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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Is The Use Of Calling Emerson A Pragmatist: A Brief And Belated Response To Stanley Cavell, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

This essay investigates the relationship between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in the context of the common law. Holmes’s Emersonian writings, in particular his dissents, fall within the theoretical framework of agonism, which Harold Bloom refers to as a revisionary and Emersonian “program.” Agonism as a political and aesthetic theory maintains that sites of contestation can be productive rather than destructive; it suggests that confrontational relationships can be at once mutually offsetting and generative. Drawing from the Greek word for an athletic competition, agonism applied to rhetoric underscores the importance of mutuality to conflict: writers struggling against …