During the tour of America that he chronicled in “The American Scene,” Henry James made a stop in Concord, Mass. By 1904, when James visited, the town’s glory days were half a century in the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne were almost as distant as the minutemen who fired the shot heard round the world. James, who had spent decades living in the capitals of Europe, wrote about Concord with a certain embarrassment, as though describing a country cousin. The river reminded him of “some large obese benevolent person,” the town itself of “some grave, refined New England matron of the ‘old school,’ the widow of a high celebrity, living on and in possession of all his relics and properties.” He imagined Concord pleading with him not to demand too much, not to expect America’s intellectual shrine to rival Paris or London: “Compare me with places of my size, you know.”

In James’s embarrassed affection for Concord, we recognize our own mixed feelings about the men and women who made it famous: the loose conspiracy of philosophers, preachers, idealists, and cranks known as the Transcendentalists. In “American Transcendentalism” (Hill and Wang, 365 pages, $27.50), his welcome and informative new history, Philip F. Gura offers sympathetic portraits of even the most eccentric members of the group. Here are Thoreau the naturalist, seceding from a corrupt society to seek out “the facts of life — the vital facts” among plants and animals; Margaret Fuller the feminist, denouncing a world where “not one man in the million, shall I say, no, not in the hundred million, can rise above the view that woman was made for man”; Theodore Parker the abolitionist, who kept preaching against slavery even though death threats forced him to write “my sermons with a pistol on my desk”; Ripley, the founder of Brook Farm, whose “belief in a divine order of human society” never wavered, even as his commune went bankrupt and burned down, and Bronson Alcott, the educational reformer who believed that every child was a peer of Jesus, “a Type of the Divinity.”

It seems unlikely that such a collection of free spirits, all of them in revolt against the culture and institutions of antebellum America, could ever have coalesced into a single movement. Indeed, it took them several years to embrace the name “transcendentalist,” which was first used by their detractors as a way of mocking their debt to abstruse German philosophy. The informal club that began meeting in 1836 at Ripley’s house, where most of the movement’s leading lights could be found, preferred to call themselves “the club of the like-minded” — because, the joke went, no two of them thought alike. Even when Emerson publicly embraced the name, in his 1841 essay “The Transcendentalist,” it was with the caveat that “there is no such thing as a Transcendental party.” Transcendentalism, as Emerson defined it, was rather an intuition, an emotion, a climate of feeling, “the Saturnalia or excess of Faith.”

As Emerson’s phrase suggests, the original inspiration behind Transcendentalism was religious. The first chapters of Mr. Gura’s book are devoted to a dry but rewarding analysis of the theological ideas that caused a ferment in Boston Unitarian circles in the early 1830s. Most of the leading Transcendentalists, he points out, started out their careers as ministers in liberal churches. Some remained ministers all their lives, like Parker, who used his pulpit at Boston’s Twenty-eighth Congregational Society to thunder against slavery and greed. But the emblematic path was that of Emerson, who found himself finally unable to accept even the lenient dogmas of the Unitarian Church. In his scandalous 1838 speech to the graduating class of Harvard’s Divinity School, Emerson bade a final farewell to Christianity, declaring that Jesus was not God but simply an exemplary human being, who “saw with open eye the mystery of the soul.”

Mr. Gura helps us to see that Emerson’s apostasy was only the last step in New England’s long journey away from Christianity. For decades, American readers of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Coleridge had been steadily losing faith in the mild Unitarianism that had supplanted their ancestors’ stern Puritanism. Transcendentalism represented the final cutting of the cord with a Christian tradition that went back 1,900 years. This helps to explain why its assertions of human goodness and possibility sometimes sound nearly hysterical — as when Orestes Brownson, a Unitarian turned Transcendentalist turned Catholic, writes that men “have in themselves the elements of the Divinity and powers which when put forth will raise them above what the tallest archangel now is.” With their hectic insistence that Man Is Nature Is God, the Transcendentalists often sound like men who, having leapt off a cliff, are flapping their arms wildly to keep from falling. In charting the intellectual progress of Transcendentalism, Emerson’s writings are indispensable, and he is inevitably a major presence in “American Transcendentalism.” But Mr. Gura deliberately refuses to give him pride of place, and even regards him with a certain suspicion. Because Emerson was the one undoubted genius to emerge from Transcendentalist Concord, we still tend to view the whole movement through the lens of his essays. To Henry James, “not a russet leaf fell for me” while in Concord “but fell with an Emersonian drop.”

But the central argument of Mr. Gura’s book is that Emerson’s sovereign egotism represented only one side of Transcendentalism, and not the most admirable one. To Mr. Gura, Emerson’s unremitting focus on the individual — his insistence that “nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind” — shades all too easily into mere selfishness. When Emerson wrote, “I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong,” he meant to sound as radical as the Jesus who declared, “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me with you.” But sentiments like these also explain why Emerson was so easily accepted as the official sage of the Gilded Age when, as Mr. Gura writes, “the self-reliant entrepreneur was the man of the hour.”

Mr. Gura, however, insists on the tension in Transcendentalism between “those who remained primarily interested in theological and social reform, and others who gravitated toward belles lettres.” By using the slighting term “belles lettres” for the work of Emerson and Thoreau, Mr. Gura makes clear which side of the divide he is on. In place of the literary Transcendentalism of Concord, he elevates the political Transcendentalism of Boston, where radical reformers like Parker and Brownson came to grips with poverty and slavery. Their supreme moment arrived in the 1850s, when they helped to light the blaze of Abolitionism in New England. Even the “belletrists” joined in the cause: Thoreau’s eulogy for John Brown praised him as “a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles.”

Yet Brown’s holy terrorism was hardly typical of Transcendentalism in action. In fact, the high intentions of the reformers Mr. Gura praises were consistently undermined by their own elitism and impracticality. When Bronson Alcott opened his progressive Temple School in 1834, promising not just to teach reading and writing but to cultivate “the imagination and the heart,” some of Boston’s leading citizens signed their children up. But Alcott had to close the school three years later, when word got around that his Bible lessons included frank discussions of the physiology of the Virgin Birth. Andrews Norton, a leading Unitarian critic of the Transcendentalists, called Alcott’s curriculum “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene.”

Still more notorious was Brook Farm, the experiment in communal living launched in 1841 on a tract of land west of Boston. Derided by Emerson as “the Astor House hired for the Transcendentalists” — the highbrow version of a luxury hotel — Brook Farm did not manage to regenerate society, or even to pay its own way. Yet Mr. Gura devotes a mostly laudatory chapter to the commune, under the title “Heaven on Earth.”

His admiration for Brook Farm, in fact, is a perfect example of his readiness to credit the Transcendentalists’ good intentions while forgiving their bad results. Mr. Gura chides Emerson for refusing Ripley’s invitation to participate in the venture, implying that he was simply indifferent to the social evils Ripley hoped to remedy: “Evidently, Emerson neither knew much about the social problems in the neighborhood around Ripley’s Boston church nor had talked with those to whom Brownson regularly ministered.”

The truth, however, is that the self-admiring dilettantism of Brook Farm did absolutely nothing to help the Boston poor. Emerson’s refusal to join the commune was based on his recognition that this would be the case. Mr. Gura might have quoted further from Emerson’s letter declining Ripley’s invitation (it appears, like all the central documents of the period, in the excellent Modern Library anthology “The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings,” edited by Lawrence Buell). After explaining why he doesn’t feel personally suited to the Brook Farm lifestyle, Emerson goes on to inform Ripley that he has consulted a “Mr. Edmund Hosmer, a very intelligent farmer and a very upright man in my neighborhood,” who informed him that the plan to run the farm on a cooperative basis was doomed to failure.

“Mr. Hosmer disbelieves that good work will continue to be done for the community if the worker is not directly benefited,” Emerson writes. “His boys receive a cent a basket for the potatoes they bring in, and that makes them work, though they know very well that the whole produce of the farm is for them.” This realistic assessment of human motives, based on actual experience of men and money, is precisely what the Transcendentalist reformers lacked, and what doomed their dreams to remain just dreams. Hawthorne, a fellow traveler of the movement and sometime resident of Concord, gave a convincing verdict on Transcendentalism in “The Blithedale Romance,” his satirical novel about Brook Farm. “I rejoice that I could once think better of the world’s improvability than it deserved,” he wrote. “It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime.”

akirsch@nysun.com