‘ALL HISTORY IS BIOGRAPHY’: RALPH WALDO EMERSON’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Abstract

R.W. Emerson’s (1803-1882) philosophy of history has been little discussed and even less understood. Emerson’s thought, outlined both in his poetry and in his Essays, has been variously dismissed as ‘ahistorical’, ‘anti-historical’, and even as ‘crude hero-worship’. That may be so to a mind accustomed to the rigidity of analytic thought. But an appreciation of the Continental antecedents of American thought in the 19th century, particularly the influences of German Idealism and Romanticism, shows that Emerson grapples with fundamental historiographical problems that have bedevilled historians throughout the centuries.