Representative Men

Representative Men (1850) is Emerson's American answer to Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Six exemplary figures — Plato (the philosopher), Swedenborg (the mystic), Montaigne (the skeptic), Shakespeare (the poet), Napoleon (the man of the world), and Goethe (the writer) — together with an opening essay on the Uses of Great Men, are treated as living examples of what greatness in each kind looks like.

Emerson's interest is not in hero-worship. He insists, against Carlyle, that great men are useful precisely because they are representative — because they reveal possibilities in ordinary humanity rather than constituting some separate order of being. Each essay treats both the achievement and the limitations of its subject.