The Independent Scholar

How Six of the Greatest Thinkers in History Lived, Worked, and Published Independently

Plato founded the Academy only after establishing a reputation on the open market and inventing Philosophy as a category.Montaigne invented the modern essay genre from a tower on his estate, publishing the Essais at his own expense.Spinoza was a lens-grinder by day and wrote philosophy by night. He published only two books in his lifetime, which everyone hated.Samuel Johnson survived on fourpence halfpenny a day while compiling the first great English dictionary. He lived at the end of the patronage era but before the modern publishing market.Emerson left the ministry and traveled the country lecturing for fees. He managed his own tours and turned his lecture success into books.Nietzsche left academia after the fallout from his first book (and failing health), then paid to print all of his subsequent books—none sold more than a thousand copies in his lifetime.The Independent Scholar examines these six lives as case studies of a particular vocation: The pursuit of truth, for its own sake, without permission, beyond all gatekeepers, via entrepreneurial creativity on the open market. Drawing on recent scholarship in the history of ideas and the sociology of knowledge, I reconstruct the material conditions, economic strategies, and social infrastructure that made each of these lives work.This book aims to be a humble contribution to the history of ideas but I also hope that it will be useful to anyone interested in this calling.