Emerson has been called many things, but except by theological stalwarts outraged by the Divinity School “Address,” “radical” has seldom been one of them. Disposed by taste and training to the rule of gentlemen, he was appalled by the Jacksonian rabble even as he saw it impelled by a feeling of human worth much like his own. Emerson's practical politics were instinctively conservative; the political coloring of his writings is harder to assess. It was once commonplace to observe that the literary Emerson had no politics at all and little sense of history as progressive or teleological. Nature and the Soul were timeless; only the outward costumes and idioms changed. More recently, Emerson has been historicized by embedding him within an American world “poised,” as Carolyn Porter has said, “on the verge of the most accelerated capitalist development in modern history.” Surely no contemporary registered the new economic forces more acutely than Emerson did. Yet if the Emerson of the 1940s and 'SOS was construed as loftily indifferent to the currents of the age, the Emerson of the 1980s and '90s has been portrayed as ideologically captive to them.