Emerson's Proleptic Eloquence‪.‬

This reading of Emerson's essay "Eloquence" from Society and Solitude challenges the perceptions of Emerson as "the genius of American democracy" and as the sentimental, genteel, mystical Concord Sage. Read alongside Edward T. Channing's "The Orator and His Times," Emerson's ideas concerning the potential political effects of eloquence to renew ancient modes and orders, divide the many from the few, establish and maintain communities through persuasion and dissimulation, and incite fanaticism seem to anticipate Nietzsche's rhetoric of nihilism and its vulgarization in the Nazi regime. Reading Emerson according to Leo Strauss' theories of "esoteric" writing and Strauss' statements on pedagogy and persuasion in "German Nihilism," this essay attempts to clarify aspects of Emerson's political philosophy that have long been ignored, dismissed, or unread. **********