> I think it's difficult to say whether Emerson was about anything
> in particular.
That's because he believed in the Hegelian generality, in which all particulars are equally grey. His "Great Men" is a hoot -- Plato is described as the gorgeous synthesis of intuitive, feminized, colonial Asia, and rational, grasping, male, acquisitive Europe. Transcendentalism was immanent nationalism, at a time when national capitalism was still, as Marx would put it, objectively revolutionary -- but no less problematic for that.
-- Dennis