Lessons from "Walden": Thoreau and the Crisis of American Democracy - Softcover

Taylor, Bob Pepperman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268107343 ISBN 13: 9780268107345

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025

Synopsis

Original and passionate, Lessons from Walden presents a wide-ranging inquiry into the nature and implications in the works of Henry David Thoreau.

Henry David Thoreau's works are a backbone of American political philosophy, but how do his ideas translate into the tumultuous modern political landscape? Bob Pepperman Taylor closely examines Walden and Civil Disobedience, focusing on the philosophical questions Thoreau raises. He considers simplicity and the ethics of "voluntary poverty," examines the role conscience plays in democratic policies, and the truth of what "nature" means, and what, if anything, we can learn from it today. By drawing on a wide range of perspectives—from historians, philosophers, and popular media—Taylor breathes new life into Thoreau's work and shows how it is still alive for us today. He allows all sides to have their say, even as he persistently steers the discussion back to a nuanced reading of Thoreau's actual position.

With a tone of friendly urgency, this interdisciplinary tour de force intersects American literature, environmental ethics, and political theory to address the concerns facing the current political landscape and the future of democracy.

About this title

About the Author

Bob Pepperman Taylor is the Elliott A. Brown Green and Gold Professor of Law, Politics, and Political Behavior at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Lessons from Walden, which was named the winner of the American Political Science Association section award for the best book of 2020 in American political thought.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Simplicity is not a minor concern in Walden. The first chapter, “Economy,” constitutes almost a quarter of the entire book. Thoreau clearly believes that if we are to think seriously about the causes of our “quiet desperation,” and to imagine ways of awakening from our moral stupor and learn that we can change more than our clothes, we must confront and significantly adjust our economic life. Thoreau’s discussions in “Economy” and elsewhere suggest that wealth and affluence are problems for at least four significant reasons. First, wealth is simply a distraction from more important things. He believes that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” Most importantly, if we spend all our time and attention caring for what he calls the “necessaries” of life, we are to that degree turned away from those humane pursuits he believes constitute greater goods. We’ll return below to what he has in mind about these higher goods, but for now it is sufficient to simply note that the imagery is of turning away from the trivial to the important, from the mundane to the meaningful: once the necessities are cared for, an individual is “to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.” In a famous image, he writes, “He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap,” suggesting one should minimize the needs of the body as much as possible for the sake of higher goods. He claims that he has learned to meet all his economic expenses, through good planning and learning to live simply, by working a mere six weeks annually. When we get caught in the trap of making our living, earning our way becomes a hardship rather than a pastime. As we mentioned in the introduction, Thoreau rants in “Life without Principle”: “It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work . . . I think there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.” At its simplest, Thoreau’s defense of voluntary poverty grows from his fear that attending too much and too seriously to economic affairs is both trivial and wasteful: “Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.” He equates luxury with dissipation. Cut away the waste and attend to more important matters. Thoreau comments that he went to Walden to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Voluntary poverty is not an end in itself, but it allows us to concentrate on those things that are.

Related to this concern about distraction is a claim about what we might call alienation, or control. In two famous passages, Thoreau writes, first, of men becoming “tools of their tools,” and, second, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” The idea is simply that the economy (including our technologies) has become a power over us rather than a set of practices and technologies we control as we wish. Similar observations are found in Marx’s (and others’) writings from the same period and suggest the degree to which modern economic development was taking on a life of its own, seemingly beyond the control of individuals or even social classes. The only cure for losing control of our individual, and even our collective, lives lies “in a rigid economy, a stern and more Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.” Chasing after wealth is not only a distraction, but the economy takes on a life of its own and becomes our master—reversing the appropriate relationship between workers and tools, the economy and the society it should serve.

A powerful third concern relates to the problem of justice. Thoreau is convinced that any society committed to the enthusiastic pursuit of wealth will necessarily generate economic inequality and injustice. He brags that his cabin “was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers,” despite there being no lock on the door. It is true that during his stay at Walden a single volume of Homer was taken from his cabin, but Thoreau is nonetheless “convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown.” Property crimes grow from inequality, and if we all lived simply, such inequality would evaporate. In American society, however, such inequality is essential to the economy itself: “The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another.”

(excerpted from chapter 1)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268107343
• ISBN 13: 9780268107345
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 258