Emerson’s Superhero

After offering some preliminary remarks on the notion of what makes a “captive mind,” the article shifts its attention to one of the most significant and yet relatively neglected early essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essay “War.” This text, I argue, deserves not only to be considered the (largely forgotten) founding document of the American anti-war movement, but it remains important even today, as it sheds light on the inevitable contradictions and double-binds any serious movement against war and for social justice must face. It is a text, in other words, which helps us highlight some of the problems we run into—both conceptually and practically—when we try to free our minds from a given mindset, but we must still rely on a world that is pretty much the outcome of the ideologies, customs, and traditions we wish to transcend. To imagine a world free of violence and war is the age-old problem of how to change the world and make it “new” when the practical and intellectual instruments we have are all steeped in the old world we want to abolish. Emerson’s thinking provides a basis to unpack the aporias of what, historically speaking, the antiwar movement has been, both inside and outside the US. The article concludes by examining some recent collections of US pacifist and anti-war writings, as providing useful examples of the challenges antiwar, and more generally protest movements, must face.