The Political Thought of Henry David Thoreau: Privatism and the Practice of Philosophy

Jonathan McKenzie : The Political Thought of Henry David Thoreau: Privatism and the Practice of Philosophy . (Lexington : University Press of Kentucky , 2015. Pp. 214.)

Book Reviews

All his life, Henry David Thoreau resisted being tamed--whether that be by his contemporaries, the state, or the conceits of modernity (one of those conceits being, of course, that the tame is the more civilized, and therefore more desirable, state of existence). "As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame," he wrote, "so is the wild--the mallard--thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way against the fens" ("Walking," in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau [Houghton, Mifflin, 1893], 9:283).

Jonathan McKenzie revives that resistance, defending Thoreau against the inclination in present-day scholarship to tame the wild man of Concord. Specifically, McKenzie takes on the way in which political theorists narrow Thoreau to suit our own purposes--to domesticate him, essentially, in ways Thoreau would resist. That is no insignificant task, given the number of serious political theorists who have attended to Thoreau of late, such as Jane Bennett, Shannon Mariotti, Jack Turner, and Brian Walker.

McKenzie makes a fascinating claim that despite the intelligence that all of those thinkers (and others like them) bring to Thoreau, their readings share the great professional liability of political theory. That liability, simply put, is that we political theorists like to theorize politically. We are good at seeing--we are trained to see--the political dimensions of things, even those that seem a- or anti-political to most. Moreover, many of us who are presently theorists think by reflex in democratic terms, sussing out the resources that any text offers for democratic engagement, participation, or vitalization.

McKenzie argues that these inclinations lead...