Ralph Waldo Emerson was a central figure in the American Transcendentalism movement which dominated New England literature during the era in which he lived. At the heart of Transcendentalism, as evidenced by Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” and his buddy Thoreau’s book Walden, is the significance of the individual to the continuing progression of history. Civilization has progressed to where it is today from where it started not as the result of mass movements or systems of beliefs like religion or political ideologies, but because of individuals within those movements acting for the betterment of the whole. The universal is thus at all times inextricably linked to the collective, but is not—or, at least, should not—be dependent upon it. Non-conformism which rejects the wider sweeps of thought through history is every bit as necessary as the greatness of individuals pursuing the loftiest of ideals inspired by those mass movements.
This basic tenet of Transcendentalism is the foundation upon which Emerson’s essay on “History” is built. On the masterpiece which is their first album, the British post-punk band Gang of Four sing a song titled “Not Great Men.” The lyrics are stripped down to the essential quality of philosophy, devoid of the specifics of analysis and existing without context. The result is ambiguous and pliable, open to interpretation while also asserting a philosophical truth. History is “not made by great men.” The song belongs more to neo-Marxist ideology than Transcendentalism, but the messages seems to be the same as Emerson’s. One message that the song seems definitely to be proposing is that history is the not what coincides with the “Great Man Theory” which suggests that throughout the course of civilization it has been singularly superior individuals who have acted outside the constraints of their material conditions to change the course of events. The Transcendentalist notion of the individual is not the same as “Great Man Theory” because, as stated, the individual cannot act outside the realm of the universal surrounding him. The very first lines that open Emerson’s essays firmly establishes the playing rules: “There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.”
The suggestion here is that there is no opportunity for those Great Men to act outside the environs of that mind if it is shared by all men. To do so would place that hypothetical Great Man outside the influence and restrictions of that “one mind” and that is, quite simply, impossible.
The essential lyric that remains unsung in Gang of Four’s song is obvious. If history is “not made by great men” then that must mean that men are made great by history. Emerson addresses this reversal of the conventional wisdom directly and in doing so explains how the process works:
“We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded.”
When history as written account of history as actual fact is made known, the greatness of those who have been honored with a singularly essential place in it is the result not of what the acts they did or stopped from being done. The greatness awarded them lies in the universal acceptance of an individual awareness and respect for acts which were done or stopped from being done.
When Emerson writes about “history” in this essay, he is not addressing the facts of the past, but rather than written account of it after the fact which is passed down through generations. History is to a large part an unspoken agreement to accept the account of the facts at face value. And, of course, the willingness to accept things at face value is highly dependent—perhaps completely dependent—on how many individuals within a universal collective deem those things acceptable. Recent history suggests that even when shown undeniable evidence supporting the factual accuracy of an event is placed right in front of large numbers of like-minded people who are in agreement that this fact has been deemed unacceptable, it is easily rejected as a historical truth and nothing can change their minds. This is the Transcendentalist interpretation of history Emerson outlines in his theory manifested in concrete terms. When he writes that any “fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible” he is describing the fundamental process by which one person can stand by and watch incredulously as nine-hundred-ninety-nine people reject as truth a factual occurrence which all one-thousand just witnessed with their own eyes and ears in the same place at the same time.
