Abstract

This chapter is a study of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s individualism, both in itself and as he addressed it to the realities of the market revolution. Throughout his long career as an essayist and lecturer, he developed a doctrine of what he called self-reliance, meant to marry inner self-knowledge and self-trust with pursuits of self-culture. Emerson was also keenly interested in the development of a market economy in America, though his thought on this subject appears to have undergone notable changes over time. Reading across the decades of his work, this chapter argues that Emerson struggled to make a home for self-reliance in American society, first condemning the market revolution as an impediment to self-culture but later finding ways in which his individualism could find imperfect but needful expression in a market society.