5. Capitalist Vistas: Walt Whitman and Spontaneous Order

¹James E. Miller, Jr., “Introduction,” in Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, James E. Miller, Jr., ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. xix. The texts of Whitman's poems are taken from the so-called “deathbed edition” of 1891–92.

²Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 10.

³Ibid., p. 101.

⁴Ibid., p. 24.

⁵Ibid., p. 48.

⁶Ibid., p. 96.

⁷Ibid., p. 30.

⁸Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, pp. 455–56.

⁹Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. iv.

¹⁰Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. 469.

¹¹Ibid., p. 475, emphasis added.

¹²Ibid., pp. 464–65. Whitman's recourse to evolutionary thinking should not lead us to conclude that he makes common cause with Herbert Spencer and others who advanced “social Darwinism” as a guide to public policy. According to social Darwinists, especially those who rather crassly popularized Spencer's theories, nothing should be done to prevent the weak in society from failing, as their destruction will result in a strengthened polity. This view is more conservative than Whitman's, as it fails to inquire whether individual failures might be caused by structural contradictions in the status quo. By contrast, Whitman argues that a gradual, evolutionary adjustment of the general rules by which society functions will result in a general amelioration of the whole, including those who are disadvantaged by the persistence of ideas or institutions that have not yet adjusted to the emergent triumph of the democratic principle.

¹³Ibid., p. 469.

¹⁴Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), vol. 5, p. 275.

¹⁵Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. 455.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 458.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 487.

¹⁸Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), p. 508.

¹⁹Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stephen E. Whicher, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 75.

²⁰Ibid., p. 274.

²¹Ibid., p. 350.

²²Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. 469.

²³Ibid., p. 65.

²⁴Ibid., p. 17.

²⁵Ibid., p. 65.

²⁶Emerson, Selections, p. 345.

²⁷Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, pp. 456–57.

²⁸Ibid., p. 460.

²⁹Ibid., p. 461.

³⁰Ibid., p. 496.

³¹Richard Pascal, “‘Dimes on the Eyes’: Walt Whitman and the Pursuit of Wealth in America,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 44 (1989): 168.

³²Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. 471, n.

³³Ibid., p. 455.

³⁴Ibid., pp. 470–71.

³⁵Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 15.

³⁶Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. 469.

³⁷Ibid., p. 494, n.

³⁸Quoted in Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 20.

³⁹Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, J. Sibree, trans. (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 457.

⁴⁰F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, W.W. Bartley III, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 139–40.

⁴¹Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. 58.

⁴²Ibid.

⁴³Ibid., p. 58.

⁴⁴Ibid.

⁴⁵Ibid.

⁴⁶“Walden” and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Brooks Atkinson, ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1965), p. 280.

⁴⁷Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. 110.

⁴⁸Ibid., pp. 63–64.

⁴⁹Ibid., p. 63.

⁵⁰Ibid., p. 26.

⁵¹Emerson, Selections, p. 157.

⁵²F.A. Hayek, Rules and Order, vol. 1 of Law, Legislation and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 46. Of course the lower-order rules on which the spontaneous order rests need not—and frequently are not—the result of deliberate design; those rules, too, may have been generated spontaneously, as, indeed, it seems grammatical rules themselves were.

⁵³Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. 68.

⁵⁴Ibid., p. 26.

⁵⁵Miller, “Introduction,” Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. xlviii.

⁵⁶Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, Jonathan Mayne, trans. (London: Phaidon, 1964), pp. 11, 15.

⁵⁷Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. 120.

⁵⁸Ibid.

⁵⁹Ibid., pp. 35–36.