Comparing Emerson And Thoreau Essay

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Thoreau wrote Walden, which is a continuation of Emerson’s The American Scholar. There are many similarities and differences between Walden and The American Scholar. Thoreau discusses a laboring man who works to benefit other people, but he is not a man who performs the task of labor, instead man does nothing more but labor. The Laboring Man allows his work to consume him unlike the Scholar in Emerson’s story (Thoreau 983). Thoreau also refers to the functions of laboring man “He has no time to be anything but a machine…his highest duty to fodder and water his horses!” (Thoreau 983). Although Thoreau and Emerson both describe a laboring man (Man who Labors), they describe his fate differently. Emerson expresses the title and fate of man based …show more content…
As little as man wants to accept the beliefs of other people, Emerson explains that the government is making the individual accept the beliefs of other people. Emerson describes power and money as something that men naturally search for. “Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money,-‘the spoils,’ so called, ‘of office.’ And why not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them, and they shall quit the false good and leap to the true, and leave government to clerks and desks.” (Emerson 253). Emerson believes that the people in government, “‘of office,’” are in search of power, money, and authority over the religion people chose to believe. Thoreau, however, referring to government says “Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment…Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or do not, but whether we should live like baboons or like
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