Representative Men: Seven Lectures
Last updated October 31, 2026
In these lectures, published in 1850, Ralph Waldo Emerson considers what great people offer the rest of humanity. After an opening lecture on the uses of great men, he profiles six figures as types: Plato the philosopher, Swedenborg the mystic, Montaigne the skeptic, Shakespeare the poet, Napoleon the man of the world and Goethe the writer. Great lives matter, he argues, because they show ordinary people their own potential.
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