Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Baudelaire

Will society ever come together under one belief? Understanding the past changes of certain parts within society will bring you one step closer to opening your own eyes of what you believe in. Throughout the major literary philosophies in the United States, one can see how social requirements to attend church diminished throughout history. Philosophers have done their best to spread their beliefs to see their own change in the world.

An influential literary movement in the nineteenth century, transcendentalism placed an emphasis on the wonder of nature and its deep connection to the divine. As the two most prominent figures in the transcendentalist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau whole-heartedly embraced these principles. In their essays “Self-Reliance” and “Civil Disobedience”, Emerson and Thoreau, respectively, argue for individuality and personal expression in different manners. In “Self-Reliance”, Emerson calls for individuals to speak their minds and resist societal conformity, while in “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau urged Americans to publicly state their opinions in order to improve their own government.

Transcendentalists believe that using their principles, humanity can inch closer and closer to utopia, the perfect society. Transcendentalism, the flawed doctrine, instead leads its adherents on the road to nowhere, and many of the principles fail spectacularly when applied in real life. Transcendentalism is too idealistic to be realistic. Simply put, transcendentalism is wrong. Their ideals are not just incorrect, they are potentially dangerous.

The story “lord of the flies’’ by William Golding, the novel correlates to the philosophical views of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. John Locke was an English philosopher that surmised man's natural moral compass would point towards good, Locke's philosophical writings stated “ that individuals in a state of nature would have stronger moral limits on their actions. Essentially, Locke thought that our human nature was characterized by reason and tolerance. People, Locke believed, were basically good’’ ( Locke and Hobbes Overview 2). John Locke thought if people were given no rules they would make a paradise, flourishing in law, order, and structure, Thomas Hobbes believed people were naturally cruel and chaotic, with a need of a strong ruler to make decisions. Hobbes stated, “Who felt that mankind was inherently evil and required a strong central authority to ward off this inclination toward an immoral behavior, Locke believed that human nature allowed men to be selfish’’( Locke and Hobbes Overview 2 ). Thomas Hobbes believed a strong iron-fisted ruler was needed for the safety and well being of a society. The ideals of man in a natural state, follow Thomas Hobbes philosophical view represented through Jack's brutish and monarch like attitude which lead to them living in a dystopian society.

Chris McCandless: a man so infatuated with nature, he practically committed suicide to bring himself nearer to it. This extreme liking for nature, along with other ideals, makes up the core tenets of the transcendentalist philosophy. McCandless demonstrates other tenets of transcendentalism as well, most notably the supremacy of the individual, by detaching himself from the mammon of this world. Another way he shows the supremacy of the individual, by the belief that one should not conform to the usual policies of life, causes him great trouble in some cases. As well as the belief that the individual supersedes all else, McCandless received much of his inspiration from nature. Finally, always following what he believes correct, McCandless

In many works of literature, authors express their viewpoints on society and times in which they live. In the essay “Self Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau, the authors speak out against conformity and materialism in society. Both were romanticism authors during the 1800s. They focused on simplicity and individuality. Both writings can advise teenagers today on the importance of non-conformity and the value of rejecting materialism.

This was the battle started with the “shot heard ‘round the world” as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed.

About a century ago, such scholar as Nietzsche disregarded the principles of modern “factualism”. Later on, Weber established the end of the era of generalists. One cannot but state extreme specialization and narrowly focused technical work to have changed certain visions into straight forward realities. Concerning this essay, it is mainly aimed at analyzing the sociological speculations of two outstanding thinkers John Winthrop and Ralph Waldo Emerson that, in view of widely-acknowledged scholars, reflect the state of public opinion even though they date back over two centuries; to be precise, the focus lies in comparing and contrasting the utopian visions of the two above mentioned thinkers, making emphasis on what utopia meant for these two authors and the way it was supposed to be achieved. Moreover, the paper is focused on interpreting and coming to terms with the pivotal social movements of Puritanism as well as transcendentalism. Speaking about the peculiarities of social theories, it is necessary to take a view of recognized changes in vast domains of social life and culture. The research will emphasize the main reconstructions of social and cultural theories due to historical events. The essay is also targeted on finding out whether it is logically to discount all the concepts, methods of the past, and acknowledge the new theoretical assumptions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Jon Krakauer, and Michael Donovan are four similar writers. These four writers typically write about their individuality and depending on themselves. In Michael Donovan’s poem, “Its All-On-Me”, he talks about how everything is on him, and how he has to handle everything. Emerson’s short story, Self-Reliance, talks about the conviction of a man's beliefs at some point in his life and how he must deal with them. Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau is another short story about how government should play a smaller role in the decisions of the people. Lastly, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, is about a man attempting to survive in the wild on his own.

Both authors Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels focus on the topic of freedom. Both authors argue that they are being oppressed. However, this is where the similarities end. Engels and Marx believed that capitalism was a social system used by the proletariats to oppress the bourgeoisie, and that the only way to be free was to fight back against the system. On the other hand, Frederick Douglass focuses more on his individual story and his struggle for freedom, while he tries to appeal to his audience from an ethical point of view.

Ralph Waldo Emerson							I am writing this essay on the beliefs and thoughts of Ralph Waldo Emerson on the subjects of individuality, society, government, technology, and spirituality.

Though Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville differ, they both contributed greatly to revolutionary concepts of their era. To better understand the analyses between politics, social, and economic changes Marx and Tocqueville discuss, we must first understand the shift of their time and the need for sociological analysis. The 19th century was a time of change and adaptation for everyone and few scholars were capable and willing to understand the impacts these changes would have on society and its entities. Both industrial and democratic revolutions affected their times and created shifts in society. The industrialization affected many aspects of society. It created a structural change in the economy shifting from agrarian income to industrial and commercial income. Technology impacted labour force and production shifting to large-scale manufacturing creating new types of investments. These changes affected class structure, migration, and workers which in turn affected economy and a shift in politics.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche are both prominent figures of Modern Political thought even though they lived more than a hundred years apart from each other. Rousseau and Nietzsche tend to differ from each other in terms of their views on what we now call “globalization”.

Many scholars consider Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to be the most influential political philosophers of the classical liberal viewpoint, as they both believed that a government should exist, but that it should exist only for the purpose of preventing members of society from harming each other, not from harming themselves, therefore maximizing liberty in society. Although they agreed on the general purpose of government, which today would be a libertarian ideology, one critical issue on which they disagreed was on the nature of rights. In Hobbes’ view, people have no natural or inherent rights, and that in a state of nature, people would have no obligation to respect the rights of others. As a result, Hobbes argues that rights descend

My friend and I once had a riveting discussion about whether mashed potatoes should be eaten with a fork or a spoon. She firmly believes that mashed potatoes should be eaten with a spoon because reason suggests that soft foods would fall through the cracks of a fork. I am convinced that mashed potatoes should rightfully be eaten with a fork because I have complete faith that the solidity of the potatoes will maintain itself on top of the fork. My friend and I have yet to resolve this conflict; we just settled on the conclusion that as long as the potatoes can be consumed, our differences of opinion remain irrelevant. Similar to this argument, the dual philosophers and mathematicians Blaise Pascal and Renè Descartes share a difference of opinion about certain elements of the world. Even though both Pascal’s Human Happiness and Descartes’ Discourse on the Method ultimately land on the same conclusions, their thought processes widely differ.