Reading Emerson in Neoliberal Times
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591714523622 |
| Date | 01 June 2015 |
| Author | Mark E. Button |
| Published date | 01 June 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2014
Article
Political Theory
2015, Vol. 43(3) 312 –333
Reading Emerson in
© 2014 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591714523622
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Contesting the
Abandonment of
Autonomy
Mark E. Button1
Abstract
Nineteenth-century American political thinkers like Emerson, Thoreau,
and Whitman advocated for and sought to exemplify a life of self-direction
and critical self-reflection, or personal autonomy, as a means of contesting
entrenched routines of democratic-capitalist normalization and as a way
of resisting a host of institutional disciplinary pressures. Today, the ideal of
personal autonomy within a diverse liberal society is branded by many as a
form of “comprehensive” disciplinary normalization in its own right. In this
essay I offer a reconsideration of this reversal in the appraisal of the value
of autonomy within pluralistic democratic societies and argue that the
abandonment of autonomy is a symptom of a mistaken understanding of the
personal-ethical qualities upon which a democratic culture depends and a
maladaptive concession to neoliberal norms. To confront these challenges,
I draw upon a range of Emerson’s writings to offer some ideas about how
a reconstructed ideal of aspirational autonomy might inform contemporary
politics without unduly constraining moral pluralism or undermining toleration.
Keywords
Emerson, autonomy, neoliberalism, pluralism, education
1Department of Political Science, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Corresponding Author:
Mark E. Button, Department of Political Science, University of Utah, 260 S Central Campus,
Dr Rm 252, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA.
Email: mark.button@poli-sci.utah.edu
Button
313
This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes
Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841)
This essay addresses a virtue that has recently become the object of political
and philosophical abandonment: personal (or moral) autonomy.1 The aban-
donment of autonomy as an ethical quality upon which a democratic society
relies and as capacity that helps to clarify part of the merit, value, and aim of
liberal institutions has been prompted in recent years by an admirable solici-
tude for the cultural diversity that defines a free and open society like the
United States. The basic idea here is that under conditions of value pluralism,
personal autonomy is but one among many possible values or ends worthy of
pursuit, but with no more inherent moral or epistemological warrant than any
other “reasonable” way of life.2 To insist otherwise, we are often told, is to be
guilty of a kind of pre-modern sectarianism that does injustice to the facts of
moral pluralism and threatens to undermine the core liberal principle of tol-
eration; it has even been suggested that “the autonomy principle . . . exerts a
kind of homogenizing pressure on ways of life that do not embrace auton-
omy.”3 To publicly plump for autonomy today is to betray a properly liberal
spirit because, as John Rawls put it, “While autonomy as a moral value has
had an important place in the history of democratic thought, it fails to satisfy
the criterion of reciprocity required of reasonable political principles and
cannot be part of a political conception of justice.”4
In this essay, I argue that this line of reasoning has now taken the form of
an overcorrection that threatens to sacrifice a central understanding of the
meaning and value of a liberal democratic society. I make this argument by
drawing from one of America’s preeminent theorists of autonomy and demo-
cratic culture: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)—with some help from his
spiritual heir, Walt Whitman (1819–1892). I take as my guiding inspiration
Emerson’s claim, that “in self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended”
(“American Scholar” EL, 65).5 By self-trust I take Emerson to refer to a sense
of individual moral dignity that a person who is awake to the principle of
autonomy will seek to sustain and strive to protect as a fundamental moral
and political good for all. Utilizing this Emersonian idea, autonomy can be
understood as the power or capacity to exercise one’s freedom and to express
one’s unique humanity (Emerson calls it “character”); by protecting this
capacity and incorporating the commitment to do so into the conception of a
just political society—respecting the same unique powers in others—the
members of a political society express their belief in and seek to give practi-
cal operation to the idea that “each person possesses an inviolability founded
314
Political Theory 43(3)
on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.”6
Personal autonomy is a matter of “basic justice.” I seek to defend this claim
and to connect the features of this account to an ethical framework that might
inform political practice and judgment for our times. More specifically, I
draw upon Emerson to critically intervene on two inter-related trends in
American cultural and political life: the turn against personal autonomy
within contemporary liberal theory, and the on-going challenges for the
humanities in American universities today.
Emersonian Autonomy: Aspirational Not
Ontological
Reading Emerson against the backdrop of contemporary democratic and lib-
eral political theory is a disorienting and bracing experience. The dominant
trend over the past several decades has been to work out the moral and epis-
temic bare minimum for a liberal-democratic order given value pluralism and
the persistence of reasonable moral disagreement in a free and open society.7
Where present (i.e., post-Enlightenment) democratic theory aims to thin out
principled moral commitments to make broad agreement on fundamentals of
justice between diverse citizens more likely and reliable, Emerson pursued a
very different path: one not only of provocation but one that explored ethical
and philosophical depths—adducing normative views about the conditions of
and the labors necessary for a life less governed by material, moral, or politi-
cal forces outside of the self.8 Emerson pushed relentlessly for a life lived
from the inside out, for himself and others. Emerson’s aim was not to offer
moral justifications for a liberal democratic society to which all could or
would agree, but to offer a perspective and a vision of life—a contestable one
of course—that might influence the ways in which we assess both the value
of a democratic society (extrinsically, macroscopically, politically) and the
ways in which we assess our individual practices, capacities, and attachments
within such a society (introspectively, microscopically, and ethically).
Before contemporary liberal thinkers completely abandon this perspective
and vocation as altogether improper for moral and political theory today, I
would like to pause for a moment over its substance and some of its chal-
lenges. Can there be more to liberal-democratic theory today than determin-
ing (through a priori reasoning) what we can rationally and reasonably justify
to diverse others? Or is this question itself already too injudicious for our
times? Indeed, what does it say about the genre and permissible bounds of
contemporary ethical and political thought that the very qualities and senti-
ments that Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau limned to contest entrenched
Button
315
routines of democratic-capitalist normalization and to resist disciplinary
pressures (in the church, state, market, and academy) have been recast as
examples of a comprehensive liberal mode of normalization that is perceived
as unjust and unreasonable to moral pluralism?
The best place to begin a consideration of these questions is with Emerson’s
1841 essay “Self-Reliance.” This essay offers a unique democratic ethics for
an age that is, by Emerson’s lights, doing persistent and unacknowledged
harm to the ultimate source and end of democracy: the individual moral self.
While Emerson published and delivered numerous public lectures during one
of the high water marks of mass democratic political participation in America,
he did not entertain the common self-congratulations of America’s demo-
cratic triumphs (for white men), but instead provided his contemporaries with
frequent and dire warnings that mass society had now gotten the better of
individuals as such: “Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the
water of which it is composed does not” (“Self-Reliance,” EL, 281).9
American democracy and emergent industrial capitalism had submerged the
individual in a sea of conformity at a time when social, legal, and political
reforms (nowhere near complete to be sure) had otherwise created some of
the most favorable conditions for the widest possible flowering of personal
freedom, freedom of thought, and individuality. Democracy, it seemed, held
no necessary or natural relationship to the flourishing of the individual self,
or for culling forth the latent and boundless possibilities of “character,” as
Emerson would put it. Indeed, the dark, underlying worry of critical observ-
ers of society and culture in the nineteenth century—like Emerson, Thoreau,
and Whitman in America; Mill and Wollstonecraft in England; Tocqueville,
and Constant in France; Marx, Engels, and Weber in Germany—was that
democracy and capitalism lived at the quiet enervating expense of the indi-
vidual soul. More specifically, the extension of...
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