| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane. By Patrick W. Carey. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004. xx, 428 pp. Paper, $28.00, ISBN 0-8028-4300-X.)

Before the maturation of research universities in the late nineteenth century, American intellectual life was not yet dominated by legions of credentialed academic authorities devoted to ultraspecialized fields of research. Instead, in literary and social criticism, theology, philosophy, and history, academic research and intellectual exchange were advanced by a fascinating mix of thinkers and writers, a mix that of course included not only university graduates (mostly without advanced degrees) from various disciplines but also a remarkable assortment of autodidacts and self-made iconoclasts. Indeed, not only were such estimable antebellum novelists as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Herman Melville operating far from university culture, but so too were many other intellectuals. Perhaps foremost among these public intellectuals were those from the famed Concord, Massachusetts, Transcendentalist circle associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson, such as A. Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. In all of New England, though, the most remarkable instance of the self-fashioned antebellum public intellectual was Orestes A. Brownson, the leading American Catholic thinker of the nineteenth century.

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