Radical Transcendentalisms - (Historical Materialism Book) (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book reconsiders the relation between nineteenth-century Transcendentalism and social change, and seeks to connect it to Marxism, slavery, European labor radicalism, and gender reform, while also examining its activist afterlives through philosophy and climate change activism.

Book Synopsis

Radical Transcendentalisms seeks to recover the intense relation that the nineteenth-century Transcendentalist movement had with radical social reform, and to recover it from the long history of liberal, individualist accusations that have been hurled at it. The authors in this collection argue that Transcendentalism offers us a deep critique of capitalist social relations, and that we might reexamine this critique in order to draw inspiration for our contentious political present.

About the Author

Alex Moskowitz is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. He teaches and writes about the senses, slavery, and political economy in early and nineteenth-century American and African American Literature.
Ted Stolze is Professor of Philosophy at Cerritos College. He has published primarily on Spinoza, Marxism, and contemporary French philosophy; and he is the author of Becoming Marxist (Brill, 2019).