Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay "Self-Reliance," focuses not so much on differences related to race, gender, class and sexuality, as he does on differences related to conformists and nonconformists. There are indeed important divisions among people, divisions which certainly affect their political status, but to Emerson all of those differences essentially can be reduced to the difference between an individual who thinks for himself or herself and an individual who thinks what the herd or the society tells him or her to think.
Clearly, the issue of conformity vs. nonconformity is crucial to the question of politics. An individual who does not think for himself or herself is not truly an individual at all. If the society is made up primarily of such conformists, then the political reality of that society will be dreary indeed. The political status of such a conformist--of whatever race, gender, or socioeconomic class--is no status at all, because he or she is simply one small part in a social and political machine which exists in large part to intimidate and crush the will and spirit of the individual nonconformist. In addition, although he directly espouses no political stand as such, his philosophy of self-reliance would today instantly be classified as conservative Republican, or, at the very least, Libertarian.
Emerson only touches upon issues of race, gender and class. He uses these categories not for their own sake but to shed light on the more significant category of freedom and enslavement in terms of thought. He mentions slavery and Abolition, for example, not to argue that slavery is wrong, which he obviously believes, but to shed light on the hypocrisy of any person who would favor the freeing of the slaves and then treat his family or neighbor with less than a loving attitude (123). His rare mention of gender (or even the fact that the female of the species exists) has to do with, again, not gender at all but the...