Finding Thoreau: The Meaning of Nature in the Making of an Environmental Icon by Richard W. Judd

Author:Richard W. Judd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:46:14.616000+00:00

Was Thoreau an Anarchist?

The “Now Thoreau,” as the Ohio State Lantern put it, was not always so self-evident. In his American Mind in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Irving Bartlett assured readers that “when loyalty to state collided with loyalty to the higher law, Thoreau knew what his duty was.” In fact, Thoreau never made clear what he meant by duty or, for that matter, how he defined the state. Thoreau scholars Sherman Paul and Lyndon Shanley insisted that he saw government, in the main, as a useful instrument, but Townsend Scudder saw him as a biblical David, “armed and ready to fight . . . [a] government [that] threatens to become a tyrant Goliath.” Like Scudder, Truman Nelson thought in more radical terms. “How Thoreau pours scorn on this liberalism,” he marveled. “I could never understand how writing as full of revolutionary incitements as ‘Civil Disobedience’ can be fed like pap to students without, until recently, causing any noticeable upheavals.”19

In his landmark Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, published in 1968, Stoughton Lynd gave a good deal of thought to Thoreau’s interpretation of higher duty and the state.20 The question of the day, according to Lynd, was “what does Henry Thoreau think?” But again, it was not clear what Henry did think. He was often considered a pacifist, having inspired Mahatma Gandhi, but as Lynd pointed out, he also defended John Brown’s desperate raid on Harpers Ferry. “Why shrink from violence when for once it is employed in a righteous cause?” Thoreau wrote. Was he an anarchist? Thoreau began his essay on civil disobedience with a decidedly anarchical pronouncement: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and . . . it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—‘That government is best which governs not at all.’” But again Lynd qualified, since Thoreau asked a great deal indeed from the same government in the near term. If he was neither pacifist nor anarchist, was he a revolutionary? He was, Lynd concluded, because he pioneered the three elements that defined a truly American form of radicalism: direct action, civil disobedience, and nonviolence. This, Lynd announced, was the “essential quality of the new radicalism” that was sweeping across America—a radicalism unaligned with any particular ideology but beholden to higher law and revolutionary in its focus on specific injustice. Thoreau had become, in short, the perfect New Left protester.21

Inasmuch as Lynd, like Nelson, was a public intellectual, his book helped position Thoreau in popular thought as an American rebel, but Lynd also touched off a heated debate about where he fitted into this radical tradition. Robert Dickens considered Thoreau a prescient critic of the industrial system, but where Lynd saw his individualism as a new form of radicalism, Dickens saw it as “the greatest cop-out of all, because it fails to recognize that man is . . . part of a social/natural environment by necessity.” Nelson, whose radical lineage went back to the 1930s, agreed with Dickens: “If you declare your liberation from all institutions .

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