I wish to thank Danielle Allen, Shelley Burtt, Chad Cyrenne, Jacob Levy, Michael Lienesch, Dimitriy Masterov, and Chris Planer, in addition to the participants of the University of Chicago's Political Theory Workshop and the anonymous readers for The Review for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. The writing of the essay was made possible in part by a fellowship from the Institute for Humane Studies.

1. Rosenblum's, Nancy original reflections on “Thoreau's Militant Conscience,” (Political Theory 9 [1981]: 81–110)Google Scholar are reconciled to a theory of liberal democracy in her book Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and in her introduction to Thoreau's, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Kateb's, George book The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar identifies Thoreau as an embodiment of the ideals of modern representative democracy. Recent scholarship by Walker, Brian (“Thoreau's Alternative Economics: Work, Liberty, and Democratic Cultivation,” American Political Science Review 92 [1998]: 845–856CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Thoreau on Democratic Cultivation,” Political Theory 29 [2001]: 155–189)CrossRefGoogle Scholar builds on this theme by reading Walden as a “democratic self-help book.”

2. Unfortunately, the term “civil disobedience” has been appropriated in service of a variety of political agendas, ranging from that of Martin Luther King Jr. to Gandhi to the New Left. The invocation of Thoreau's act and accompanying essay in these contexts has harnessed both with connotations Thoreau did not intend; mass demonstrations, for example, are perceived as constitutive of and necessary to this type of political action. As I hope this paper will make clear, Thoreau is better identified with the more solitary and anarchist tradition of “civil disobedience” emblematized by Antigone's embrace of moral over political law.

3. For the strongest statement of this view, see Buranelli, Vincent, “The Case Against Thoreau,” Ethics 67 (07, 1957): 257–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Eulau, Heinz (“Wayside Challenger: Some Remarks on the Politics of Henry David Thoreau,” in Thoreau: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Paul, Sherman [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962])Google Scholar and Madison, Charles A. (“Henry David Thoreau: Transcendental Individualist,” Ethics 54 [01 1944]: 110–23)CrossRefGoogle Scholar agree that his politics lead ultimately to “a blind alley.” More sympathetically, Philip Abbott claims that Thoreau's preoccupation with finding his own identity grounds a political ethic that, while compelling, is simply unrealizable by others: see “Henry David Thoreau, the State of Nature, and the Redemption of Liberalism,” Journal of Politics 47 (1985): 182–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Before I proceed I should point out that by “democracy” I mean its modern liberal-representative version, because this is the form Thoreau is usually assumed to embrace. This definition, moreover, presents the greatest challenge to my argument since I also acknowledge that Thoreau's liberalism, coupled with his principled dislike of structured political participation, would prohibit him from endorsing other, more thoroughgoing forms—an assumption usually invoked to link Thoreau's political project with representative democratic institutions.

5. Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” in Thoreau, Henry David, Political Writings, ed. Rosenblum, Nancy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 20–21Google Scholar. All following citations of Thoreau's political essays refer to this edition unless otherwise noted.

6. The usual title given this essay is “Civil Disobedience.” But despite Mohandas K. Gandhi's attribution of this term to Thoreau, Thoreau himself never uses the term anywhere in any of his works. When given as a lecture at the Lyceum, Concord on 26 01 1848, the essay was titled “On the Relation of the Individual to the State”Google Scholar; its published title (in Peabody's, ElizabethAesthetic PapersGoogle Scholar) is “Resistance to Civil Government.” Only after Thoreau was dead for four years did the essay assume the title that finally stuck. Since the original (and only authorized) published title suggests that Thoreau's essay placed more weight on examining the responsibilities of an individual in responding to government activity than on the institutionalization of the act as a standard of democratic conduct, I have retained it here. For more on this history see Glick's, Wendell exhaustive textual commentary in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Reform Papers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 313–21Google Scholar; and Harding, Walter, The Variorum Civil Disobedience (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967), p. 59 n.lGoogle Scholar.

7. Edward Madden identifies the major elements of Transcendentalism as “German romanticism [via Coleridge], a distinction between Reason and Understanding, a basic optimism about human nature, and a general commitment to intuitionism as a theory of knowledge” (Civil Disobedience and Moral Law in Nineteenth-Century American Philosophy [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968], p. 8)Google Scholar.

8. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Nature,” The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Atkinson, Brooks (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 23Google Scholar.

9. Madden, , Civil Disobedience and Moral Law, p. 88Google Scholar. This synergy was first explicated by Parker, Theodore in his Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion, bk 2, chaps. 6–8 (Boston: Rufus Leighton, Jr., 1859)Google Scholar. For a more detailed philosophical history of Transcendentalism, see Goddard, Harold Clark, Studies in New England Transcendentalism (New York: Hillary House Publishers, 1960)Google Scholar.

10. See for example Thoreau, , Walden, in Walden and Other Writings, ed. Krutch, Joseph Wood (New York: Bantam Books, 1962), pp. 320, 325, 339Google Scholar. Far from embodying the duplicitous combination of violent antagonism and moral innocence that Nancy Rosenblum (Another Liberalism) perceives Thoreau's militant conscience as forcing upon the natural world, nature stands most prominently in Thoreau's works as a manifestation of the higher law.

11. Thoreau, , Walden, p. 319Google Scholar. Thoreau's essay “The Natural History of Massachusetts” was commissioned by Emerson to explore how the concrete particulars of nature could yield principles of the general and universal. In that essay Thoreau, notes, “The merely political aspect of the land is not very cheering; men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organization.” See The Transcendentalists: An Anthology, ed. Miller, Perry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), pp. 324–25Google Scholar.

12. Thoreau, , “Resistance,” p. 14Google Scholar. Rosenblum, , “Militant Conscience,” p. 94Google Scholar, cites this passage as evidence of Thoreau's celebration of competition and antagonism in nature. I think it more reasonable to assume (especially in the context of Thoreau's other nature writings and the beliefs of his fellow Transcendentalists) that his mention of the trees is a simple reiteration of his conviction that nature impels all the elements within it, especially and including man, to “obey their own laws.”

13. He does not, however, recognize a political obligation as a necessarily moral obligation. The distinction between political and moral obligations is dealt with more fully later in the paper.

14. Thoreau, , “Resistance,” pp. 10, 13, 17Google Scholar. Here and throughout the paper I use the term “politics” and all its derivatives simply to identify that which involves, or exists as a condition of, the institution and affairs of government.

15. Thoreau, , “Resistance,” pp. 1–2Google Scholar.

16. Rosenblum, , “Thoreau's Militant Conscience,” pp. 98, 100–101Google Scholar.

17. See Walzer, Michael, Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 129Google Scholar. “For what is lost when morality becomes ‘merely personal’ is…the sharing of moral knowledge, the sense of Another's presence, the connection of the individual to a universal order.” He denies that a subjective sense of right can involve any meaningful sense of responsibility (p. 22)Google Scholar. However, I fail to see why a methodologically individualist understanding of values precludes moral interactions with others, or how a conviction in a higher, “universal” order or law can possibly relieve one of moral responsibility.

18. Thoreau, , Walden, pp. 265, 267Google Scholar. This sentiment is echoed throughout other his other works; e.g. “Slavery in Massachusetts,” p. 127Google Scholar.

19. For more details on Thoreau's association with the abolitionist movement see Sanborn, Frank, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (Boston, 1917), pp. 466–69Google Scholar; Glick, Wendell, “Thoreau and Radical Abolitionism” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1950)Google Scholar; Broderick, John C., “Thoreau, Alcott, and the Poll Tax,” Studies in Philoloogy 53 (1956): 612–26Google Scholar.

20. An exhaustive survey of these reformers and the variety of political programs they formulated can be found in Perry, Lewis, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 36–45; 174Google Scholar. For a focus on Transcendentalist movements, see Francis, Richard, Transcendental Utopias: Individuality and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

21. Francis, Richard, Transcendental Utopias, p. xGoogle Scholar. Francis portrays Thoreau's mission as a replacement of the totality with an individual, and interprets Thoreau's hut at Walden pond as symbolic of the fundamental unit of his community (p. 227).

22. Emerson repeatedly expresses confidence that the laws of Nature act persistently to bring humanity back to the moral track. See especially his essay “Compensation,” The Selected Writings, p.174Google Scholar.

23. For example, he complains that the political candidates currently running for office “have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it.” Emerson, , “Politics,” The Selected Writings, p. 428Google Scholar. In his journals Emerson derided Thoreau's radicalism, and criticized him for his refusal to admit of concerted moral action: “If I knew only Thoreau, I should think cooperation of good men impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, comfort, and joy?” Emerson's Journals, IX, p. 498Google Scholar. Cited in Madden, , Civil Disobedience and Moral Law, p. 90Google Scholar.

24. William Earle rightly identifies it as a question of moral resolution to a moral conflict between public law and private conscience (“Some Paradoxes of Private Conscience as a Political Guide,” Ethics 80 [1970]: 306–12), p. 306CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Wolff, Robert Paul, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), especially pp. 18–19Google Scholar.

25. Thoreau, , “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” p. 151Google Scholar.

26. Thoreau recognizes the need for attributing the government with penal power, but seems to believe that those who violate the higher law will themselves recognize the justice in their punishment: “the murderer always knows that he is justly punished” (ibid., p. 156).

27. Thoreau, , “Resistance,” 14Google Scholar.

28. King, , “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” reprinted in Bedau, , Civil Disobedience, p. 74Google Scholar. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, King phrases this display of bodies in religious terms: the protesters are “witnesses to the truth as [they] see it.” Quoted in Cohen, Carl, Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics, and the Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 40Google Scholar.

29. In her article “Civil Disobedience,” (Crises of the Republic [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969]), p. 60Google Scholar, Hannah Arendt dismisses Thoreau's actions as inherently unpolitical, since they are private actions taken merely to free himself from evil. The basis for her judgment is the equation of conscientious action with mere opinion separated from the bodily action that would have public consequences. However, Thoreau intended his act to demonstrate that only private, conscientious action can avoid the false dichotomy between body and mind; taking action according to the rules and laws of the public realm alienates one's mindful, moral responsibility from the body it inhabits.

30. Thoreau, , “Resistance,” p. 6Google Scholar.

31. Lewis, H. D. notes the agreement among moral philosophers that virtue must be cultivated, meaning its practice must be habitual and ongoing. “Obedience to Conscience,” Mind 54 (1945)Google Scholar.

32. Thoreau, , “Resistance,” p. 11Google Scholar. In “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” p. 152Google Scholar, Thoreau asks quite simply, “When were the good and brave ever in a majority?”

33. Wolff, , In Defense of Anarchism, p. 29Google Scholar. See also Thoreau, , “Slavery in Massachusetts,” p. 132Google Scholar.

34. Thoreau, , “Slavery in Massachusetts,” p. 128Google Scholar.

35. Thoreau, , “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” p. 150Google Scholar.

36. Ibid., p. 140.

37. “The few who talk about his vindictive spirit, while they really admire his heroism, have no test by which to detect a noble man, no amalgam to combine with his pure gold. They mix their own dross with it” (ibid., p. 149).

38. See Simmons, A. John, Moral Principlesand Political Obligations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar and Cameron's, J. R. “‘Ought’ and Institutional Obligations,” Philosophy 46 (1971): 320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Thoreau, , “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” p. 156.Google Scholar

40. While all moral obligations do rely on certain necessary pre-conditions for their realization (e.g., most require the presence of another sentient being), these preconditions do not ground their reasons for fulfillment. Stacker, Michael, “Moral Duties, Institutions, and Natural Facts,“ The Monist 54 (1970): 610.Google Scholar

41. Simmons, , Moral Principles and Political Obligations, pp. 17, 24.Google Scholar See also Singer, Peter, Democracy and Disobedience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973):Google Scholar “Our ultimate obligation to obey the law is a moral obligation and not a legal obligation. Itcannot be a legal obligation, for this would lead to an infinite regress—since legal obligations derive from laws, there would have to be a law that says we must obey the law. What obligation would there then be to obey this law?” (p.3).

42. Stocker, , “Moral Duties,” p. 611.Google Scholar

43. Cameron, , “‘Ought’ and Institutional Obligation,” p. 311.Google Scholar

44. Simmons would agree with this assessment, noting that there are certain positive moral duties, like securing justice, that may sometimes require that we perform the obligations attached to various institutional roles, simply because that is the most (or sometimes only) efficient way of discharging those duties. “External Justifications and Institutional Roles,” in Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 95.Google Scholar

45. For an overview of this debate over the moral duty of politicalobligations, see Pennock, J. Roland and Chapman, John, eds. Political and Legal Obligation: Nomos XII (New York: Atherton Press, 1970), pp. xvi–xviii.Google Scholar As already noted, George Kateb believes that the legal and political procedures of constitutional democracy (and, we may infer, the obligations required to sustain them) have intrinsic moral worth; see The Inner Ocean, p. 57.Google Scholar

46. Thoreau, , “Life Without Principle,” p. 117.Google Scholar

47. Rosenblum, , Another Liberalism, pp. 105–106.Google Scholar

48. Hanna Pitkin contends that both Locke and Joseph Tussman advance consent theories which do not ground obligation in consent, but really see the arrangement as anobligation to consent to a (just) government; this means that one's political obligation isderived not from an incidence of contract but from a judgment of the justness of the government: “Obligation and Consent—I,” American Political Science Review 59 (1965): 990–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Two responses to Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism echo Arendt's argument in “Civil Disobedience” that the issue at stake in consent theory is less the security of moral autonomy than the protection of a sense of the common good: Ladenson, Robert F. contends that the authority of the state is grounded in respect for its service of the unanimously agreed-upon “good” (American Philosophical Quarterly 9 [1972]: 335–341);Google Scholar and Lisa Perkins follows Socrates in asserting that obedience to laws is grounded in a duty to preserve the conditions that make the good possible.“On Reconciling Autonomy and Authority,” Ethics 82 (1972): 114–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. For instance, see Arendt, Hannah, “Civil Disobedience,” p. 85;Google ScholarTussman, , Obligation and theBody Politic, p. 10.Google Scholar Michael Walzer, in Obligations, elaborates a version of consent wherein obligations are grounded in promises made to other people, so that obligation begins with membership in a group; the state is a primary authority whose obligations may nevertheless conflict with those of a secondary group (pp. 7, 10, 21). But since Thoreau certainly did not phrase his obligation to higher law in terms of group membership, the same criticisms he implicitly levels against the collectivism of democratic “consent” apply here.

50. Kateb, , The Inner Ocean, pp. 114, 120, 173.Google Scholar

51. This is Herzog's, Don argument in Happy Slaves: A Critique of Consent Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 205–13.Google Scholar He notes that responsiveness does not itself imply consent, but a list of regimes we intuit as resting on consent will all be the responsive ones. Moreover, given that true voluntary consent is difficult to establish, he suggests that it may be more important to respect the autonomy of all individual people under a political regime which could take consent as its foundation than to worry about securing the consent itself.

52. Thoreau, , “Resistance,” p. 13.Google Scholar

53. See Thoreau, , “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” p.151;Google Scholar“Resistance to Civil Government,” p. 20.Google Scholar This is very similar to the argument made by A. John Simmons on behalf of John Locke. Simmons maintains that Locke intended expressed consent, and that any attempts to reconcile his theory to reality by formulating approximations to this consent (as through the radical participationism of Herzog or the hypothetical contractarianism of John Rawls) miss the point entirely. See On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 74–78.Google Scholar

54. Thoreau, , Walden, p. 345.Google Scholar

55. Kateb, , The Inner Ocean, p.78.Google Scholar

56. Kateb, , The Inner Ocean, pp. 57–64.Google Scholar I should note that my argument with Kateb extends only to his characterization of Thoreau as a democrat, not to his arguments about the value of constitutionalism and representative democracy.

57. See Rosenblum, Another Liberalism, and “Thoreau's Militant Conscience.” Her later views concerning Thoreau's commitment to representative democracy become considerably less ambivalent: see her introduction to Thoreau, Henry David, Political Writings, pp. xxix–xxx.Google Scholar

58. Rosenblum, , “Thoreau's Militant Conscience,” p. 83.Google Scholar

59. Rosenblum, , Another Liberalism, p. 103.Google Scholar

60. Ibid., p. 92.

61. Thoreau, , “Resistance,” p. 10.Google Scholar

62. Thoreau, , “The Last Days of John Brown,” pp. 164–5.Google Scholar

63. Richardson, Robert D. Jr, “The Social Ethics of Walden,” in Critical Essays on Henry David Thoreau's Walden, , ed. Myerson, Joel (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988), p. 244.Google Scholar

64. Even his abolitionism was less directly political than one may imagine. Alfred Tauber insightfully observes that Thoreau's indignation over slavery arisesmore from the fact that his rights are being threatened, not the slaves'. Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 191.Google Scholar

65. Simmons, , Moral Principles and PoliticalObligations, p. 190.Google Scholar

66. Brian Walker relates Thoreau's doctrine of advice-givingto the concept of continuity between everyday activity in the local sphere and in the rest of the political sphere, which is precisely the way Thoreau seems to envision political activity in the ideal state. It is unclear from his article, however, what for Walker constitutes Thoreau's endorsement of democratic institutions as such, other than Thoreau's gestures in Walden toward a universal capacity for self-cultivation: “Thoreau on Democratic Cultivation,” pp. 180–83Google Scholar.

67. Kateb, , The Inner Ocean, p. 40Google Scholar.

68. Rosenblum, , Another Liberalism, p. 114Google Scholar.

69. Thoreau, , Walden, pp. 135, 138Google Scholar.

70. Thoreau, , “Resistance,” p. 17Google Scholar.

71. This is Rosenblum's claim in Another Liberalism, p. 64Google Scholar.

72. See, for instance, ibid., p. 153.

73. Lewis, H. D., “Obedience to Conscience,” p. 244Google Scholar.

74. Thoreau, , “Resistance,” p. 21Google Scholar. Such a characterization may lend some support to the “community consciousness” that many commentators read into Thoreau's social criticism in Walden: e.g., Drinnon, Richard, “Thoreau's Politics of the Upright Man,” in Walden and Civil Disobedience: Authoritative Texts, Background, Reviews and Essays in Criticism, ed. Thomas, Owen (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1966), p. 416Google Scholar.

75. Thoreau, , “Paradise (to be) Regained,” Reform Papers, p. 42Google Scholar.

76. See, e.g., Tussman, , Obligation and the Body Politic, pp. 18, 25–31Google Scholar; Walzer, Michael, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Political Affairs 2 (1973): 160–80Google Scholar.

77. Thoreau, , “Resistance,” p. 18Google Scholar.