Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal: Alienation, Participation, and Modernity

3 Man as Machine: Thoreau and Modern Alienation

3 Man as Machine Thoreau and Modern Alienation E The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Henry David Thoreau The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines. Henry David Thoreau E When Emerson and Thoreau are compared, Emerson is typically described as a pillar of society who took an active part in the political and social issues of his era while Thoreau is most remembered for his solitary sojourn in a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond. In his own time and even today, Thoreau has been criticized for not being worldly enough, sociable enough, or politically engaged enough. While Emerson was looked up to in Concord and was truly a leader of his town and country, Thoreau was the hermit who criticized the superficiality of society and had only scorn for the politics of his day. But the picture is considerably more complicated when we move from comparing Emerson and Thoreau as people to comparing their ideas. Theoretically , Emerson’s way of seeing the world seems to remove and disengage him from his historical context. In contrast, Thoreau’s withdrawal from mainstream society and politics paradoxically works to highlight the deeply situated 85 nature of his critical dialogue with the processes of modernization that characterized his own time. If for Emerson, “grief too will make us idealists” and motivates us to abstract away from the objects around us, for Thoreau suffering inspires political practices of withdrawal that engage particular objects to critique modern conditions of alienation in the world around us.1 Thoreau does not dismiss the objects of the world as disagreeable appearances and hasten toward a more harmonious and affirmative universal, as does Emerson. Instead, Thoreau pays the greatest attention to objects in the world and describes them in concrete terms. He takes seriously how nineteenth-century modernity was negatively shaping subjectivity: through the market and consumerism, through mainstream politics, and through social conventions such as manners and etiquette. These forces prompt him to withdraw from society to go walking and huckleberrying, practices which recuperate the same critical capacities that are threatened by modern society. Looking at Thoreau’s depiction of the alienated nature of experience in Concord, Massachusetts, we can trace his common ground with Adorno. Here, I lay out the problem that motivates Thoreau to go walking, to go huckleberrying, to confront the wild, and that, a century later, will stimulate Adorno’s practice of negative dialectics. Understanding Alienation in Historical Context: Thoreau’s Concord The specific setting for Thoreau’s writings is a town located eighteen miles inland from Boston, Massachusetts, where the Sudbury joins the Assabet to form the Concord River. Concord provided the context for every aspect of Thoreau’s life. He “used to say that he had been born in just the right place at just the right time,” according to Mary Hosmer Brown, the granddaughter of Edmund Hosmer, a Concord farmer and intellectual who was a friend of Thoreau’s.2 Thoreau was born and died in Concord. After college at Harvard, he was almost never away from his native town, except for a few brief excursions elsewhere in the United States and in Canada. But Thoreau is not just tied to Concord because he spent a lot of time there. His work cannot easily be abstracted away from Concord to apply to anyplace or anytime. Thoreau’s writing itself is situated, concrete, and specific. Concord was the setting for his thought and action: as he said, “The old coat that I wear is Concord: it is my morning robe and study gown, my working dress and suit of ceremony, and my nightgown after all.”3 On the surface, then, Thoreau’s statement that he had been born in just the right place and time seems to reaffirm his love of his hometown. But this isn’t a completely satisfying reading. While it is true that 86 Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal E Thoreau loved the landscape and nature around Concord, his writings about the town and his fellow townsmen tend to be very critical and come from a place of frustration. Thoreau is highly critical of the trappings of modernity as he understands them: the instrumentalization of nature, an increasing preoccupation with business and commerce, cultural refinement, superficial manners , and rules of etiquette.4 He was also born in just the right time and place to witness the...