Thoreau and John Brown (original) (raw)
Thoreau’s defense of John Brown in the aftermath of the radical abolitionist’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry is arguably the most overtly political act of Thoreau’s life. Scholars tend to focus, however, on “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) as the definitive statement of Thoreau’s politics at the expense of the 1859 “Plea for Captain John Brown.” This essay asks what Thoreau’s “Plea” for John Brown can teach us about Thoreau’s politics when we make it the central object of inquiry: it spotlights Thoreau’s rhetoric of Americanism, his theory of revolutionary violence, and his thinking about the ethical significance of human mortality. Finally, it argues that the best way to conceive of Thoreau’s politics is as one requiring the public performance of conscience. Thoreau is not an anti-political thinker; he wishes rather to infuse art into politics.
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Performing Conscience: Thoreau, Political Action, and the Plea for John Brown
Does Henry Thoreau have a positive politics? Depending on how one conceives of politics, answers will vary. Hannah Arendt famously portrayed Thoreau’s commitment to the sanctity of individual conscience as distinctly unpolitical. More recent commentators grant that Thoreau has a politics, but they characterize it as profoundly negative in character. This essay argues that Thoreau indeed sponsors a positive politics—a politics of performing conscience. The performance of conscience before an audience transforms the invocation of conscience from a personally political act into a publicly political one. The aim of the performance is to provoke one’s neighbors into a process of individual self-reform that will make them capable of properly vigilant democratic citizenship and conscientious political agitation. I establish this claim through a sustained reading of a relatively neglected text that deserves wider attention in political theory: Thoreau’s 1859 lecture defending insurrectionary activities by radical abolitionist John Brown.
While Thoreau represents a great intellectual point of reference in today's political theories, this has never been always the same. The popular magazines during Thoreau's lifetime wrote a different view about him. This paper focuses on the life of Thoreau in the course of history. How he was received during his time in some popular magazines such as The Sun and The New York Times, and how some contemporary scholars such as Henry Salt saw his work. The paper will then focus on current trends in the works of Thoreau. How scholars like Leigh Kathryn Jenco and Jack Turner see Thoreau today, and how far he has influenced the American society. The subject of criticism is a spotlight on Thoreau's work, " Civil Disobedience " .
Thoreau and the Politics of Ordinary Actions
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Many regard Henry David Thoreau as an apolitical or even antipolitical thinker, concerned above all with his personal moral purity, and thus unresponsive and irresponsible towards the society in which he lived. Contrary to this received interpretation, I argue that Thoreau's life and work articulates a robust and complex doctrine of intersubjective responsibility and political agency. Although he denies individual responsibility to institutions and other persons, he soberly embraces individual responsibility for one's role in shaping and maintaining the arrangements of society, including those that compromise the self and lend support to vicious practices and institutions. In respect of his understanding of responsibility, both his strident critique of modern society and his committed individualism appear as political postures especially apt for late modern times.
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Walking Away with Thoreau: The Pleasures and Risks of Exit
Much of the political theory literature on Thoreau is divided, with one camp focusing on resistance and civil disobedience, while the second concentrates on withdrawal. This bifurcation is not borne out in Thoreau’s texts, and it can lead to a mischaracterization of Thoreau as an essentially instrumental thinker and an idiosyncratic political actor. In this article I argue against this bifurcation of withdrawal and resistance, maintaining that Thoreau’s exit was simultaneously a mode of resistance. His “resistant exit” has double political significance because it was instrumental and expressive. In addition to the change that it can produce in the individual, Thoreau’s resistant exit is consequential because the action itself symbolizes opposition.
Towards a Reconciliation of Public and Private Autonomy in Thoreau's Politics
Astrolabio Revista Internacional De Filosofia, 2009
Resumen: Tras una revisión bibliográfica, el artículo proporciona una presentación de la filosofía política de Henry D. Thoreau, enfatizando en su obra un concepto de autodeterminación cívica que Habermas descompone en una autonomía pública y otra privada. Sostengo que Thoreau no era un anarquista antisocial, ni tampoco un mero liberal individualista, sino que su liberalismo presenta elementos propios de la teoría democrática e incluso del comunitarismo político. Finalmente, identifico y describo una tensión entre esos temas liberales y democráticos, tanto en la obra de Thoreau como en la vida política de las sociedades occidentales, mostrando así la relevancia de este autor.
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