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Standing “Aloof” from the State: Thoreau on Self-Government

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Ruth Lane
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Extract

Long an icon of the American cultural tradition, Henry Thoreau has recently been welcomed into political theory as a theorist whose political writings go beyond the essays on resistance to government, and contain ideas deeply important for understanding the American contribution to democratic experience. I extend this new appreciation by showing how Thoreau presents a specific model of self-government, individual self-government, that occurs under the frequently irrelevant roof provided by liberal democratic state institutions. Thoreau's model of self-government imagines women and men who are largely free of, or indifferent to, the state; but fully involved in an everyday experience that is deeply political because it allocates values for the individual. Walden is, in this sense, less an escape from government than it is an escape to it. Thoreau spans the spectrum of political philosophy, from Socrates′ concern with justice in the individual, to Nietzsche's model of the self as a governable community, but Thoreau's work is unique, and distinctively American, in its model of a hard-headed individual self-government based upon an unsentimentalized natural world.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , Spring 2005 , pp. 283 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2005

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References

1. This statement, from the “Plea for Captain John Brown” in its original context dissociates the author from public debates and the politics associated with the slavery issue, but I use it here in its fully general sense, because it so neatly captures Thoreau's attitude to the state and the self. The quotation is found in Rosenblum, Nancy L., ed., Thoreau: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), p. 153.Google Scholar Thoreau repeats the point in “Resistance to Civil government”: “I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad” Similarly, “I was not born to be forced, I will breathe after my own fashion” (ibid., pp. 9,14).

2. A review in The American Political Science Review described Thoreau as “a strange mosaic of impressions” including “transcendentalist, theist, temperate revolutionary, individualist, libertarian, humanitarian and pragmatist”; Atkinson, David M., “Review of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau” American Political Science Review 70 (1976): 1296.Google Scholar

3. Taylor, Bob Pepperman, in America's Bachelor Uncle: Thoreau and the American Polity, (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996), pp. 1–7,Google Scholar reviews the remarkably adverse literature on Thoreau over the years, involving criticism of his anarchism, self-righteousness, inconsistency, and so on. Much of the problem, as Eulau, Heinz remarked in “Wayside Challenger: Some Remarks on the Politics of Henry David Thoreau” in Thoreau: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Paul, Sherman (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 118,Google Scholar was that readers tried to read “their own preferences” into his writing. Walker, Brian, in “Thoreau's Alternative Economics: Work, Liberty, and Democratic Cultivation” American Political Science Review 92 (1998): 845,CrossRefGoogle Scholar note 1, gives an interesting example of how writers on Thoreau accused him of attitudes he did not hold; specifically, Walden was called a “diatribe” against village life, when the entire book expresses his attachments to such life.

4. Taylor, , in Bachelor UncleGoogle Scholar, draws attention to Thoreau's study of American colonial history, with its violence and cruelty to the pre-colonial peoples and to nature itself, and provides a strong example of Thoreau's peculiar approach to the difficulties of self-government, either of self or nation.

5. See Bennett, Jane, Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (Modernity and Political Thought Volume 7; Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994);Google ScholarCavell, Stanley, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981);Google ScholarJenco, Leigh Kathryn, “Thoreau's Critique of Democracy” Review of Politics 65 (2003): 355–81;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKateb, George, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992);Google ScholarD.Richardson, Robert Jr, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986);Google ScholarRosenblum, Nancy L., Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987);CrossRefGoogle ScholarTaylor, , Bachelor Uncle;Google Scholar and Walker, “Alternative Economics”

6. Kateb, for instance, (Inner Ocean, pp. 23–24)Google Scholar makes the obvious point that the proper term is representative or constitutional democracy, since it is impossible to conceive any way in which large modern states can be governed directly by the demos gathered under some ancient oak. But, as Jenco's “Critique” argues, Kateb and others too incautiously classify Thoreau's theory as consonant with current definitions of liberal democracy.

7. See his acerbic comments in Cape Cod: “The Beach”; in Thoreau, Henry D., Cape Cod, ed. Moldenhauer, Joseph J. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 57–60, also p. 209.Google Scholar As a convenience to readers who may be using different editions of Thoreau's works, I give the title of the Thoreau work involved, and where relevant the section, followed by page citations within the particular editions used for this essay.

8. Plato, , The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, trans. Tredennick, Hugh (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 92.Google Scholar

9. In the Walden section on Economy, Thoreau refers to “Darwin, the naturalist” but Walden was published in 1854 and the first edition of Darwin's Origin of Species not until 1859, so Thoreau would not have been referring to Darwin's evolutionary theory in its fully developed form. See Thoreau, Henry D., Walden, ed., Shanley, J. Lyndon (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1971), p. 12.Google Scholar

10. Walden, Economy; Shanley, , Walden, pp. 18, 92, 98, 326, passim.Google Scholar

11. Government I define as the management of a system according to consistent principles of organization; self-government is when the management is exercised by all or most of the participating elements. These are rough definitions, refined further in the later text. Politics I define at the micro-level, meaning the patterns of influence individuals attempt to exert over one another. When I use the term democratic or democracy it refers to a principle of non-hierarchy and not a specific political institution. I accept Jenco's point in the “Critique” that Thoreau is a critic of democracy as an institution, and does not therefore contribute in quite the usual way to democratic theory.

12. Walden, Economy; Shanley, , Walden, p. 41.Google Scholar

13. Contemporary political theorists from all sides of the political spectrum tend to emphasize openness and care for the other as mitigations of the perceived harshness of liberal democracies; e.g., Connolly, William E., Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991);Google Scholar and White, Stephen K., Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).Google Scholar Thoreau vigorously opposes this approach because he sees it as disguised domination. It is we who are charitable, generous, tolerant, and we give the other what we think he should have, without asking for his viewpoint.

14. The whole conclusion to the Economy section of Walden (Shanley, , Walden, pp. 69–79)Google Scholar speaks to the necessity of finding one's own way and living it thoroughly even if the life was a mean one; even in the poor house, he said, there were moments of joy (Conclusion; ibid., p. 328). See also the remarks on stars (Laws, Higher; pp. 216–17).Google Scholar

15. Walden, Economy; Shanley, , Walden, p. 326.Google Scholar

16. Battles between native Americans and various settlers were cruel and destructive, Thoreau shows, yet they left behind them a peaceful countryside in which two boys might safely journey, enjoying both human and natural contacts without endangering their lives. Thoreau, Henry D., A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ed. Hovde, Carl F. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).Google Scholar Taylor's Bachelor Uncle gives an admirable summary of this aspect of Thoreau's thought.

17. It was notably Thoreau, not Emerson, who hitched up the horses when fleeing slaves arrived in Concord and drove them to a railhead where they might safely continue their journey north. Thoreau also spent his famous night in jail, on similar principles.

18. I find a modified version of David Easton's well-known definition of the political to be helpful in appreciating Thoreau's point; Easton, David, The Political System (New York: Knopf, 1953), pp. 129–34.Google Scholar If the political is “the authoritative allocation of values” then the self-governed person is political as he creates order in himself through that process of intelligent allocation. I eliminate Easton's final clause, which restricts the political only to allocations for whole societies, thus restricting politics to the state in the conventional manner. Thoreau's individual allocation, of values within the individual, is far more interesting.

19. Richardson, , Life of the Mind, pp. 224, 226.Google Scholar

20. The term social theorist is used here to emphasize (1) the scope of Thoreau's theory, which goes beyond narrow attention to the state and civic duties, by integrating psychological and sociological factors, and (2) the empirical nature of his analysis. Of course classical political philosophy included all of what we today classify as social science (psychology, sociology, economics, politics), but it is rarer in recent times.

21. Walden, Economy; Shanley, , Walden, p. 78.Google Scholar

22. E.g., Shanley, , Walden, pp. 18,19, passim.Google Scholar

23. Walden, Economy; Shanley, , Walden, p. 74.Google Scholar

24. Ibid.

25. Walden, Visitors; Shanley, , Walden, pp. 144–50.Google Scholar

26. Thoreau also discusses with something resembling awe the case of the pauper who baldly described himself to everyone as “deficient in intellect”; this was “so simple, and sincere and so true” that Thoreau found it transcended itself and became wisdom (ibid., p. 151).

27. As Walker's “Alternative Economics” notes, Thoreau is probably the only philosopher who ever worked as a day-laborer.

28. Walden, Economy; Shanley, , Walden, pp. 4–6;Google Scholar Conclusion; ibid, p. 84.

29. Ibid., p. 46.

30. Richardson, , Life of the Mind, p. 167.Google Scholar

31. Thoreau repeatedly emphasizes his disapproval of the division of labor: for instance demanding that men build their own houses, not hire contractors, because doing it themselves would develop their faculties and make many into poets (Walden, Economy; Shanley, , Walden, p. 46).Google Scholar He also emphasizes in various ways how his own multiple roles were educational: being his own ‘gentleman’ as well as his own “scullion” and “cook” taught him how ugly certain dishes were and therefore simplified his diet (Higher Laws; ibid., p. 214).

32. Walden, Conclusion; Shanley, , Walden, pp. 326–27.Google Scholar

33. Harding, Walter, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982 [1965]), p. 429;Google ScholarRichardson, , Life of the Mind, pp. 376–84.Google Scholar

34. He would rather be sober than drunk: “I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven” (Walden, Higher Laws; Shanley, , Walden, p. 217).Google Scholar

35. Edelman, Compare Murray, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).Google Scholar

36. Bennett, , Thoreau's Nature.Google Scholar

37. Walden, Economy; Shanley, , Walden, p. 25.Google Scholar

38. Bennett, , Thoreau's Nature, pp. 1–15.Google Scholar

39. “Life Without Principle” Rosemblum, , Political Writings, p. 116.Google Scholar

40. Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 85,CrossRefGoogle Scholar is the recent locus classicus of this position, with the argument that we must behave according to the principles of John Stuart Mill in public life, but may abandon ourselves to Nietzschean ecstasies in our private lives. Its unfortunate side-implication is that there is a difference between public and private, a difference which Thoreau's theory rejects. The interpretation of Nietzsche is also outdated; see below, the section “Self-Government as Self-Control, and note 74 on Rorty's argument.

41. “Walking” in Thoreau, Henry D., Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Atkinson, Brooks ( New York: The Modern Library, 1937), p. 599;Google Scholar and Walden, The Village; Shanley, , Walden, p. 167.Google Scholar

42. Modern readers of Walden may wonder why Thoreau stayed at the bucolic pond only two years; but they undoubtedly have not experienced the difficulties of growing, catching, or shooting one's own food, or the work of cooking bread on hot stones in an outdoor pit; or hiking over to a spring under Brister's Hill to get drinking water when Walden was too warm (Harding's Days). Walden Pond was not a free lunch.

43. Walden showed that monetary outlay was small, but time outlay was large.

44. Walden, House-Warming; Shanley, , Walden, pp. 243–44.Google Scholar

45. Walden, Higher Laws; Shanley, , Walden, p. 216;Google Scholar Conclusion; ibid., p. 328.

46. Walden, What I Lived For; Shanley, , Walden, pp. 94, 96.Google Scholar

47. Richardson, , Life of the Mind, p. 192–93.Google Scholar

48. Shanley, , Walden, pp.155–66.Google Scholar

49. Walker, Brian, “Thoreau on Democratic Cultivation” Political Theory 29 (2001): 163,CrossRefGoogle Scholar treats the bean field as a field of war, where Thoreau cuts down a lusty weed that is threatening his crop. This echoes Nancy Rosenblum's emphasis, in “Thoreau's Militant Conscience” Political Theory 9 (1981): 81–110,CrossRefGoogle Scholar on Thoreau's militancy, but fails to account for Thoreau's fondness for weeds, all of which he knows by name and describes with affection (Walden, Spring; Shanley, , Walden, pp. 309–310).Google Scholar The beanfield is less a war and more of a bittersweet choice between beauty and utility. Or at least one may say that Thoreau's emphasis is more Darwinian than military.

50. Walden, Higher Laws, Shanley, , Walden, pp. 211–13.Google Scholar

51. Walden, Where I Lived…ibid., p. 90.

52. “Resistance to Civil Government”; Rosenblum, , Political Writings, p. 9.Google Scholar

53. Locke's position is frequently discussed without reference to his educational writing, which draw a more complex picture; but it is fair to say that at maturity Locke's man is fully defined by his nature and upbringing and is not, as with Thoreau, a work in progress. See Locke, John, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. with Introduction, Notes, and Critical apparatus by W., John and Yolton, Jean S. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989);Google Scholar and Simmons, A. John, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp.110–11.Google Scholar

54. Strong, Tracy B., The Self and the Political Order (New York: New York University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

55. Arrow, Kenneth J., “Methodological Individualism and Social Knowledge” American Economic Review 84 (1994): 1–9.Google Scholar

56. Harding, Days; Richardson, Life of the Mind.

57. Walden, Solitude; Shanley, , Walden 134–35.Google Scholar

58. The full text adds emphasis to this point: Thoreau says he has “seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself”; and goes on to say he wishes for deeper and richer soil, rather than stems “dangling this way and that” (Hovde, , Week, p. 383).Google Scholar

59. In addition to his being a classical scholar Thoreau also ran the family's pencil business, making many technical improvements in the machinery and the composition and manufacture of the pencils; later in life he expanded his mathematical teaching materials and took up land surveying, doing a lively business at it; Thoreau also wrote for magazines, studied the history of the American Indian, worked as a handyman for Emerson and various others, and of course spent a great amount of time “inspecting” the woods and the snowstorms.

60. Walden, Spring; Shanley, , Walden, pp. 301–302.Google Scholar

61. Richardson, , Life of the Mind, pp. 138, 267.Google Scholar

62. Taylor, Bachelor Uncle.

63. Walker, , “Alternative Economics” pp. 845, 855.Google Scholar

64. Bennett, Jane, “On being a Native: Thoreau's Hermeneutics of Self” Polity 22 (1990): 569.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65. Walker, “Alternative Economics”; Bennett, Thoreau's Nature; Kateb, Inner Ocean.

66. The new agreement on Thoreau's stature does not imply consensus on the substantive interpretation of Thoreau's political theory, but I do not focus here on those differences, preferring to suggest an understanding of his work that moves in a new direction, emphasizing and drawing conclusions from his attitude to state and self.

67. Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin and Miller, Peter, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. ix.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68. Foucault says elsewhere: “What we need…is a political philosophy that isn't erected around the problem of sovereignty, not therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the King's head: in political theory that has still to be done” (Foucault, Michel, Power I Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin [New York: Pantheon, 1980], p. 121).Google Scholar The “king” is of course still with us as the State.

69. Connolly, (Identity/Difference, p. 201)Google Scholar writes, for instance: “But the state is the official center of self-conscious collective action. It is the institution of last recourse's highest appeal, the one that symbolizes what we are.…It is the sovereign place within which the highest internal laws and policies are enacted.…if the state does not serve as a center of self-conscious collective action in pursuit of common purposes, then nothing does”

70. There are of course other reasons for Thoreau's neglect, especially the bias against American writers; and even within the American context, the elitism that prefers Emerson to the man who did odd jobs around Emerson's home.

71. I do not intend to malign anarchism here, but simply use its everyday sense of “disorderly” to summarize what is sometimes the response to Thoreau's writings. Classical anarchists of course advocated forms of rule other than the state; few however were as individualistic as Thoreau in this matter.

72. See, for example, Bennett, , Thoreau's NatureGoogle Scholar; Kateb, , Inner OceanGoogle Scholar; Richardson, , Life of the MindGoogle Scholar; Rosenblum, , Political WritingsGoogle Scholar; Taylor, , Bachelor UncleGoogle Scholar; Walker, , “Cultivation”Google Scholar

73. “Resistance to Civil Government” Rosenblum, Political Writings, p. 17.Google Scholar

74. Rorty (in Contingency) insists on the difference between the individual as “self-creator” and the individual as “public liberal” and discusses the issue in his Chapter 4 “Private Irony and Liberal Hope” (pp. 73–95, esp. 88–95). He groups Nietzsche with Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Proust, Heidegger and Nabokov as “exemplars,” “illustrations of what private perfection can be like” (p. xiv), and emphasizes Nietzsche's desire in his private self-creation for “the sublime and ineffable” for the “incommensurable” vision of himself and reality as a whole (p. 101). More recent theorists, like those I discuss in the present section, have substantially revised this interpretation of Nietzsche's work.

75. Flathman, Richard E., Willful Liberalism: Voluntarism and Individuality in Political Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1992)Google Scholar; Thiele, Leslie Paul, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Warren, Mark, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

76. Kateb, (Inner Ocean, p. xxiv)Google Scholar remarks that Nietzsche read Emerson's work and “had feelings of admiration tending to reverence” I can find no reference to Nietzsche's having read Thoreau, but Richardson (Life of the Mind) frequently refers to Thoreau's ideas as anticipatory of Nietzsche's ideas.

77. Thoreau's argument can almost be summarized as the belief that everyone is potentially heroic.

78. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, #19, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 26.Google Scholar

79. Flathman, , Willful Liberalism, p. 165.Google Scholar

80. Thiele, , Politics of Soul, p. 37.Google Scholar

81. Ibid., p. 12.

82. The Nietzsche phrase is from Human All Too Human, #134. See Thiele, , Politics of Soul, pp. 20–21.Google Scholar

83. Ibid., pp. 42–43.

84. “Life Without Principle” Atkinson, Walden and Other, p. 719.Google Scholar

85. Flathman, , Willful Liberalism, p. 166, emphasis added.Google Scholar

86. Ibid., p. 210.

87. Ibid., p. 211.

88. Ibid., p. 54.

89. Ibid., p. 56.

90. Ibid., p. 67.

91. Ibid., p. 171.

92. Ibid., p. 53.

93. Ibid., p. 63.

94. Ibid., p. 91.

95. Ibid., p. 209.

96. Ibid., p 197.

97. Thiele, Politics of Soul, p. 23.Google Scholar

98. Ibid., p. 75

99. Flathman, , Willful Liberalism, p. 204.Google Scholar

100. Ibid., p. 206.

101. Walden, , Economy/Philanthropy: Shanley. Walden, p. 74.Google Scholar

102. Concepts such as autonomy, authenticity, agency; see the helpful discussion in Digeser, Peter, Our Politics, Our Selves? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

103. Rorty, , Contingency, p. 85Google Scholar; see notes 40 and 74 above on the issue.

104. Thoreau makes this point with the curious tale of the New England bug that gnawed its way out of a table which had been a tree when, long ago, the egg was first deposited there. As the bug subsequently matured, escaped, and enjoyed its full growth, so may mankind (Shanley, , Walden, p. 333).Google Scholar The point, while hardly couched in philosophical terms, is plain enough. Thoreau valorized human maturity, which he defined in individual political terms as self-government–individual self-government as a supplement to the formal governments under which all people live without finding them satisfactory.

105. Kateb, , Inner Ocean, pp. 24–27.Google Scholar

106. Kateb rests his hopes of escaping the problems inherent in individualism heavily on Emerson and Whitman and a kind of “ecstatic contemplation” which is “a preference for consciousness over action, for the indefinite over the social, for the intense over the well-rounded, for the episodic over the uninterrupted, for uncertainty over a false sense of completion, for the true over the fictional” (Inner Ocean, p. 92).Google Scholar I believe this fits two of the transcendentalists. Emerson and Whitman, far better than it does the third member of the group. Thoreau's works, and indeed his life, describe a far less narcissistic model.

107. Jenco, “Critique” see also the conclusion below of the present essay.

108. Rosenblum, , Another Liberalism; Political Writings.Google Scholar

109. Rosenblum, , Political Writings, p. xxvii.Google Scholar

110. Rosenblum, , Another Liberalism.Google Scholar

111. The verdict on Thoreau's composure depends upon which works one consults. Rosenblum (p. 82) emphasizes his “preoccupation with violence” but her citations are largely to the John Brown Plea, “Civil Disobedience” with some references to Walden; a choice that was typical at that period of Thoreau research. Recent work emphasizes the whole oeuvre and reduces the “outraged” Thoreau to a smaller scope. See Rosenblum, Nancy L., “Thoreau's Militant Conscience” Political Theory 9 (1981): 81–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

112. Bennett, , Thoreau's Nature, p. xxiv.Google Scholar

113. Richardson, , Life of the Mind, p. 171.Google Scholar

114. See also Burbick, Joan, Thoreau's Alternative History: Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and Language, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

115. Taylor, , Bachelor Uncle.Google Scholar

116. Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

117. Taylor, , Bachelor Uncle, p. 18.Google Scholar

118. Mosher, Michael A., “Review of America's Bachelor Uncle” American Political Science Review 92 (1998): 214–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

119. Walker's analysis of Walden illustrates still another way of approaching Thoreau's work, since he defines it on almost exclusively economic terms, as advice to the least advantaged citizens of a democracy on how to achieve a “new ethos of everyday life” consonant, if necessary, with “voluntary poverty” (“Alternative Economics” pp. 851, 854).Google Scholar

120. Easton, , Political System, pp. 129–34.Google Scholar

121. E.g., Connolly, , Identity/DifferenceGoogle Scholar; Kateb, , Inner Ocean.Google Scholar

122. See Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 [1972]); discussion of the point is on pp. 325–40.Google Scholar

123. See, e.g., Flathman, , Willful Liberalism.Google Scholar

124. See especially Taylor, , Bachelor Uncle, pp. 64, 77–80.Google Scholar

125. It would be a mistake to think that Thoreau's model is “social darwinian” Thoreau does not define nature as “red in tooth and claw” but in the context of his neighboring woodlands and fields, where things tried to make their way without much outside help. Even when the tooth was red, however, Thoreau did not suggest using that fact to affirm the Tightness of such behavior; rather he urged the prey to take care of itself.

126. Resistance to Civil Government, Rosenblum, Political Writings, p.14.Google Scholar

127. Thoreau for instance remarks (neutrally) on the field mice who one hard winter fed on the grove of young pines near his hut, girdling and thus killing them—he goes on to observe that the trees were too thick and would anyway have killed each other off (Walden, Winter Animals; Shanley, , Walden, p. 280Google Scholar), so it is not appropriate to condemn the field mice for their behavior.

128. Thoreau's major example is his own giving up of the hunting he had enjoyed as a child, as he gradually came to find it inappropriate to his adult way of life; Walden, Higher Laws; Shanley, , Walden, pp. 211–13.Google Scholar

129. Cavel, , Senses of Walden, p. 119.Google Scholar

130. It is useful here to repeat my earlier point, that democratic theory usually refers to theories that justify the institutions of the modern Western industrialized state; in this sense, Thoreau is not a democratic theorist. He does, however, do a different sort of democratic theory, one that involves principles of individual politics and justice.

131. “Resistance to Civil Government”; Rosenblum, Political Writings, p. 6.Google Scholar

132. E.g., Kateb, , Inner OceanGoogle Scholar; Rosenblum, “Militant Conscience”; Walker, Alternative Economics”

133. Jenco, , “Critique”Google Scholar;

134. Ibid., pp. 357, 366.

135. Ibid., p. 381.

136. “A Plea for Captain John Brown”; Rosenblum, Political Writings, p. 151.Google Scholar