Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

The sentence marks a turning point in “Self-Reliance”. Emerson has just described society as “a joint-stock company” whose members give up “the liberty and culture of the eater” to secure their bread. “The virtue in most request is conformity,” he writes. “Self-reliance is its aversion.” After the line he adds: “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” He then recalls how, when quite young, he answered an adviser who warned that his inner impulses might come “from below, not from above”: if he were “the Devil’s child”, he would live from the Devil.

Emerson, who had settled in Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-1830s, published the essay in 1841. “Man” here means the adult, independent self, the “manhood” against which, a few lines earlier, society is said to conspire.

His young friend Henry David Thoreau put the idea into practice: in 1845 he built a cabin by Walden Pond, on land Emerson owned. The line remains a motto of American individualism.

Self-Reliance (Essays: First Series), 1841

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