Emerson and Self-Reliance: Individualism Amidst the Market PDF Free Download
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Ralph Waldo Emerson lived from 1803 to 1882, witnessing the major-
ity of the nineteenth century and coming of intellectual age during the
transformative antebellum period. Educated at Harvard to serve in the
Unitarian clergy, but quickly chafed by even its more liberal institutions,
he found his ultimate vocation as a public intellectual striving to depict
the potency and dignity of the individual, and to diagnose the perils, he
faced in American society.1 What is more, Emerson’s essays and lectures
record a lifelong engagement with the complex, emergent imbrications
of individualism and the rising market. The market presents a problem
for Emerson’s later interpreters, as it did for Emerson himself. While
his engagement with the market as an intellectual, practical, and moral
phenomenon is often explicit and robust, his reections are fraught with
tensions and apparent contradictions, both among his various characteri-
zations of the market itself, and between these characterizations and his
other abiding concerns, including the doctrine of self-reliance for which
he is most widely remembered. Market principles and practices—trade,
wealth, competition, compensation, property, labor, and vocation—
resound throughout all periods of Emerson’s public and private writings.2
Yet his most strident criticism of the market in his works of the 1830s and
1840s gradually softens into an apparent accommodation of his individu-
alism to the realities and aspirations of a maturing market system. By the
1860s and 1870s, Emerson regularly “invok[es] images of enterprise in
order to locate a distinctive moral heroism in the everyday life of market
culture” (Augst 1999, 93). Scholars have found various ways of dealing
CHAPTER 3
Emerson and Self-Reliance: Individualism
Amidst the Market
© The Author(s) 2018
L.P. Plotica, Nineteenth-Century Individualism and the Market
Economy, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62172-2_3
72 L.P. PLOTICA
with these tensions, though the most common approach has been to
resolve the tension into a developmental narrative whereby Emerson
eventually made peace with the market.
The argument I wish to advance in this chapter is that the tensions
in Emerson’s stance toward the market cannot be eliminated, and fur-
thermore, his doctrine of self-reliance must be implausibly softened and
domesticated in order to mitigate or resolve those tensions. My guiding
premise is that Emerson was genuinely torn between opposed aspects of
life in market society, and his vacillation between praise and criticism of
the market (both within and across his lectures and essays) manifests his
continuous struggle to reconcile individualism with the realities of mod-
ern economic life. I shall argue that self-reliance is a doctrine of indi-
vidual self-culture and self-assertion for which the market simultaneously
furnishes opportunities to exploit and stands as an adversary with which
to contend. The resources, practices, and institutions of a market econ-
omy are materials upon which the individual can exert his creative poten-
tial and, in the process, elevate and enrich both himself and others. Yet
Emerson realized that the market is neither an inert nor a morally indif-
ferent institution. In it, the individual is beset by complex and dynamic
forces that would both tempt and compel him to serve shallow and
even wicked ends. Rather than arriving at a series of clear-cut maxims,
Emerson leaves us with a form of what Stanley Cavell has described as
“perfectionism,” a principled conviction that “the human self—conned
by itself, aspiring toward itself—is always becoming, as on a journey […]
described as education or cultivation” (2004, 26; see also Cavell 1990,
1–32). Much as Emerson’s life was framed by the rise of a market society,
his individualism developed in ongoing conversation with the conditions
of that society, its aspirations and antagonisms, its demands and rewards.
In what follows I attempt to trace the lineaments of the difcult—neither
impossible nor guaranteed—coexistence of Emerson’s self-reliant indi-
vidual and the market.
In substantiating this argument I engage critically, though often only
obliquely, with a rich and complex secondary literature that addresses
the relationship between the individual and the market in Emerson’s
works in many voices and from many perspectives. While nearly all of
Emerson’s commentators have taken note of his reservations and criti-
cisms for the tenor and quality of life in market society, especially in his
Panic-era writings of the late 1830s and early 1840s, many hasten to
explain them away or mitigate their signicance. One body of scholarship
