Emerson was one of a small community of influential thinkers around his home of concord, massachusetts, known as :

It is known as Transcendentalism. Transcendentalism is an American scholarly, political, and philosophical development of the mid-nineteenth century revolved around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism is a philosophical development that created in the late 1830s in the eastern United States. It emerged as a response to or challenge the general condition of intellectualism and the deep sense of being at the time.