Man the Reformer (1841)

AUTHOR: Emerson, Ralph Waldo

PUBLICATION: Nature, Adresses and Lectures. 1849. Centenary Edition: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. I. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903-1904. 225-256.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/emerson/4957107.0001.001/1:14?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

First published in 1849, “Man the Reformer” was a lecture given at the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association,  Boston, 25 January 1841. The essay argues for the necessity of ethical social reform, within the context of social pressures that corrupt and perpetuate hypocrisy.

KEYWORDS: food, animals,  land usage, environmentalism, slavery, labor rights, reform

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin & Bryn Skibo, revised Deborah Madsen):

Emerson finds that, even among poets and thinkers, society presents obstacles to the honorable life and therefore creates hypocrites: “It is only necessary to ask a few questions as to the progress of the articles commerce from the fields where they grew, to our houses, to become aware that we eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred commodities. How many articles of daily consumption are furnished us from the West Indies; yet it is said that, in the Spanish islands, the venality of the officers of the government has passed into usage… The abolitionist has shown up our dreadful debt to the Southern negro. In the Island of Cuba, in addition to the ordinary abominations of slavery, it appears, only men are brought for the plantations, and one dies in ten every year, of these miserable bachelors, to yield us sugar” (231). He goes on to describe the disavowal that sustains this hypocrisy: “The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no individual. One plucks, one distributes, one eats. Every body partakes, every body confesses,—with cap and knee volunteers his confession, yet none feels himself accountable. He did not create the abuse; he cannot alter it. What is he? an obscure private person who must get his bread. That is the vice,—that no one feels himself called to act for man, but only as a fraction of man” (233). It is in this context that Emerson turns to the model of the farmer to propose a new or reformed relation with productivity by "put[ing] ourselves into primary relations with the soil and nature, and abstaining from whatever is dishonest and unclean, to take each of us bravely his part, with his own hands, in the manual labor of the world” (234-235).

Reform, for Emerson, is not only necessary but inevitable, despite the difficulties because, as he asks, "What is a man born for but to be a Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good" (248). “I do not wish to be absurd and pedantic in reform. I do not wish to push my criticism on the state of things around me to that extravagant mark that shall compel me to suicide, or to an absolute isolation from the advantages of civil society. If we suddenly plant our foot and say,—I will neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch any food or fabric which I do not know to be innocent, or deal with any person whose whole manner of life is not clear and rational, we shall stand still. Whose is so? Not mine; not thine; not his. But I think we must clear ourselves each one by the interrogation, whether we have earned our bread to-day by the hearty contribution of our energies to the common benefit; and we must not cease to tend to the correction of flagrant wrongs, by laying one stone aright every day. ” (247-248).

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