Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than material force, that thoughts rule the world. -Emerson

In his essay The American Scholar, Emerson discusses the idea of the thinking man. The scholar as he sees him is being usurped by the values placed on manual labor and use of machinery during the industrial revolution. Also, the division of labor moving from trained professionals who worked broadly within a field to individuals who have very specialized and easily replaceable services troubles Emerson. He sees the world as a place which no longer values philosophy, poetry, or the intellect but, instead cares only of the mundane, and in his eyes the decadent, concepts of increasing profits and maximizing efficiency. “In [the] distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking” (Emerson 56). Here Emerson comments on how the thinking man in our society is viewed as unimportant as the humanities are undermined and capital is valued over deep thought; in fact, he says these thinkers often fall victim to the schemes of those who control the capital.

He also speaks on the corrupting power of money and how it has become the focus of too many occupations, driving the person to do their work instead of the accomplishment of satisfying their patron or some other external reward. “The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship” (Emerson 57). Through their jobs the men become trapped in their one-mindedness and fail to reach the full potential of a man who is multi-faceted and capable of multiple roles. “Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his” (Emerson 56). It is apparent from Emerson’s writing that holds distain for our capitalistic society which essentially allows for many people to continually perform rudimentary tasks which take little skill so that there is no need to pay the workers any substantial amount of money and so that they are easily and cheaply replaced. This labor only truly benefits those who are at the top of the pyramid while those at the bottom are suspended in a perpetual state of poverty. This kind of society, although it is often said to value the individual, does exactly the opposite; exploiting the individual and instead using the concept to divide and discourage the masses from any collective thinking which may intimidate the government. And while Emerson also values the individual he values it in a very different way, believing that a man should be independently conscious yet belong to a collective, whether that be an intellectual commune, nature, or society at large. He believes that men should serve each other, empathetically, looking to improve the common good instead of only achieving individual success. “…That the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end” (Emerson, 56). Here Emerson credits God with giving us the now squandered ability to work together with rest of mankind, something which is downplayed today in a society which wants an isolated and delusional public incapable of peaceful, altruistic cooperation.