Knowledge with ‘Practical Cash-Value:’ Emerson’s Lectures and the Cultural Market of Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

 One of the founding fathers of American literature, the essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was, arguably, the most influential public intellectual of nineteenth-century America. This article explores Emerson’s ideological struggle in participating in a project that, despite its educational mission, was also a profit-driven initiative which exemplified the materialism he so frequently and vehemently denounced. I argue that Emerson’s participation in the capitalist commodification of culture for financial gain and, more generally, his engagement with the capitalist practices of what Jürgen Habermas calls “the public sphere” was a strategic effort to balance materialism with the cultivation of a vibrant cultural environment. Approaching the lyceum as the privileged site where to engage on both the rhetorical and pedagogical level with what he called a “convertible audience” (Emerson 1960-82, 7:265), Emerson used the public lecture to give a “practical ‘cash-value’” to his ideas and to exhort his fellow Americans to put theory into work.