![]() Libertarians like to claim him, but Thoreau’s experiment in Walden was not so much a “going off the grid” like today’s survivalist fringe, so much as it was an effort to find a way to live against state-thinking. But vehemence alone does not establish a shared affinity. Much rightwing rhetoric today pronounces itself with vitriol equal to Thoreau’s against government programs they oppose, like health care, public education, and regulation (versions of government Thoreau scarcely knew). Thoreau was unlike the “no-government men” or at least, he wanted to be. But just a page later we find Thoreau reformulating: “But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.” This idea is different: Thoreau’s expectancy for improvement, his call to better government, is less often heard, even from left anarchist circles, than his call to do without it. “I heartily accept the motto–“That government is best which governs least”…Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe–“That government is best which governs not at all.” These are words to thrill a modern Tea Party activist. ![]() The famously combative opening sentence of his essay on Civil Disobedience is memorable. So, lest we be hopelessly anachronistic in our reading, we must keep in mind all that Thoreau could not have meant, when we try to recover what it meant for him to dwell apart from his society, what prompted him to utter his famous animadversions against government and to pronounce our individual duty to resist it. There was no federal income tax, no Social Security, no FBI or NSA. ![]() Even those enjoying the heights of antebellum civilization that Thoreau rejected, did so without electricity, telephones, televisions, cars, the highway system, airplanes, or the internet. But, if we take too literally his descriptions of how he lived, and what he lived for, we can sometimes forget that the society he temporarily distanced himself from was, by today’s standards, itself incredibly spartan. Every American school child knows how Thoreau went to live in a cabin by a pond in Walden forest, and how he epitomized the search for a more basic and independent way of life. I wonder: could I be mistaken in my conviction that, however much leftwing anarchism can sound like rightwing libertarianism, they ultimately form distinct and opposed political traditions?įor answers, I turn to Thoreau, and his queer little errand into the wild a century and half ago. This anarchist resurgence inspires me, even as it disquiets. But how can I extol the worldview of this fearless forerunner of queer anarchism while the anti-government wing of the governing party allows the sick and needy to go uncared for, the statistics on the jobless to go uncollected, the safety of our food supply to go unverified? There is a great deal of interest today, post-Occupy, in anarchist political philosophy and horizontal modes of organizing and action. And I, like Abelove, very much want to be seduced. The scholar Henry Abelove has called Thoreau’s prose persona seductive. Teaching Thoreau’s great essay on ‘ Resistance to Civil Government‘ during a partial shutdown of the US federal government is an occasion for feelings of great ambivalence. “My thoughts are murder to the state.” - Henry David Thoreau, 19th century American writer, conservationist, and proto-anarchist. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” - Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government.
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