of appreciation and critical insight) has left us all immeasurably in his debt, his assertion that we can still share Emerson's "thrill" in the "primacy that he shared with Nature and America itself" does not strike me as terribly helpful, especially when it is accompanied by disparagement of Emerson as a "sage-at-large"; a believer in "self-actualization" and "rapturous self-affirmation"; a closet elitist whose "underlying contempt for those who could not live up to his revelation" offends us as deeply as his conviction that " 'life' ... was indeed nothing but what the 'great man' is thinking of"; an "apostle of perfect personal power" whose "trust in the spiritual life" took no account of hard material realities; and, worst of all, an abstracted, "unctuous" ex-preacher who gave the dominant classes their "favorite image of the literary man as someone removed from 'real' life while remaining an embodiment of the idealism professed as the essence of America."

Communitarians have added to this familiar indictment the charge that Emerson's "expressive individualism," "limited to a language of radical individual autonomy," in Bellah's words, provides an inadequate counterweight to the acquisitive or "utilitarian" individualism that governs America culture. It "promises an inner refuge," according to David Marr, American Worlds since Emerson (1988), and thus encourages an "ideological assault upon politics and the political." More recently, in a review of David Van Leer's Emerson's Epistemology (1986) in Clio 18 (1989): 196-99, Marr has qualified this judgment to the extent of admitting that "the issues with which Emerson was preoccupied were more subtle and his treatment of them more precise than he has been given credit for."

It is not clear whether this remark is intended as an endorsement of Van Leer's contention that Emerson was a Kantian chiefly preoccupied with epistemological issues—a view of Emerson that also plays some part in Evan Carton, The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne (1985). John Michael, Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World (1988), argues persuasively that Emerson was more deeply influenced by Hume than by Kant. Like a number of other recent critics, Michael objects to the picture of Emerson as the "triumphant spokesman of self-reliance," stressing instead his "skepticism concerning the coherence and persistence of his own identity." The problematical standing of the concept of selfhood, the "volatility" and "unrelenting doubleness" of Emerson's language, and the self-referential quality of language in general figure prominently in Eric Cheyfitz, The Trans-Parent: Sexual Politics in the Language of Emerson (1981). Julie Ellison, Emerson's Romantic Style (1984), also assigns central importance to the "problem of language" and its "reflexivity." If these studies make Emerson sound too postmodern, too much like a nineteenth-century Derridean, they do help to correct the impression left by the scholarship of the fifties and sixties, that Emerson's work declined in force and visionary eloquence as he moved from the optimism of Nature to the pessimism of "Fate." The most recent assault on this tradition of scholarship is Leonard Neufeldt, The House of Emerson (1982), which also challenges another aspect of the conventional wisdom— that Emerson's abandonment of the ministry and his rejection of "all institution

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