Chapter 1 considers how Emerson uses the essay form to present his ideas as experiments or trials, to preserve a sense of spontaneity or casualness (“I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics”) and to dramatize what he calls the “contrary tendencies” in his philosophy (“I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies”). While it is important to trace Emerson’s main positions, one misses the living nature of his philosophy unless one also takes account of the motions and patterns within his essays, and the ways he dramatizes instability, spontaneity, and inconsistency. Emerson’s description of a poem in “The Poet” applies equally to his own essays: each is a living thing, like “a plant or an animal,” each has “an architecture of its own.” The discussion focuses on the moods of “History” and “Experience,” guided by Theodor Adorno’s idea of the essay as a carpet, or an arena for thought.

In the first part of Chapter 5, Goodman considers some basic affinities of Emerson and Montaigne that are evident even before Emerson published “Montaigne, or the Skeptic”: their use of the essay form to register spontaneity and contingency, their critique of books and travel, their discussions of the play of moods, their attention to themselves. The second part of Chapter 5 considers the shape of Emerson’s Montaigne essay, which has its own moods and its own architecture, and which concludes by taking what the critic Barbara Packer calls “a miraculous act of levitation” outside the play of moods to the moral sentiment that “outweighs them all.” In evaluating this leap, Goodman deploys Emerson’s own skepticism against his more metaphysical and dogmatic tendencies. “Why so talkative in public,” he writes, “when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute?”

More than any other of Emerson’s essays, “Experience” shows us a succession of states, moods, and “regions” of human life. It is not a “carpet” essay in Adorno’s sense, in which a set of themes is woven into a core idea, but a journey essay, which moves from region to region, and portrays life as a set of moods through which we pass. Like a piece of music, “Experience” is in motion. It provides an exemplary case of the essay as Montaigne describes the form: “something which cannot be said at once all in one piece.” Chapter 7 considers whether “Experience" is to be seen as what Cavell calls a “journey of ascent” – as in the journey up and out of the cave in Plato’s Republic; as a version of Plato’s myth of Er; or, with its praise of “the midworld,” as a return to the ordinary as Wittgenstein thinks of it.

Chapter 9 considers Emerson’s first revolutionary book of 1836, Nature. Even in this first book, Goodman argues, Emerson presents a nascent epistemology of moods. The discussion then turns to the moody swings of “Nature,” from the Essays, Second Series, in which Emerson finds the natural world either bountifully present or just missed, and as taking two opposing forms: a stable finished form he calls natura naturata, and a dynamic form he calls natura naturans. At the end of the essay, Emerson abandons this main set of oppositions in a leap to a metaphysical conclusion. The Coda considers Emerson’s attraction to Michael Faraday’s idea that “we do not arrive at last at atoms, but at spherules of force.”

Emerson describes a range of experiences that constitute friendship: titanic battles between beautiful enemies; conversational brilliance and expansion; a joyful solitude, as if someone has departed rather than arrived; a generalized benevolence toward people in the street to whom one does not speak; the warm sympathies and household joy one shares with a familiar friend; the disappointment of a friend outgrown. His account shows an intense focus on moral perfection – on our unattained but attainable self, alone and with others – but an equally intense awareness of what he calls in “Experience” “the plaint of tragedy” that sounds throughout our lives “in regard to persons, to friendship and love.” The chapter’s coda charts the opposition in “Love” between love as the experience of being “swept away” and a skeptical vision of marriage as a prison, from which sex, person, and partiality have vanished.

Chapter 4 begins by tracing some reappearances and interconnections of Emersonian themes, in what Goodman calls paths of coherence in Emerson’s philosophy: not a complete system, but ways that his thoughts hang together. The chapter focuses on “Nominalist and Realist,” where Emerson sets out the competing metaphysics of particulars and universals without reconciling their opposition. Near the end of the essay, he draws a skeptical lesson from his epistemology of moods. “I am always insincere,” he writes, “as always knowing there are other moods.” This might be cause for despair, but Emerson’s tone in this final paragraph is more in tune with ancient skepticism and Montaigne. He ends “Nominalist and Realist” by withdrawing from the dispute, but this does not mean that he gives up inquiring. Skepticism can be both a withholding of final judgment, and, as Herwig Friedl observes, “a constant looking around, without any attempt at closure.”

Historian Carl Becker once said that every generation rewrites history to suit its needs and according to its perspectives. This twenty-first-century collection of essays on the Declaration partly validates his claim and partly does not. Probably the chief way in which this collection differs from earlier efforts is in its broadened horizons. There is a systematic effort to consider the Declaration in relation to groups and concerns that received little attention in the past – women, labor, Native Americans, the international resonances of the document. But there are familiar themes as well, though these are mostly treated differently from the past. The intellectual roots of the Declaration is indeed a familiar topic, but the century or so since Becker’s book has enriched and deepened our grasp of the intellectual sources and, perhaps even more deeply, of their meaning. Not often emphasized in previous treatments are the religious and theological influences. Themes like the relation of the Declaration to the political context from which it emerged, the legal basis of the document, its main ideas, the Declaration and slavery – these are all topics that have a long history but which receive new treatment here based on new scholarship.

American presidents have actively participated in the process that transformed the Declaration of Independence into a fully constitutive document. Many presidential citations are either ceremonial or express shared values. All presidents, however, claim the Declaration supports at least some of their favored policies on civil rights, governmental powers, the culture wars, and immigration. Liberal and conservative presidents dispute whether the Declaration supports regulation in the public interest or limited government. Presidents in the culture wars engage in parallel play, with more progressive presidents citing the Declaration when supporting the rights of LGBTQ persons, gun control, and liberal immigration policies, and conservative presidents citing the Declaration for bans on abortion, a greater place for religion in the public sphere, and crime control measures.

This chapter re-examines slavery and abolition in the writing and reception of the Declaration of Independence. Far from being marginal parts of the nation’s founding document, as previous generations of scholars asserted, both slavery and abolition proved to be essential to the making and meaning of the Declaration. Indeed, during and after the American Revolution, the Declaration testified to the nation’s high abolitionist ideals and the enduring problem of slavery in American statecraft. By examining not only Jefferson’s ideas about black freedom in the Revolutionary era but a wide range of reformers who meditated on it as well – including African American writers and reformers like Benjamin Banneker – this essay argues that the Declaration itself remains a testament to the conflicted nature of emancipation in the American mind.

While it is important to trace Emerson’s main positions, one misses the living nature of his philosophy unless one also takes account of the motions, moods, and patterns within his essays, and the ways he dramatizes instability, spontaneity, and inconsistency. This emphasis is found in Goodman’s discussions of “History” in Chapter 1, “Friendship” in Chapter 3, “Nominalist and Realist” in Chapter 4, “Manners” in Chapter 6, “Experience” in Chapter 7, “Nature” in Chapter 9, and “Illusions” in Chapter 10. Chapter 2 distinguishes the sheer variety of skepticisms in Emerson’s thought, about the world and other minds, but also about mystical experiences that refuse “to be named” or are “ineffable.” It also attends to the differences between the “modern” tradition of skepticism as doubt, and skepticism as a form of life, with Emerson’s essay on Montaigne a key source for his idea of a “wise skepticism.”