The Transcendentalism Movement

Although Transcendentalism as a historical movement was limited in time from the mid 1830s to the late 1840s and in space to eastern Massachusetts, its ripples continue to spread through American culture. Beginning as a quarrel within the Unitarian church, Transcendentalism's questioning of established cultural forms, its urge to reintegrate spirit and matter, its desire to turn ideas into concrete action developed a momentum of its own, spreading from the spheres of religion and education to literature, philosophy, and social reform. While Transcendentalism's ambivalence about any communal effort that would compromise individual integrity prevented it from creating lasting institutions, it helped set the terms for being an intellectual in …show more content…
At one pole, Emerson and Thoreau, who both declined to be Brook Farmers, felt that improvement must begin with the self, that many of the specific reforms rampant in Jacksonian America such as prohibition and vegetarianism were too narrowly conceived and that to engage in social and political action was to dissipate creative energies. One the other side were Brownson, Peabody, and, intermittently Alcott, who felt that rampant individualism was part of the problem, not part of the solution, and that social change could be effected only through social means. But even Emerson and Thoreau recognized that when evils such as slavery and imperialistic war reach a certain enormity, one must speak out and act, and they, along with other Transcendentalists, most notably Theodore Parker, joined the abolitionist …show more content…
The writings of Thoreau, for example, shaped both the passive resistance methods of the civil rights movement and the underlying vision of the ecology movement. Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody are role models for feminist intellectuals who also espouse activism. The Transcendentalist efforts in education were reincarnated both in Dewey' laboratory school and the open school movement of the 1970s, and Brook Farm was the prototype of many of the communes of this same period. At its core, Transcendentalism was a youth movement, making eloquently obvious one of the first generation gaps in American history. Emerson wrote, "This deliquium, this ossification of the soul, is the Fall of Man. The redemption is lodged in the heart of youth," and went on to contrast the Party of Hope with the Party of Memory. Based on the foundational American assumption that the future can be better than the past through imagination and effort, the Transcendentalists envisioned a culture that would foster further acts of culture-making, a community that would also liberate the individual, a way of thinking that would also become a way of