Complete Works

This collection brings together seven lectures that Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered under the heading Representative Men. Each lecture sketches a figure whose work shaped history, among them Plato, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Napoleon and Goethe. Emerson does not present these men as isolated wonders. He argues instead that a great mind works like a lens, helping others see the world and themselves more clearly, and that the ideas it produces go on to organize science, art and politics.

The lectures return often to the connection between thought and conduct, and to the view that truth and beauty belong together. Emerson also warns against worshipping individuals in place of the universal principles they serve. Across the lectures he considers how genius outlasts its era and draws together Eastern and Western traditions, and how a society moves forward by following exemplary minds while keeping personal freedom intact.

The volume reflects Emerson's faith in biography and portraiture as tools for philosophical thought. This HardPress reprint presents the lectures as part of his Complete Works.