The Transcendentalists and Their World by Robert A. Gross

Reviewed by: The Transcendentalists and Their World by Robert A. Gross Camden Burd (bio) Keywords Transcendentalism, Social history, Intellectual history, Concord, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Community The Transcendentalists and Their World. By Robert A. Gross. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Pp. 864. Cloth, $40.00.) Robert Gross invites us back to Concord, Massachusetts in his latest work, The Transcendentalists and Their World. The title should sound familiar. It echoes his similarly named and Bancroft Prize-winning work, The Minutemen and Their World, published in 1976.1 In many ways, the book feels like a sequel. The Transcendentalists and Their World bears the hallmarks of new social history (rebuilding community profiles, outlining the divisions among group members, tracking ideas, economic shifts, cultural influences, generational change). Gross even notes that the work "began as an investigation into how the close world of the Minutemen, with its communal ethic and its inclusive institutions, gave way to the individualistic society of the Transcendentalists" (xx). The book links local happenings to this broader intellectual movement by arguing that broader social transformations were already underway by the time Emerson and Thoreau began their scribbling in Concord. Through painstaking research, Gross tracks a fracturing community in order to better [End Page 670] understand how, and why, Transcendentalism took root in this New England village. In order to understand the Transcendentalists, Gross argues that we must understand Concord in the decades leading up to 1830s. In doing so, we discover a village brewing with the cultural, social, economic, political, and intellectual milieu that would eventually develop into a movement. By 1825, villagers closed the door on the old-style political presumptions of the Federalists and embraced the new democratizing spirit of republicanism. The momentary pause in political strife was replaced with religious schism as the long-standing First Parish Church experienced a wave of dissent from congregants seeking a more conservative approach to worship. Communal bonds continued to break away as the industrial revolution and the market economy chipped away at long-standing social norms. Roads and railroads connected Concord to larger markets. Commercial agricultural, industrialization, and professional specialization—the hallmarks of the burgeoning capitalist economy—all took root in Concord during the 1820s. Forests fell; creeks and rivers were dammed; debt and distrust bloomed. Ideas also spread on commercial networks. School reform, the temperance movement, and Anti-Masonry all found a welcome audience in Concord whose residents came to embrace the promise of individualism and self-improvement. The Concord of the early nineteenth century was a village questioning traditionalism, transformed by the marketplace, and immersed in new ideas about politics, education, and the individual. Ralph Waldo Emerson arrived in Concord at a time when the community seemed to be fracturing under pressure from these new commercial and social forces. He, himself, was looking for change. Like many around him, Emerson was growing disinterested with traditional religious philosophy and soon took interest in the Transcendental reform movements that spread within the ranks of Unitarian clergy. Concord was an ideal place for him to evaluate New England and track its anxieties—all while finding a ready market for his ideas in nearby Boston. "Concord did not make Emerson a Transcendentalist," Gross makes sure to clarify, "but if afforded ample resources with which to illustrate and apply his observations of New England life" (385–86). His essay and speeches on education, individualism, and self-reliance were infused with inspiration from local debates. Though the origins of his new philosophy could be traced to German roots, Emerson's version of Transcendentalism was deeply local—reflecting a community at the crossroads of change in the second [End Page 671] quarter of the nineteenth century. Perhaps less surprisingly, Gross tracks the local influences of Henry David Thoreau's ideas. "The civic spirit and religious vision that Puritans had bequeathed to the Minutemen and thence to the leaders of Concord in the new republic were the seedbed in which the native's son vision of ecology of germinated" (608). Even Thoreau's conception of nature, a proto-ecological philosophy for man and the natural world, was the culmination of experiences with local environments, community residents, and cultural processes. In Gross's retelling...