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the Shakers. After an 1842 visit to the Harvard community with Hawthorne,
Emerson concluded, . In harmony as he was with the rapidly shifting
intellectual , Emerson gradually found more and more in
Shakerism that impressed him”. 125
We can add that the list of Emerson’s readings reveals how well he had known
Fourier’s and Owen’s publications since 1840, the year in which he published a
review of the essay Social Destiny of Man by Albert Brisbane (1840) in the October
issue of The Dial. In July two years later, he published an article entitled “Fourierism
and the Socialists” in the same magazine. 126 However, the most intense of
Emerson’s meditations regarding these social experiments remains his famous
lecture “New England Reformers”, which he gave at Amory Hall in Boston on March
3rd, 1844: “These new associations are composed of men and women of superior
talents and sentiments […] but remember that no society can ever be so large as
one man” 127 . Although he highlighted some of the merits of the utopians during the
conference, Emerson revealed his perplexities about the community life they
proposed. He thought, in fact, that a man influenced by habits and rules, searching
for alliances “external" to his spirit, could not express his own will and his own
individuality in full. This also gave rise to the theoretical justification and the
premise at the start of Thoreau’s Walden Experiment, the community of just one
man: “The union is only perfect, when all the uniters are isolated. It is the union of
friends who live in different streets or towns […] Government will be adamantine
without any governor. The union must be ideal in actual individualism” 128 .
By suggesting a provocative, anarchical solution, Emerson set the terms of the
American relationship between democracy and the individual, which was the object
125 BREWER, Priscilla J., “ Emerson, Lane, and the Shakers: A Case of Converging Ideologies”,
published in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Jun., 1982), pp. 254‐275; p. 258
126 See FLANAGAN, John T., “Emerson and Communism”, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 2
(Jun., 1937), pp. 243‐261
127 See EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, Essays, Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1894
(first ed. 1854 and 1876) p. 213
128 Ibid., p. 215
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