Emerson and Other Essays

“Away with this hurrah of masses,” Emerson declares, demanding instead the judgment of single men. But can the fight for individual liberty avoid becoming a new tyranny?

In this essay, John Jay Chapman looks back to the America that formed Emerson: a North burdened by the Missouri Compromise, religious and political conservatism, and the pressure of public opinion. Chapman sees Emerson as a champion of the individual soul, but no maker of doctrines; his metaphors, he argues, resist being turned into rules that bind others. Around him, free speech falters and conscience lends its authority to compromise, while the struggle for liberty threatens to harden into another orthodoxy. What kind of freedom can survive its own victories?

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