Civil Disobedience And Transcendentalism Analysis

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Within the pages of his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, 18th century Scottish economic philosopher Adam Smith writes, “The labor of a menial servant. adds to the value of nothing.” (Smith, 187). He continues, “If any branch of trade, or any division of labor, be advantageous to the public, the freer and more general the competition, it will always be the more so.” (Smith, 185). Hailed as the forefather of capitalist thinking, Smith’s respect for free enterprise and disdain for state intervention remain massively influential in the realm of economic thought today. Less than one century after the proliferation of Smith’s economic theory, the American transcendentalist movement encouraged the individual to “view [the world] as a display of …show more content…
American Transcendentalism, and Thoreau himself, both emphasize the sovereignty of the individual and reject the idea that greater society may determine the essential natures of virtue and vice. In On Civil Disobedience, Thoreau explains, “Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free trade.there will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power.” (Thoreau, 17). In distrust of the government, Thoreau finds himself unquestionably in agreement with the laissez-faire capitalists – in fact, Thoreau ventures into anarchy, arguing that the inevitable future of humanity lies in the total dissolution of government. If the government derives its substantial authority from the consent of the governed, then the highest government acts to enshrine the sovereignty of the individual to live as they so …show more content…
Drastic increases in the division of labor, and a concurrent uptick in material wealth produced, accompanied the industrial revolution. Masses of laborers could produce with staggering efficiency by delegating to each laborer minor components of the greater process. Henry Ford employed this philosophy in the early 20th century to transform the automobile into a staple of American middle-class life, rather than a luxury reserved only for the wealthy. Regarding this topic, Adam Smith wrote: The division of labor, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive power of labor. this separation, too, is generally carried furthest in those countries which enjoy the highest degree of industry and improvement; what is the work of one man, in a rude state of society, being generally that of several in an improved one. Smith,
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