Discussion of Thoreauvian Civil Disobedience in the Political Field

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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