Common Strands Regarding Man's Role - Essay Example

Thoreau, in contrast, wrote Walden during a time of relative peace in America. The Civil War was still a few decades in the future, and the book’s emphasis on self-government and self-reliance is a result of a stable government and society. Both of these works seek to define a period of each man’s life, but they also define periods of American society. One concern evident in both works is the proper place of man in relation to his government, a concern greatly influenced by the religion of each man.

Benjamin Franklin began life as a baptized Puritan but ended his life as a Deist. His change in religion and his ideas about religion gave birth to his beliefs about the role of man in relation to government. In his autobiography, he states that he “became a thorough Deist,” and his conception of his religion was “that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life” (Franklin). So, for Franklin, to be happy meant that a man had to exhibit integrity in his dealings with his fellow men.

One of the by-products of his belief in Deism was that he saw his duty as being a part of government and insuring that it provided men with freedom and a means of relating to each other. To this end, he created a political party known as The United Party of Virtue. The governing idea of his party was that it should gather “virtuous and good men of all nations into a regular body, to be govern'd by suitable good and wise rules, which good and wise men may probably be more unanimous in their obedience to, than common people are to common laws” (Franklin).

By his actions and statements, Benjamin Franklin propounded his view of the role of man in government. He assumed that men, not women, of intellectual and moral power could create laws that would establish a desirable society for America. He became a Founding Father of the United States because of this view. The hidden assumptions in his beliefs about government are that there are only certain men who are capable of making laws that create a desirable government, that women are incapable of making these laws, that common people will enjoy these laws and be obedient to them, and that government treats men with respect and virtue.

The government of America still operates on the rules that Franklin promoted. A select few, politicians, create rules that the citizens must follow. The views of many Americans are also based on ideas that Franklin developed about the role of man in government. Many Americans believe that citizens should follow the rules of government because elected officials have created these rules. For these Americans, questioning the motives of government is not the role of a common man. A common man must do as he is told and place his faith in those leaders he has placed in a position of power.

However, not all Americans accept this view. Many have a much different idea of man’s role in government, an idea that has its origin in the writing and historical period of Henry David Thoreau. In Walden, Thoreau lived the life that his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, preached. Emerson developed the religion of Transcendentalism, which stated that all of nature was a reflection of the divine. The religion emphasized the role of the individual in attaining