The World Soul in American Transcendentalism

American Transcendentalism, a religious, literary, and social reform movement whose acknowledged leader was Ralph Waldo Emerson, characteristically deployed world soul thinking to harmonize Protestant individualism with Deist rationalism and modern science. Emerson’s “Over-Soul,” whose sources include Platonism, German Idealism, and the transcendental anatomy of Georges Cuvier, enabled the Transcendentalists to distance themselves from orthodox theism by turning God’s magisterial law from outer command into inner creative principle, based on the fundamental concept that all human beings (and, for some, all life) share an inner divine principle that radiates meaning into the world. This chapter draws on William James, who analyzed world soul thinking in terms of the varieties of transcendentalism: this lens suggests that for many Transcendentalists, Emerson’s idealist, absolute monism yielded to a range of pluralist and materialist variants, as seen in Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and the radical pluralism of William James himself.

Orestes Brownson For and Against America

The compatibility, or lack thereof, between Catholicism and American citizenship is continually raised by Catholic political theorists. With each new political crisis we face as a nation, proponents and opponents trot out their arguments in an attempt to prove that Americanism continues to nourish, or poison, the Body of Christ. This argument has been raging for nearly 200 years, and today an important contributor to this conversation is often overlooked: Orestes Brownson. While in his magnum opus, The American Republic, he spoke eloquently of America’s providential and Catholic mission, in 1870 he confided in Isaac Hecker that he had lost all hope for America and saw her as a corrupting influence on the Church in America. In this essay I explore Brownson as for and against America, showing how his later book, Conversations: Liberalism and the Church, reveals a consistency between his apparently contradictory stances.

Orestes Brownson and the Liberal Tradition in America

This essay describes Orestes Brownson’s general orientation to the American regime. As an initial starting point, comparisons are made between Brownson and the other great commentator on the American constitutional order, Alexis de Tocqueville. Brownson tends to emphasize general ideas whereas Tocqueville begins with particulars, but both recognize the unique relationship between religion and politics in America, which presents a new approach to Church-state arrangements in the modern world. Brownson is hopeful that American Catholics can take the lead in American affairs and serve as an example to the citizens of other nations, but this will require a robust educative formation in which love of Truth and love of country are both appropriately nourished.

Orestes Brownson, Old Republican

Written in the aftermath of the Civil War, Orestes Brownson’s The American Republic is careful to address the arguments of the recently-defeated southerners. The running debates between southern constitutionalists and their nationalist opponents had produced a rich literature from the 1790s through secession. Brownson himself had known some of this literature and had greatly admired John C. Calhoun, the pre-eminent southern constitutionalist of the 1830s and 1840s. Brownson drew on the Old Republican constitutional tradition in The American Republic in order to counter the tendencies he saw in the northern movement for a national democratic politics. Through comparing Brownson’s ideas in The American Republic to those of Jeffersonian theorist John Taylor of Caroline, his reliance on Old Republican thinking becomes apparent.

It's About Liberty

While there are legitimate concerns about the sweeping character of Deneen’s indictment of liberalism’s anthropology and political theory and its impact on American society—in particular, his tendency to make the story of creation and instantiation of liberalism simpler than it actually is, to reduce the Constitution to a simple expression of liberal political philosophy, and not be specific about the actual accomplishments of liberalism—his overarching argument about liberalism and its trajectory is ultimately convincing, as is his critique of its understanding of liberty. The historical experience of American Catholics and the thought of two of its leading thinkers—Orestes Brownson and John Courtney Murray—support Deneen’s argument that a false understanding of liberty has been part of our American culture and provide guidance as to how a true understanding might be articulated and instantiated.