Elihu Palmer's Enlightenment: Vitalist Materialism in a Transatlantic Context

Kirsten Fischer shows how the pantheism of Elihu Palmer, an American radical and collaborator with Thomas Paine, led Palmer to critique nation-states and the allegiances they required.  Palmer, formerly a Presbyterian minister and then a champion of deism, took a new turn in 1801 when he published a book titled Principles of Nature.  The book espouses a pantheist view of the universe that marks a radical break from deism.  While deism adhered to the belief in a transcendent creator-god, Palmer had come to think there was nothing beyond the eternal and endless substance that made up everything in the universe.  All life forms come about through the endless permutation of this singular matter, briefly acquiring shape and consciousness before their reformulation into something else.  Palmer’s cosmology led him to reject national boundaries as false and patriotism as narrow-minded and misguided.  He criticized nation-states and the nationalism they fostered solely, he claimed, for the sake of conducting war.  Palmer may have been influenced by the ideas of the radical universalist, Anacharsis Cloots, who befriended Thomas Paine during their time together in a Parisian prison before Cloots was executed at the guillotine.  The paper uses Palmer’s work to show how ideas of cosmopolitanism and radical anti-nationalism travelled across the Atlantic in the decade after the French Revolution.