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DEEP IN Walden's opening chapter, "Economy," Henry Thoreau intimates the irony of his title: "even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably." The irony is one that all readers of Walden recognize: under the heading "Economy," which he is careful to associate with the business boom of the American nineteenth century, Thoreau in fact talks about little more than the economy's excesses, how it heaps luxuries on the drowning man. His topic is not economy as he assumes his audience will expect it, but economy in the sense of thrift, and this is what readers come to comprehend by a phrase like "economy of living." But I mean to suggest that Thoreau is doubly ironic, swerving away from this meaning too, and reversing his field back toward economy in the anticipated sense. He does not of course do so systematically, and not in a way any student of political economy would accept. Nonetheless, his "economy of living" is acutely economic as no disciple of the Thoreauvian simple life would be willing to concede.
Thoreau prepares for these difficulties by presenting them in the context of the broad differences he observes between the work of the hands and the work of the head. Earlier in the paragraph on economies, he fields a hypothetical question about concrete and abstract living: "But, says one, you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?" "I do not mean that exactly," Thoreau replies, "but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that." This is the same basis on which, several sentences later, political economy seems to be distinguished from the economy of living: the work of the head, like economic theory, abstracts us from our lives; we should prefer the concrete engagements of hands-on, simple living.
But it is also the basis on which Thoreau is careful to distinguish the economy of living from the simple life. When he says, "I do not mean that exactly,"...