Emerson and Thoreau

After reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance and Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience I can see several similarities and differences between their ideologies. Both Emerson and Thoreau are passionate about individuality and breaking free from society but on the other hand they disagree when it comes to which changes should take place. Emerson takes a much more relaxed approach to change and Thoreau is very detailed with what he feels his fellow man needs to do to help alter society.

Emerson who stresses individualism in Self-Reliance writes "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide." He claims "To be great is to be misunderstood." Emerson wants his readers to start leading rather than following the majority. Like Thoreau he feels that people invest too much time and money on worldly goods. He writes "Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is."

Thoreau shares Emerson's ideas of individuality but goes a step further and details how to make reforms in government by using individualism. Thoreau writes "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence." He states "Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right." He asks his fellow man to stand up and do what is honorable. Like Emerson he wants individuals to be leaders and not followers.

I believe that Emerson would have approved of Thoreau's idea of social change. Although Emerson spoke more about self-fulfillment he too believed people needed to make a difference and stand out from the rest of society. Do I believe Emerson would have gone to jail for social change? No. Nor would he have camped out during the Occupy Movement or rioted in Seattle during the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999 had he been alive. I think this was something Thoreau would have lived for where Emerson would have been part of the Patriot and Tea Party movements or involved in peaceful protests and petitions.