Self-Reliance Self-Reliance "Self-Reliance" is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow their own instincts and ideas. It is the source of one of Emerson's most famous quotations: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." This essay is an analysis into the nature of the “aboriginal self on which a universal reliance may be grounded.” The first hint of the philosophy
Individualism Old and New his own garden without a fence, because the garden is the world and how he participates in its being. Individualism Old and New Individualism Old and New is a politically and socially progressive book by John Dewey, an American philosopher, written in 1930. Written at the beginning of the Great Depression, the book argues that the emergence of a new kind of American individualism necessitates political and cultural reform to achieve the true liberation of the individual in a world where the individual has become submerged. Most of the chapters originally appeared as a series of essays in The New