coffin Mott and other American abolitionists, including the newly married Elizabeth Cady Stanton, sailed to London for a World Anti-Slavery Convention. Mott, an official delegate, was forbidden to speak on account of her sex.

In July 1848 Mott and Stanton reconnected to organize a two-day woman’s rights meeting at Seneca Falls. Some 300 attended, including about 40 men, one of whom was Frederick Douglass, abolitionist leader and former slave.

Meanwhile, in many European nations, a reform tide that peaked in 1848 was propelling women’s rights advocates in a similar direction. Pauline Roland and other French women associated with the socialistleaning Saint Simonian and Fourierist movements called for marital reform and universal suffrage laws that included women.

Then came a backlash: in 1851 a new Prussian law not only forbade women to join political parties but prohibited them from attending meetings where politics were discussed. A series of British voting reform acts excluded women. Led by Emmeline Pankhurst, Britain’s suffrage movement intensified after 1880. Despite press mockery, the U.S. women’s rights movement grew briskly, especially after Susan B. Anthony, a teacher and temperance crusader, joined forces with Stanton.

After the Civil War, however, the two suffrage leaders precipitated a bitter split in the movement when they protested a constitutional amendment that allowed male former slaves, but no women of any race, to vote. Not until 1890 did the two suffrage organizations reunite. By 1900, four western states (beginning with Wyoming in 1869) allowed women to vote in all or most elections, and piecemeal suffrage was being doled out in Sweden, Britain, and parts of the British Empire.