Chapter 1 Introduction
1.8 Overview of the Study
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mystical, religious, or practical Transcendentalist Principles? Is Thoreauvian civil disobedience merely theoretical, or does it prescribe concrete action? If it prescribes action, what kind of action? Thoreau mentions revolution in “Civil Disobedience,”
does revolution run contrary to Thoreauvian civil disobedience?
1.7 Research Value
In this study, I aim to compensate for the lack of scholarly consideration of the link between Thoreau’s political article “Civil Disobedience” and the New England philosophy, Transcendentalism. Utilizing four major principles derived from
Transcendentalism, I combine meticulous and exhaustive textual evidence with cogent and reasonable analysis to elucidate how and why a Transcendentalist reading is crucial to understanding Thoreauvian civil disobedience.
1.8 Overview of the Study
This thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of the entire essay. The second chapter reviews political science and literary scholarship that addresses Thoreauvian civil disobedience. The third chapter provides important background information, introducing New England Transcendentalism. The fourth chapter outlines my analytical approach, detailing the four Transcendentalist Principles I extract from Emerson’s Essays: the Over-Soul, Inner Divinity, Anti-Authority, and Self-Reliance. After establishing this context, the fifth chapter, provides a close reading of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” from the
Transcendentalist perspective. I examine how the text connects closely with
Transcendentalism, argue that it is a political work with a Transcendentalist core, and propose a theory – the Thoreauvian political triad. The sixth chapter concludes the analysis, reaffirming Thoreauvian civil disobedience as a form of political “action from principle” (Thoreau 154) specifically based on Transcendentalist principles.
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Chapter 2
Split Images of Thoreau: Literature Review
In this chapter, I investigate three branches of academic research regarding Thoreauvian civil disobedience: the general field, the political field, and the literary field. I begin the first section with a general appraisal of Thoreau. Outside academic circles, people related to civil rights campaigns have treated him and “Civil
Disobedience” as a source of inspiration, whereas academics have long treated him and his work uncongenially. This scholarly disfavor may stem from Thoreau’s
irreconcilably dichotomous status as both a nature writer and a political thinker, which makes him a “problematic figure” (Mariotti 4) and marginalizes Thoreauvian civil disobedience in both the political and literary fields. In the second section, I trace scholarly views of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” from the 1960s to the 2010s, revealing the shifts in academic focus – from legality to practicality to compatibility with individualism – over time. In the third section, I examine how literary scholars discuss Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” focusing particularly on how they connect Transcendentalism to Thoreauvian civil disobedience.
2.1 Discussion of Thoreauvian Civil Disobedience in General
In this section, I review and evaluate both academic and non-academic views of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” In general, reformers have revered the text while scholars have mostly diminished it. This discrepancy may have resulted from
Thoreau’s “split images” (Mariotti 4) that he is a nature writer and political thinker at the same time, which ultimately led to the marginalization of “Civil Disobedience” in both the literary and political fields.
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2.1.1 Outside Academic Circles: Thoreau, a Giant in Civil Rights Campaigns Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” gained attention among political activists in the early twentieth century. As Bob Pepperman Taylor points out in The Routledge
Guidebook to Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov read the essay and recommended it to their friends; Gandhi claimed that Thoreau’s ideas greatly influenced his nonviolent resistance against the British Raj in India; Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledged that Thoreau’s works were an impetus for his Civil Rights campaign in the 1950s and 60s (Taylor 3). These literary and civil rights giants recognized the contribution of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.”
In light of his importance in protest politics, Thoreau’s reputation among scholars is somewhat surprising. As Taylor points out in America’s Bachelor Uncle, scholarly reviews have been comparatively few over decades. This academic lacuna has two main implications: 1) Thoreau’s importance in popular culture and political movements apparently has little correlation with scholarly judgments of the
intellectual value of his political thought; 2) scholars regard Thoreau’s political thought more as a symptom of a problem in the American political tradition than a rich, powerful, and helpful resource (Taylor 2). In other words, “Civil Disobedience”
extended Thoreau’s influence to political and social movements and protests the world over, but led him to be less favored by the academic establishment.
2.1.2 Inside Academic Circles: Thoreau, an Unqualified Political Thinker Thoreau’s work has received relatively scarce commentary from political theorists, and what attention he has received has not been very friendly (Taylor 1).
General criticisms of Thoreau’s politics tend to be disdainful and elusive. According to Shannon L. Mariotti’s Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal, some scholars amplify Thoreau’s personality flaws and regard him as unqualified to write about political
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issues. For example, Philip Abbott claims that Thoreau had a personal crisis that led him to reject community; Richard Bridgman declares that Thoreau had psychological problems that made his works pessimistic, hostile, depressed, frustrated, and anxious (Mariotti 5). Other scholars argue that Thoreau’s idiosyncratic personality limited his politics. In Crisis of the Republic, Hannah Arendt contends that Thoreau’s need to act out of conscience, which was “unpolitical” (60), restrained him politically. In
“Thoreau’s Militant Conscience,” Nancy Rosenblum, likewise, describes Thoreau’s conscience as rooted in a sense of anger, insignificance, and powerlessness
(Rosenblum 81) that curtailed his political development. Still others paint Thoreau as a hermit who withdrew from politics into nature; for instance, Joel Porte proposes that Thoreau’s political dream was a government that would leave him alone and allow him to pursue aesthetic experiences in nature (Porte 150). Similarly, in The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx surmises that Thoreau retreated from politics to nature because he could not reconcile the contradiction posed by the machine in the garden – namely, the juxtaposition of industrial modernity and the pastoral sublime (Marx 265). Thus, in various ways, critics have generally claimed that Thoreau was not an ideal political thinker.
2.1.3 Split Images of Thoreau: Political Thinker or Nature Writer?
The scholarly disfavor directed toward Thoreau may have resulted from his apparently irreconcilable position as both a nature writer and a political thinker. As Mariotti points out, Thoreau is a problematic figure for students of politics: at best, he is a marginal member of the political theory canon, known for his civil disobedience;
at worst, he is a misanthropic, withdrawn hermit who scorned conventional politics (3). Mariotti raises a question that often confuses readers of Thoreau:
How can Thoreau, who withdraws away from Main Street, into woods and
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huckleberry fields, be conceived of as a political thinker? This question captures the conflict between our predominant images of Thoreau (often melancholy and misanthropic, a passive dissenter, withdrawing into nature) and our most powerful images of politics (a public, intersubjective realm of positive action, based on engagement and participation). (4)
Academic views of Thoreau’s political thought have fallen roughly into two camps:
those who believe in Thoreau’s political significance and those who do not. The former downplay Thoreau’s hermitic propensities and emphasize his participatory actions, while the latter see Thoreau more as a nature writer than a political thinker, denying his qualification as a political thinker and social commentator altogether (Mariotti 4; Taylor 2).
2.1.4 Double Marginalization: Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”
Scholarly division regarding Thoreau’s political thought has remained remarkably stable over time (Taylor 2), leading to the double-marginalization of
“Civil Disobedience” in both the literary and political fields. It suffers marginalization in literary studies, where the mainstream treats Thoreau as a nature writer, the author of Walden, a hermit, and a Transcendentalist. The text also suffers marginalization in political studies, where political theorists diminish Thoreau as a second-rate thinker.
They regard Thoreau as a minor contributor to the idea of civil disobedience, a man who offered no systemized political theories; in fact, in the political realm, references to civil disobedience are typically to the notion put forth by John Rawls in The Theory of Justice (1971), not to the concept developed by Thoreau. This
double-marginalization in literary and political studies further marginalizes Transcendentalist readings of Thoreauvian civil disobedience. Political scholars rarely discuss
Transcendentalism, and literary scholars rarely address civil disobedience.
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2.2 Discussion of Thoreauvian Civil Disobedience in the Political Field Despite its disfavored status in academia, some political scholars still discuss Thoreauvian civil disobedience. Critics from different eras focus on different aspects of Thoreauvian civil disobedience. Their discourses over the past six decades can be divided into four phases: 1) concerns regarding the concept’s compatibility with the law in the 1960s; 2) doubts about the concept’s political practicality in the 1970s; 3) reestablishment of Thoreauvian political significance from the 1980s to the 1990s;
and 4) more comprehensive reevaluations of Thoreauvian disobedience from the 2000s to the 2010s.
2.2.1 The 1960s: Is It Legal to Engage in Thoreauvian Civil Disobedience?
In the 1960s, scholarly discussions focused on the legality of Thoreauvian civil disobedience. According to Howard Zinn’s Disobedience and Democracy and Hugo Adam Bedau’s “Civil Disobedience and Personal Responsibility for Injustice,” two specific critics attacked Thoreauvian civil disobedience the most: Abe Fortas, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and Erwin N. Griswold, a prominently placed legal spokesperson of the day. In 1968, the two sharply attacked the notion of civil disobedience and asserted the importance of “law and order” (Zinn 5). Griswold writes that it is “illicit to violate otherwise valid laws either as a symbol of protest or in the course of protest” (Bedau 50). Fortas claims that “[e]ach of us owes a duty of obedience to law” (Zinn 11) and that civil disobedience is “never justifiable” (Zinn 44) because it is an “act of rebellion, not merely of dissent” (Zinn 53). Fortas even suggests that Thoreau’s essay “should not be read as a handbook on political science”
(Zinn 24). Thus, Griswold and Fortas both staunchly criticized Thoreauvian civil disobedience, highlighting what they viewed as its problematic relationship to law and order.
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In response to these arguments, Zinn points out that Fortas’s overemphasis on the rule of law might lead to an idolization of law and a society “deaf to the rising cries for justice” (Zinn 23). He warns that, without moral philosophy and civil disobedience, politics becomes “merely a register of whatever regulations the
politicians of the time have ordered” (Zinn 24). Bedau likewise disagrees with Fortas and Griswold and defends Thoreauvian civil disobedience. He describes “the Fortas-Griswold theory” as a belief that “a person remote from a social injustice can have little or no responsibility for it” (Bedau 52, 53). To combat this idea, Bedau proposes embracing “Thoreau’s Principle” that all people are responsible for inflicting certain injustices on others unintentionally, unknowingly, or indirectly (58). Bedau points out that Thoreau regarded the poll tax as participation in social injustice and the refusal of the tax was a protest against “the systematic violation of others’ human rights” (52).
In short, Bedau contends that Thoreauvian civil disobedience may be legally wrong, but morally right.
2.2.2 The 1970s: Is It Practical to Execute Thoreauvian Civil Disobedience?
In the 1970s, scholars including Rawls, Arendt, and Stanley Cavell were primarily concerned with the practicality of Thoreauvian civil disobedience. As a political philosopher who treats civil disobedience as a means of accomplishing justice in society, Rawls regards civil disobedience as a “public, nonviolent,
conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government” (320). Rawls’s theory of civil disobedience does not include violent actions or private conscientious refusal grounded on conscience or religion; thus, for Rawls, Thoreauvian civil disobedience – done in private and based on conscience – is not an act of civil disobedience but only conscientious refusal. Likewise, Arendt claims that Thoreau’s political philosophy
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puts too much emphasis on conscience, which she describes as “unpolitical” (60),
“purely subjective” (62), and difficult to carry out in political reality. In Jack Turner’s view, although Rawls and Arendt engage with Thoreau in their own ruminations on civil disobedience, in the end, they both denigrate his political significance (Turner 2).
Contrary to Rawls and Arendt, in The Senses of Walden (1972), Cavell defends Thoreauvian civil disobedience as an effective expression of civil disobedience, pointing out that Thoreau published the article in public and thus met the requirement that Rawls and Arendt stipulate (Cavell 84).
2.2.3 The 1980s-1990s: Is Thoreauvian Civil Disobedience Important?
In the 1980s and 1990s, discussions of Thoreauvian civil disobedience continued Cavell’s emphasis on Thoreau’s politicization. George Kateb considers Thoreau a representative of a new and distinct form of democratic excellence (Kateb 337, 339).
In The Days of Henry Thoreau (1982), Walter Harding treats “Civil Disobedience” as Thoreau’s first political essay, claiming it anticipated a number of other significant political works, such as “Slavery in Massachusetts” and the John Brown series (“A Plea for Captain John Brown,” “The Last Days of John Brown,” “The Martyrdom of John Brown” etc.). Harding writes that Thoreau’s political essays display “a
progression of increased resistance to the state as an institution” (Harding 418). In
“Civil Disobedience” (1849), Thoreau’s resistance is polite and consists of merely refusing to pay taxes; in “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), his resistance includes violation of a specific law, namely, the Fugitive Slave Law; and, in “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1859), Thoreau begins to accept the possibility of violence (Harding 418). The fact that Thoreau’s attitude toward the use of violence began to shift led some critics to accuse him of inconsistency. In “Thoreau’s Radical
Consistency” (1998), however, Shawn St. Jean defends Thoreau by claiming that he
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was morally consistent rather than rhetorically consistent. Affirming his political significance, Harding and St. Jean helped reestablish Thoreau as a politically important thinker.
2.2.4 The 2000s-2010s: Political and Unpolitical Thoreauvian Civil Disobedience From the 2000s to the 2010s, the strict boundary between the political and the unpolitical became increasingly blurred, and political scholars started to integrate considerations of Thoreau’s hermetic and individualistic side into their analyses. In
“Standing ‘Aloof’ from the State: Thoreau on Self-Government” (2005), Ruth Lane claims that Thoreau provided a theory of individual self-government: “As he has brought government to the personal level, so Thoreau brings politics there” (309). For Lane, Thoreau was not an anarchist, but a model who exemplified a transition “from national self-government (“democracy”) to individual self-government” (302). Lane asserts that this individual self-government is “deeply political” (303) because “the true frontier of democratic development is within the individual person” (303).
Praising Thoreauvian civil disobedience in “Quiet War with the State” (2005). Robert A. Gross contends that the refusal to pay the poll tax was initially “a symbolic protest against a national government” (7) that later transformed into “a personal declaration of independence” (8); Gross likens this “active resistance to oppression” (8) to what
“the founders of Republic” (8) had done. In Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal (2010), Mariotti suggests that, for Thoreau, being a captain of a huckleberry party in
“Civil Disobedience” was a way of practicing politics rather than an escape from politics (6). Acknowledging that Thoreau was unlikely to lead a mass protest, Mariotti suggests that, for Thoreau, daily activities (berry picking) became an alternative political practice in pursuit of social change (130-31). In short, in their analyses, Lane, Gross, and Mariotti embrace Thoreau’s more hermitic side as a brand of politics.
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2.2.5 Review of Political Discussions of Thoreauvian Civil Disobedience
From the 1960s to the 1970s, scholars focused on the legitimacy and practicality of Thoreauvian disobedience, giving it a relatively unfriendly treatment. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, some scholars began to defend Thoreau as a political thinker, attempting to establish his political significance by highlighting his participation in politics. From the 2000s to the 2010s, political scholars began to deconstruct the dichotomous view of Thoreau as either a political thinker or a naturalist hermit; they accepted Thoreau’s withdrawal as a kind of political action. Scholarly evaluations of Thoreauvian civil disobedience have thus changed dramatically during the past half-century. Thoreau has gone from being dismissed as a hermit with an impractical philosophy to being viewed as a political writer who engaged in affirmative protest to, finally, being acknowledged as a hermetic yet political thinker who embraced an idealized brand of civic participation.
2.3 Discussion of Thoreauvian Civil Disobedience in the Literary Field Outside the political arena, literary scholars have engaged in relatively few discussions of Thoreauvian civil disobedience. Existing literary explorations fall into three categories: 1) those contending that Emerson has a great influence on
Thoreauvian civil disobedience, 2) those asserting that Thoreauvian civil disobedience embodies Transcendentalism, and 3) those insisting that Thoreauvian civil
disobedience enacts Transcendentalist Higher Law.
2.3.1 Emersonian Interconnectedness
Philip F. Gura, Lawrence Buell, and Taylor trace Thoreauvian civil disobedience to Emersonianism, emphasizing various Emersonian ideas that, they contended, contributed to “Civil Disobedience.” In American Transcendentalism: A History (2007), Gura claims that Thoreau “took Emerson’s Romantic individualism to new
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heights and integrated it practically into ethics” (Gura 225). In The American
Transcendentalists (2006), Buell asserts that Thoreauvian civil disobedience “applied the principles of Emersonian Self-Reliance with a literalness and moral intensity that went beyond what even his mentor could then accept” (Buell 257). What Thoreau’s mentor – Emerson – could not accept then was Thoreau’s refusal to pay the state tax.
In fact, in My Friend, My Friend: The Story of Thoreau’s Friendship with Emerson (1999), Harmon Smith points out that Emerson disagreed with Thoreau about
violating the law as a means of protest, denouncing Thoreau’s behavior as “mean and skulking, and in bad taste” (Smith 106). Despite their different practical methods, Emerson and Thoreau still shared fundamental values; they were so similar to some extent that some critics even treat Thoreau as a disciple of Emerson and claim
“[Thoreau’s] ideas are all borrowed” (Taylor 54). For example, Taylor points out that
“Civil Disobedience” resembles Emerson’s “Politics,” only differing in that Thoreau had “a personal story to tell about ‘resistance to civil government’” (55). In The Routledge Guidebook to Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (2015), however, Taylor defends Thoreau, contending that his “originality is in the blending” (56) of some political ideas and opinions “found in others’ earlier works” (56) and his own
incarceration experience, thereby making his essay unique and able to “resonate with a much wider audience” (56) than Emerson’s “Politics.” Taylor does not amplify or diminish Emerson’s influence on Thoreau but impartially points out that the two were
“thinkers and writers [who grew] within an intellectual and artistic milieu, and all [borrowed] ideas that can be traced to others” (56). In short, critics have different opinions regarding Emerson’s influence on Thoreauvian civil disobedience: Gura acknowledges the presence of Emersonian individualism; Buell sees hints of Emersonian Self-Reliance; Taylor contends that Emerson and Thoreau influenced each other. All agree that the two writers’ political ideas and writings interconnect.
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2.3.2 Enacting the Transcendentalist Doctrines
Barbara L. Packer, Christopher Lyle Johnstone, and Jennifer Powell affirm the role of the Transcendentalist principles in Thoreauvian civil disobedience and highlight the link between these principles and politically practical actions. In The Transcendentalists (2007), Packer points out that, the idealistic Transcendentalists always had trouble bridging “the gap between principle and action” (191). However, she maintains that Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” shows that, as long as people are willing to maintain the correct principles, the like-minded among them could create a new world (Packer 191). During the 1840s, the Transcendentalists “often felt as if they were outside the mainstream of human activity” (237), but the political indignities of the early 1850s “confirmed Emerson and Thoreau in their sense that they had been right to insist on private integrity before all else” (231). They believed that only through individual rectitude could citizens fight against and overcome “the stupidity of government or the immorality of law” (231). Thoreau’s “Civil
Disobedience” and the participation of many Transcendentalists in antislavery
Disobedience” and the participation of many Transcendentalists in antislavery