Daniel Malachuk's overarching project in his compelling and richly detailed Two Cities is to reassess the political significance of Transcendentalism by focussing on the forms of political critique its main protagonists recognized, and not on that which has been retrospectively applied by modern critics. As Malachuk demonstrates, the investment of Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau in political discourse does not necessarily equate to support for, or even much interest in, what was in the 1840s a still immature democratic government eagerly engaged in the effort to deify its recently passed Founders. This circumscribes Malachuk's “two-cities” model, which describes on the one hand the Transcendentalists’ efforts to “desacralize the democratic state,” and on the other the “relocation of … perfectionist energies to an entirely different place … where individuals flourished in concert with one another” (7). As Malachuk demonstrates in impressive detail, none of the three canonical Transcendentalists he studies simply treated this division as the opportunity for detachment and retreat, meaning that the traditional “self-versus-society” dichotomy is reductive. Instead, all three sought the means to gradually bring the two cities into coincidence, but only after first undertaking to “strive … to pry these cities apart” (28) from their assumed coherence in the 1830s–1840s.

Malachuk's politicized approach allows for persuasive revision of settled models of precedence. Fuller is the first case study, a decision based on chronology but one which also implies that philosophical precedent (normally accorded to Emerson) is less important than what Fuller does with this philosophy in political contexts. Malachuk recognizes Fuller's “Great Lawsuit” as the first attempt by a Transcendentalist to marry the “Higher Laws” of the city of God with the juridical structures of the city of man. Thereafter, a detailed study of the “higher-law debates” of the 1850s (when the term was repeatedly invoked in political discourse and the popular press to legitimize opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act) lends weight to Malachuk's overall argument that the metaphysical preoccupations of Transcendentalism actually had considerable impact on the politics of the era. Malachuk's chapter on Emerson echoes the recent trend to focus on his later writings, arguing that The Conduct of Life (1860) rejects Emerson's early lack of commitment to social issues and instead seeks to manipulate an imperfect democracy toward a pragmatic benefit: a “focus on person, not property … what [Malachuk calls] … ‘satisfactory justice’” (155), something that is convincingly demonstrated through the differences in structure of essays like “Fate” in Conduct compared to Emerson's earlier work. The final case study focusses on Thoreau's metaphors of topography in his discussions of conscience, arguing that such tropes are utilized to illustrate the distance between the cities of God and man. Malachuk finds the depth and range of these metaphors in Thoreau to be the most developed iteration of a two-cities model amongst the Transcendentalists and uses this reasoning to forward a compelling reading of one of Thoreau's most famous lines, from the essay “Walking”: “To brandish the most famous sentence from that essay – ‘in wildness is the preservation of the world’ – as a biocentric slogan is a misappropriation, for Thoreau is in fact advocating … that we use nature to preserve ‘the world,’ that is, the city of man” (200).

A common risk when writing on Transcendentalism is to overstate the significance of one metaphor above others, to take a metaphor coincidentally used by multiple figures and assert it to be a structuring metaphor for their common project. Malachuk's emphasis on tropes of topography in all three of his case studies fits this description, but to my mind the argument and evidence are strong enough to recommend Malachuk's reading that Fuller, Emerson, and Thoreau all conceptualized political resistance in territorial terms. I have minor reservations; the book occasionally gets locked into the terms of its own argument and loses sight of the broader scope of the ideas with which it intersects. The specific contributions the Transcendentalists made to liberalism are not unpacked, and – while its revision of Thoreau is useful for anyone interested in identifying exactly what his environmentalist readers have got wrong – the impact of the two-cities model on an environmental movement that is of necessity concerned with the territorial overstep of the city of man into the remit of natural processes is not extensively developed. But this remains a rich, sympathetic, and convincing revision of Transcendentalist political thought which constructively reveals what the conventional political preoccupations of American studies (race, gender, and class) have persuaded us to overlook.