...judgments of the world's affairs. "These are the voices which we hear in solitude," Emerson writes, "but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world." We strive to understand our own nature, to hear the voice of conscience, and to follow their lead in...

...claims, reaches his highest potential alone with nature and remains almost a slave as part of society: "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood...a joint-stock company, in which the members agree" to surrender liberty.39 Walt Whitman is as famous a lone wanderer as Leatherstocking, although he did...

...the nonconformist, self-trusting individual, who takes his way from communal man, not to man, since "society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members" (E&L 261). In fact, Emerson's next statement in the 1 880 lecture will recall for us that movement...

...conspiracy in question. As Emerson was to remark (albeit in more conventionally gendered language), "society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members" (29). Proceeding from that very premise two generations earlier, Wollstonecraft insists that one must...

...institutions was nearly pathological — the extension of an American tendency that is as old as the republic: "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members," and "no law can be sacred to me but that of my nature." Therefore, "whoso would be a man must be a...

...of the most eloquent and influential champions of individualism, self-reliance, and nonconformity. "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members," Emerson famously declares in "Self-Reliance." "The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance...

...inner and outer truth and thus makes men more like women: "Society everywhere," he famously admonishes, "is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. "But it is the following sentence that situates this gendered conspiratorialist idealism in a distinctly...

...judgments of the world's affairs. "These are the voices which we hear in solitude," Emerson writes, "but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world." We strive to understand our own nature, to hear the voice of conscience, and to follow their lead in...

...expresses similar ideas about conformity in American society. He writes in his essay, "Self Reliance,"5 Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood...members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and...

...antagonism between man and culture remains," 12 or, as Emerson puts it in his essay "Self-Reliance" (1841): "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." 13 In this case, "manhood" and "members" may constitute an intentional sexual pun. Emerson came to...