Emersonian Self-Reliance and the Enduring Crises of Democratic Selfhood

Abstract

What does it mean to think for yourself in an age designed to make that impossible? This thesis takes up that question through the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, offering his Self-Reliance as a theory of democratic self-formation that diagnoses a tension at the heart of democratic life: democracy presupposes a kind of citizen it struggles to reliably produce. I trace this tension from Emerson’s own writings through the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, and John Dewey, each of whom translated self-reliance into their respective domains. I then examine how the inward capacities Emerson thought essential came under severe pressure in the late twentieth century, as consumer capitalism and mass society produced what Christopher Lasch called a culture of narcissism and what Allan Bloom recognized as the flattening of the soul. The thesis culminates in the digital age, arguing through the work of James Williams, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Jaron Lanier that the attention economy and surveillance capitalism represent the most formidable threat to selfhood the Emersonian tradition has yet confronted. Because Emerson’s diagnosis has proven durable across space and time, I argue that his remedy deserves more than historical admiration. Self-reliance may be an enduring condition not only of democratic survival but of any life that aspires to be genuinely one’s own.