Transcendentalism and the Politics of Failure

By Russell C. Powell
 

A mystery is announced—heralded, really—toward the end of the first episode of Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers’ new three-part documentary film Henry David Thoreau, produced by Ken Burns and Don Henley, which was released nationwide on March 30 on PBS. The speaker is the late historian David McCullough, who explains that, of all the places in the United States, Concord, Massachusetts, is as good as any for understanding the spirit that animates American history. There, “you not only have the start of the [American] Revolution at the battles of Concord and Lexington,” McCullough says, “but you have the creative residences and workplaces of people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott and Henry David Thoreau. How these clusters of brilliant people can emerge and flourish and change how we view the world is one of the mysteries of history.” 

That the Ewers brothers’ film was released just two days after the third and biggest nationwide “No Kings” protest is far less a mystery than the one McCullough names. Thoreau is as relevant as ever. “A government which deliberately enacts injustice will become the laughingstock of the world,” read one sign I saw at a rally. The line, of course, is Thoreau’s, whose own attempt at deliberate living made resistance to injustice not a matter of abstract principle but of ordinary civic practice. The Thoreauvian renaissance is evident in other ways, too. In just the last two months, The New York Times has covered the growing trend to build replicas of Thoreau’s Walden cabin, the gamification of his book Walden, and the minor scandal now dawning that most of us all this time have been mispronouncing Thoreau’s name (it’s THO-reau, like “burrow”).[1]

Henry David Thoreau renders Thoreau more clearly than before, especially his vision to marry ecological awareness with a commitment to social justice. The imperative to make Thoreau legible to our own cultural moment is pronounced in this way. Yet that imperative also makes us a subject of Henry David Thoreau, and likewise the real source of the mystery it explores (McCullough’s provocation notwithstanding). The primary question that Henry David Thoreau thus asks, along these lines, is: Will we inherit Thoreau, and what should our fidelity to his example look like? And if we were to venture to embody that example, undertaking to live the Transcendentalism Thoreau’s life has come to stand for, what would change? 

McCullough’s observation that the emergence of mid-nineteenth-century Concord’s extraordinary cluster of minds is a “mystery” isn’t meant as an explanation. It is more of an admission that histories that look to social, economic, or even biographical causes are unable to account fully for why certain moments suddenly blossom with intellectual and political possibility. A better-known example would be Florence during the Italian Renaissance, say. 

The French philosopher Alain Badiou has offered one of the most powerful theoretical accounts of how such mysteries arise. For Badiou, history is occasionally punctured by what he calls events: ruptures within an established order that introduce possibilities that aren’t derived from the historical situation that preceded them. An event isn’t simply another occurrence within history, but something whose consequences exceed the sum of its identifiable causes.[2]

Transcendentalism, importantly, is not such an event (for reasons that will become clear momentarily). Yet Badiou’s thinking nevertheless helps illumine what took place in mid-nineteenth-century Concord, and what Thoreau, in the Ewers brothers’ film, is witness to for us. 

The French Revolution, for Badiou, is the event par excellence. What makes it so, he says, is that the French Revolution’s central and undergirding claim about the universality of human equality—emblematized in the motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, which was also taken up in the Haitian Revolution—couldn’t be accounted for within the structure of the preceding ancien régime. It instead appeared from what Badiou calls the “void” of the situation, or that for which the existing order has no use or understanding. Universal equality, erupting into history in 1789, inaugurated an entirely new sequence of historical possibilities. 

This same rationale leads Badiou to deny the American Revolution’s evental status. Although that revolution occurred in the name of universal equality—encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal”—the political order that emerged from the American Revolution prevented its truth from unfolding as a genuine event. The early republic was built around exclusions that contradicted the universality of its founding, the starkest being the persistence of chattel slavery, but also the political exclusion of women, the expulsion of Indigenous peoples, and the restriction of civic participation to property-holding white men.  

The American declaration of universal equality therefore functioned less as an event than as an unrealized evental possibility—what Badiou calls an “evental trace.” This, I think, is where the Thoreau of Henry David Thoreau comes in. “He’s not someone who turns his back on society to go live in the woods,” the writer Michael Pollan says in the film’s second episode, describing Thoreau. “He was writing a critique of the world he was born into.” The film counters such erroneous roles as what Thoreau has sometimes played in the cultural imagination (to which Pollan is alluding) by reading him as one of those rare figures who remained faithful to the already-but-not-yet event of the American Revolution. Against the exclusions of American society, Thoreau insisted that the truth named at its founding still struggled to arrive.

Consider how Thoreau “took up [his] abode in the woods,” he says, on Independence Day, the Fourth of July, 1845.[3] Just as Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond wasn’t a withdrawal from society, it also wasn’t his withdrawal from the American experiment. He hoped to renew it. What exactly he aimed to renew, however, is what Thoreau needed to take time, to be deliberate, to learn. At the end of Walden, he concludes, 

I learned this, at least, by my experiment. If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.[4]

I take the conclusion Thoreau draws here to be a realization that his two years at Walden Pond were something of an attempt to embody America’s promise, to bring it to pass. Walden, the book he wrote there, was to be its text, its scripture, as Stanley Cavell so amply demonstrated.[5]

That Thoreau self-consciously grounded his universalism in his experience of land is crucial to how Transcendentalism answers those critics who allege that the transcendence it pursues is removed from practical life. Edward Allen Poe’s calling Transcendentalism “Frogpondianism” springs to mind.[6] Thoreau shows us that, if universal equality is the founding truth of America, it must necessarily be true for all forms of life the land contains. At Walden Pond, that applied as much to Concord’s white, middle-class residents who took their walks there and fished its waters as it did the Black and Indigenous communities who were dispossessed of that same land for generations (which Thoreau came to know well, and Henry David Thoreau effectively depicts).

Interpreting Thoreau as a Badiouian witness to the unrealized event of the American Revolution also heads off another common critique leveled against Transcendentalism: that its universality isn’t truly universal. Margaret Fuller most forcefully raised this objection from within the movement itself, challenging the assumption that women didn’t also possess that which was “within man,” as Emerson wrote, namely, “the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.”[7] More recently, the concern has been that Transcendentalism is in fact structured on exclusions (not just of women, but of non-white, non-educated, non-middle-class people) that make its universalist project deeply suspect.

There is no disputing that the universality Transcendentalism proclaimed and pursued was limited, often in ways its principal figures did not, and perhaps could not, fully recognize. But the deeper philosophical virtue of the movement lies in its insistence that any attempt to realize universality must necessarily remain incomplete. Perfect freedom, equality, justice—these have never appeared in history as achievements finally secured in law or custom. Rather, they function as measures by which every existing social order is revealed to fall short of its professed ideals. 

In this sense, universality isn’t something that ever fully arrives. As Jacques Derrida repeatedly showed, we come to understand what is universal through its marked absence, never its presence.[8] Just as we can envision a justice more perfect than its worldly instantiations, universality is made visible in all the places where the institutions and practices meant to embody it fail. 

Emerson gave voice to this idea in his essay “Circles” when he wrote, “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.”[9] Each advance toward universality becomes, in time, the very limit that must itself be transcended—not because the ideal has been abandoned, but because the meaning of something like universal equality ever exceeds the form of its practical expression. 

Read in this light, the political lesson of the Ewers brothers’ film is to see Thoreau’s life as arrayed toward a greater effort to, as Thoreau says, “throw off sleep,” “to reawaken and keep ourselves awake.” The effect is positive even as it demands an awareness of our perennially falling short of our ideals. Our failures to achieve universal emancipation, that is to say, aren’t mere disappointments, but “an infinite expectation of the dawn.”[10]

Where McCullough’s claim about the mysterious historical convergence of epochal talent comes into alignment with Badiou is in Badiou’s idea of the ultimate inexplicability of the event’s true source. The event and the situation it erupts within are radically separate, he thinks, such that the latter could never engender the former; moreover, the former is rendered indiscernible to the previous status quo after the latter has occurred. The result for Badiou is a theory of history that treats revolutionary change if not as a mystery, then as a surd. 

This view might tempt us toward feeling helpless in light of the challenges of our own historical moment. Perhaps we can write our congressperson; perhaps we can make a sign, join a rally. But beyond that, the assumption of powerlessness that “mystery” theories of history effect leave us looking for help beyond the world that seems so resistant to our want for change. The conclusion of Martin Heidegger, who had an abiding influence on Badiou, isn’t far off: “Only a god can save us,” Heidegger famously said.[11]

Yet the Transcendentalism Henry David Thoreau represents has another story in mind. One way of putting the point is: the Ewers brothers haven’t made Waiting for Thoreau. The characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot await God’s arrival to fill the vacuum of meaning modernity has hollowed out. The Ewers’ Thoreau, by contrast, refuses both waiting and the empty political gestures our current culture of protest might cynically induce as yet another display of quiet desperation. 

Thoreau brought the still-faint traces of equality declared in 1776 to bear upon a social world resistant to the emancipatory potential America always contains but shrinks from endeavoring. If Emerson believed the fundamental condition of life was joy, Thoreau diverges, if only slightly—life, he reminds us throughout the pages of Walden, ever entices us to hope. “The life in us,” he says in that book’s final pages, “is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats.”[12] In part because of the hopeful witness of abolitionists like Thoreau, the revolutionary ideals of America’s founding were able to take some root in and after the Civil War, when emancipation was finally proclaimed—that is, performed; enacted—not just declared, stated on principle. 

In our own day, universal emancipation’s being far from fully realized isn’t sufficient reason to give up on the hope of its emergence, nor doubt its possibility. Our timorousness and skepticism account for so many muskrats on the banks of the river of life. In this, we have the witness of Gandhi, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—all of whom took strength from Thoreau’s example, which Henry David Thoreau also foregrounds—as guiding lights. They show us that inheriting Thoreau requires that we risk inhabiting the revolutionary character of his hope. 

Whatever that hope may look like today, the Ewers brothers’ film entreats us to see that the work to win the universal ideals Thoreau stood for begins in exactly the place we stand. No help need come from beyond or outside our world when, as Thoreau knew so well, the abode of the gods is the present that the unfulfilled hopes of history give us the courage to seek. We need not wait, then, for God or gods—at least not first before realizing, with Thoreau, that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. 

Russell C. Powell is Research Associate at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Prior to joining the CSWR, where he helps to lead research on American Transcendentalism, he was a Core Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Theology and Ethics at Boston College. Russell's research has appeared most recently in the journals Soundings, Ethics & the Environment, and Environmental Ethics. He is an assistant editor of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture and sits on the advisory board of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University. 

[1] See Dorie Chevlen, “They Went to the Woods Because They Wished to Live Deliberately,” The New York Times, February 3, 2026; Molly Worthen, “You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education,” The New York Times, April 19, 2026; and Sarah Lyall, “Rethinking Thoreau: We’ve Been Mispronouncing His Name for Centuries,” The New York Times, March 28, 2026. 

[2] See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006 [1988]), parts four and five. 

[3] Henry David Thoreau, Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004 [1854]), 81. 

[4] Ibid., 314-15. My emphasis. 

[5] Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden, expanded ed. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 

[6] Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. Gary Richard Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1098. 

[7] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 386. My emphasis. 

[8] See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 [1967]). 

[9] Emerson, Essays & Lectures, 403. 

[10] Thoreau, Walden, 87-8. 

[11] Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us,” interview by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, Der Spiegel, May 31, 1976. 

[12] Thoreau, Walden, 324. My emphasis.