Thoreau's Assault on the State

As I write this, the one hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the day Thoreau first presented his essay on civil disobedience as a lecture (January 26, 1848) is upon us, and I have not noticed any attempts to commemorate this event.⁽¹⁾ I think it is, nonetheless, appropriate to return to the ideas he presented there and give them a moment of thoughtful reconsideration.

The title of the first lecture his Concord audience heard was actually "On the Relation of the Individual to the State," which suggests that the subject Thoreau is treating is actually much larger than the technique of civil disobedience. The wider subject includes, not only the relation named in the original title, but the shape of the idea polity itself.

The notion of the ideal polity is stressed by the very structure of the essay, which both begins and ends with declarations about its nature and its possibility. At the end, he envisions a process in which individuals, who have attained enough moral maturity, drop out of the state altogether:

"A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen".⁽²⁾

Anyone who cannot grasp, quite on their own, what this "glorious State" would be can get a quick answer simply by turning around and beginning the essay again. It starts with the striking disclosure, "I heartily accept the motto, -- `That government is best which governs least'" and proceeds almost immediately to point out its logical implications:

"Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, -- `That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." (224)

The glorious State, the best government, is a stateless society, a government that does not govern. This, of course, would be anarchy. Yet Thoreau describes it, paradoxically, as a certain sort of state or government (a glorious one, the best). Thoreau's essay on the technique of civil disobedience is also an essay on the ideal state and how to get there. I will also suggest a little later on thathis essayt indicates a solution to the paradox that the ideal state is a government that does not govern.

Before I try to clear up any of the mysterious statements I have just made, I would like to say another word about the structure of the essay. Because it ends where it begins, the essay suggests a literal, physical shape: namely, the circle. The effect of this, or one of its effects, is to call attention to the beginning and the end, setting off the pronouncement of the ideal state from the rest of the text. The feeling of circularity is also suggested by the structure of the essay as a whole, which consists mostly of highly abstract and abstruse observations which encircle a very concrete, central narrative section. The section thus set off and framed (in the original edition, it was also indented) is the famous story of his incarceration for non-payment of taxes. The structure of the essay pulls our attention in two seemingly contrary directions: toward its most abstract and ideal portions, at its two termini, and to its most concrete and realistic portions, which lie in its nucleus. Perhaps the narrative section, like the ideal state pronouncements, can tell us something about how we are to take the essay as a whole.

Thoreau presents his narrative as the story of a journey, a trip into the interior of Concord's jail, and into the interior of the Concord itself: "It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside it" (238). Yet its effect - another Thoreauvian paradox - was to make the town seem distant and alien: "It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night" (237).⁽³⁾ Just as it alienated him from his village, it also seems to have alienated his fellow villagers from him, for he tells us that, when he emerged from the jail the next morning, they "first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey" (239).

This pathos of distance is imparted to the reader as well, not merely through Thoreau's depiction of curious details of the jail, such as its seemingly ancient thick walls and iron gratings, and of the odd customs and habits of its inhabitants, but mainly through the drama of the event itself, and through a sense of the shock one would feel at having coercion used against one in the name of one's friends and neighbors. As he surveyed his strange new surroundings, he says, "I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends" (238). The simple act of forcibly locking him up in this medieval building puts his relations with them on an entirely new footing, violating the bonds of neighborliness that prevailed only a moment ago.

The old bonds are repeatedly described by him, as indeed I just did, in terms of neighborliness. In fact, Thoreau uses the word "neighbor" and its cognates a total of 18 times in "Civil Disobedience" to characterize his normal relations with other individuals and the state and, ultimately, his ideal relations with the state.⁽⁴⁾ In an important passage detailing the precise extent of his tax revolt, he says, "I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject" (239). In the culminating passage on the ideal state, he says of the individuals who should be allowed to "stand aloof from" the state that they have "fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men" (243).

What is it to be a neighbor, in this sense of the word? As the comment on the highway tax indicates, it is very different from being a subject, so different that he suggests that he is actually a good neighbor and a bad subject. The argument Thoreau builds for his political method, and for his conception of the ideal state, is essentially an attempt to show that human beings in general are like him in being well-suited to being neighbors and ill-suited to being subjects. It is not that human beings make bad subjects, since they are all-too-adept at subjecting themselves to others, but that good subjects make bad human beings.

The argument revolves around an image, apparently metaphorical but probably meant literally, that dominates his comments on the relations between state and subject:

"A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, aye, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. ... Now, what are they? Men at all? or moveable forts and magazines at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?" (226)

He is expressing the thought that today might be put by saying that the file of soldiers are behaving like automata and not like men, a notion that by now has the nearly irresistible but somehow vacuous authority possessed by all cliches. But in Thoreau's day this idea was not a cliche, and he seems to be quite serious about it. Indeed, he persistently suggests that the state which he attacks, together with the servants who do its work, are committing an ontological error. He comments that the jail, with its walls and gratings, "treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up." He says that the people who put him in it are like boys who, "if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog." (236) Unlike the boys in question, however, they do not intentionally attack a surrogate victim, but mistake the surrogate for the original. Their mistake is about the type of being he is.

This mistake is to some extent inevitable: "The State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength." This is why "the state is half-witted." (ibid) Of the two halves of Thoreau's nature, it selects and deals with the wrong one, the one that is less essentially Thoreau.

Clearly, this is meant as an ontological claim, both about the individual and about the state. As to the state, it is perhaps obvious what Thoreau means: The state is distinguished from other human agencies by the fact that it has those walls and gratings, as well as many more brutal means, at its disposal. It only acts as the state, as opposed to acting as a preacher, a teacher, a debating society, or a club, when it threatens in some way to use such means.

As to the other side of this claim, the position it takes regarding the individual, it might also seem obvious what Thoreau is thinking: that the individual is more than anything else a spiritual being, a soul, and that this is why the actions of the state will always be in a certain way beside the point for beings like this.

Up to a certain point, this is of course also true -- that is what he means -- but there is more to it than that. Thoreau has a specific conception of what the spirituality of the individual amounts to, and of why this indicates that the action of the state is somehow beside the point.

Though there are indications of this specific conception in "Civil Disobedience," the fullest account is to be found in the pages of Walden. This idea is expressed and supported there by many different means, both literary and logical, but it is presented most directly in the chapter he called "Higher Laws":

"Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, and meanness or sensuality to imbrute them."⁽⁵⁾

The analogy Thoreau suggests here, between the body and a building, gets a pronounced sort of emphasis when read in the context of Walden, which contains definite notions about buildings and architecture. As he says in another passage, much earlier in the book:

"What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder, -- out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life."⁽⁶⁾

Just as the real architect of a house -- the author of its distinctive character -- is its "indweller," so the real architect of the body is its indweller. The course of human life, the current of principle and result, flows from the inside to the outside. When Thoreau is speaking of the individual directly (and not emblematically, through the medium of discussions of other subjects, such as architecture) he usually calls this indweller one's "genius," and in "Civil Disobedience," with its ethical subject-matter, he calls it "conscience" and "moral sense." No doubt, he would admit that there is much about a particular individual that is not there because of such internal factors. Your face, for instance, is a product of many factors in your environment. However, anything about it that makes it a living human face -- its habitual expression, for instance -- is due to your body's indweller and discloses it to us. Your face has this fundamental ambiguity, that it is at once a mere mechanism and a living, human physiognomy.

For Thoreau, this ambiguity is much more general than that. According to his view, you can degrade yourself from the status of a living human being to that of a mere mechanism simply by switching control of your conduct from your own genius and conscience to the various powers that dominate your environment. That, of course, is the profound error of the servants of the state:

"The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. ... In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones, and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw, or a lump of dirt." (226)

Thoreau's point is not that your life and well-being depend on your using your own judgment: it is that, if you do not use it, you are dead already.

This is the fate of those who are literally the subjects of the state, who subject their judgment to it by accepting it as their authority on matters of right and wrong. It follows that, when the state on the contrary commands you to collaborate with it in doing wrong, then -- quite literally, if you value your life -- you must disobey its command. This of course is Thoreau's celebrated method of civil disobedience.

One thing we should be able to see from all this is the fact that this method is not just a method. In certain circumstances, the alternative to it is a sort of self-degradation and death. As this alternative is an intrinsic evil, so this method is not a mere means but good in itself and, as such, good for the agent who uses it.

It is also an intrinsic part of the political good. The process of civil disobedience is not merely a way of correcting particular injustices, like the Fugitive Slave Law or the Mexican War. It is the same process as the one he describes at the end of the essay, as one in which individuals ripen and fall off the tree of the state. In it, he says, the state learns to treat "the individual with respect as a neighbor," which means that it will allow people to "live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it," provided only that they fulfill "all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men" (243).

In Thoreau's view, individuals who do not subject their judgement to that of the state stand outside it.⁽⁷⁾ The only question is whether the state should move to wipe such independence out. Part of the reason he believes it should not is that the particular sort of independence he has in mind does not merely involve rejecting subjection to the state: it also involves replacing it with something else. As the comments I just quoted suggest, the alternative he offers is neighborliness. As Thoreau describes it, this relation, like the relation between state and subject, also includes duties which may be relied on. As such, it is also a principle of social order, a polity. It is a glorious State, the more glorious for being no state at all.

1. The only exception, if it can be called that, is a chillingly snide little blurb in American Heritage by Senior Editor Frederic D. Schwarz. "Lincoln and Thoreau Get Pious," December 1997, p. 94-5. Schwarz compares Thoreau's method for fighting slavery unfavorably with Lincoln's, on the ground that Lincoln's method succeeded and Thoreau's did not. Slavery, he says, "was ended by a cohesive society," and "not by individuals reveling in their own unsullied virtue." He does not mention that this cohesive society accomplished this end by killing .......... people and transforming the South into an immense Dogpatch for almost a century to come.

2. "Civil Disobedience," in Walden and Civil Disobedience, ed. Owen Thomas (New York: Norton, 1966), p. 243. Hereafter, I will cite the sources for all quotations from "Civil Disobedience" parenthetically, in the text.

3. In yet another of his paradoxes, a paradox within a paradox, he has said that "to lie there" was like "travelling."

4. Stanley Cavell masterfully recounts the ways in which Thoreau depicts his relations with nature, and the relations between the parts of his own self, in terms of neighborliness in The Senses of Walden (New York: Viking Press, 1974) pp. 103-108.

5. Walden, in Walden and Civil Disobedience, p. 147.

6. Walden, pp. 31-32. The parallel between this passage and the one cited immediately above was pointed out by Stanley Cavell in The Senses of Walden, p. 105.

7. I venture to suggest, with some trepidation, that Cavell goes disastrously wrong on this issue. Commenting on the fact that Thoreau mentions having taken up residence at Walden Pond on the Fourth of July, he cautions us against seeing any positive connection between Walden and The Declaration of Independence. Thoreau makes it plain, Cavell points out, that he is not independent at all, either of society or of the state. See Senses, pp. 7-8 and 82-3. In a way, of course, this is right: Thoreau surely knows that he is not "independent," as Cavell seems to mean that word. I would only point out that in that sense Jefferson's Declaration itself was not meant to declare these states "independent" of Great Britain. Jefferson expected that we would continue to stand in relations of mutual dependence with that country: that we would need it as a trading partner, a source of ideas, and so forth. The independence he declared was only meant to put an end to our being subjected to it. And this is just the sort of independence Thoreau is declaring, both in Walden and in "Civil Disobedience."