It is part of Emerson’s own usefulness that he offers us, in “History” and “Self-reliance,” a way to turn the burden of the past into a survival kit for the present. By regarding all times and places as equal (the historiographical equivalent of the axioms in modern physics that the universe has no one center, and that the laws of nature are equally valid everywhere) and by accepting the idea that we share a common mind, of which history is the record, we are enabled to say that all history is explicable by each mind. Thus history exists only for our education, not as a load of information we must somehow shoulder, carry, augment, and finally shunt onto the backs of our children.

Emerson similarly provides us with a way to deal with the burden of human greatness. Instead of concluding, sadly, that the achievement of each great person before us leaves just that much less for us to do, Emerson persuades us that each great person and his or her achievement is merely one more testimonial to what we may legitimately expect of ourselves. Even Christ left room for improvement, and Emerson once drew up a list of his defects: “no cheerfulness, no love of natural science, no kindness for art, nothing of Socrates, Laplace, Shakespeare.” Representative Men is a major book for the American experiment in representative democracy, because it undertakes, seventy-five years after the American Revolution, to reconcile the patent inequities of human talent and training with the underlying egalitarian premise of modern democratic idealism.

Much of Emerson’s power lies in his complete and unwavering allegiance to this intellectual and historical egalitarianism. He refuses to concede that greater eras, greater peoples, or greater individuals have ever existed than exist now. Thoreau and Whitman learned this basic article of trust from Emerson. Self-trust or self-acceptance is a liberation from the unrequested tyranny of the past, and from the injurious superiority of the great and famous. Emerson’s lasting importance is as a liberator. In poetry, in politics, in personal ethics, he teaches the possibility of self-emancipation as the necessary first step toward an autonomous, free life.

Stanley Cavell has recently observed that America has already had its great philosophers in Emerson and Thoreau, but that America seems incapable of incorporating them into the general culture. George Kateb has also argued, a little more hopefully, that the democratic idealism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman is our best defensive strategy in the postnuclear age (because it combines egalitarianism with a commitment to life as such). These large claims agree that Emersonian thought is more easily grasped than put into practice. For Emerson’s thought is not so much a system of ideas as an angle of vision, not so much a theory of knowledge as an insistence that we act and take responsibility for our lives whether we have adequate information about everything or not. The habitual center of Emerson’s personal energies—what William James calls the hot place in a given consciousness, “the group of ideas to which he devotes himself, and from which he works”—is unlimited respect for the individual, for all individuals. Thoreau, in “Civil Disobedience,” puts it this way: “There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.” Modern liberalism has been founded largely on respect for the secular individual’s political, economic, and material interests. Critics accuse modern liberalism of bleakness and soullessness. Emerson supplies a spiritual center, a soul for modern liberalism. None of the material gifts of modern life is worth much unless it is compatible with a society composed entirely of self-respecting, autonomous, free persons. “The one thing of value in the universe,” says Emerson, “is the active soul.”