Thoreau’s Dialectic of Dissent and Contemporary Activism

• Published date: 01 June 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129221109152
• Author: Lisa Gilson
• Date: 01 June 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(2) 667–679

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129221109152

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Thoreau’s Dialectic of Dissent and

Contemporary Activism

Lisa Gilson

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Abstract

Recent scholarship on Thoreau’s thought has pushed in two opposing directions: some have maintained tha t Thoreau’s

withdrawals from political engagement were actually intended to serve democratic ends, whereas others have argued

that Thoreau’s political engagement was a lapse in his better judgment. In this essay, I contend that neither interp retation

of Thoreau’s thought fully captures the roles that political engagement and disengagement played in his life as a dissident.

Instead, via an examination of Thoreau’s“Walking”and his reform papers, I argue that Thoreau modeled a dialectical

approach to dissent, where the “antithesis”of withdrawal served as a specif‌ic antidote to the personal toll of the “the sis”

of political action. As I show, Thoreau’s attention to the potential costs of radical dissent makes his dialectical model

especially relevant for those for whom the costs are highest, including contemporary womenactivists of color. Forthese

women, normalizing a practice of continual disengagement from activism might benef‌it them in ways that collaborative

solidarity cannot.

Keywords

Thoreau, dialectic, dissent, withdrawal, activism, captive maternal

On April 23

rd

, 1851—17 days after the African-American

Thomas Sims was tried in Boston under the Fugitive Slave

Act of 1850, 11 days after he was sent back to Georgia

under military guard, and 4 days after he was publicly

whipped by his once-again master—Thoreau delivered

the lecture “Walking”at the Concord Lyceum (1906,5:

205-49). During the weeks leading up to the lecture,

Thoreau had uncharacteristically devoted a great degree of

attention in his journal entries to these political devel-

opments. Decrying the “Carrying off [of] Sims”in lengthy

passages, Thoreau compared state off‌icials’f‌idelity to the

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to the “monstrous and

anomalous cruelties”of Caligula and Nero (1906, 8:173).

Ultimately, Thoreau wrote in his journals, the trial re-

vealed that the “true sources of justice in any community”

were the people who felt compelled to challenge the courts

(178). Thoreau hoped that Concord, his town of residence,

would be “a place where tyranny may ever be met with

f‌irmness and driven back with defeat to its ships”(1906,

173).

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Given these militant entries, some of which were

written just a few days before the lecture, it would be

natural to assume that his “Walking”lecture would em-

phasize the duties citizens owed to a “higher law”of

justice over the “sentence of the Judge”(Thoreau 1906,8:

181). After all, 3 years before this lecture, without so

immediate a provocation, Thoreau had written “Resis-

tance to Civil Government”—an unmistakably political

speech, delivered at the same venue, in which he declared

he could “not for an instant recognize that political or-

ganization as my government which is the slave’sgov-

ernment also”(Thoreau 1906, 4:360). Yet, by all

appearances, “Walking”took the opposite tack. Where

“Resistance to Civil Government”had condemned those

who were “in opinion opposed to slavery and to the

[Mexican-American] war, who yet in effect [did] nothing

to put an end to them”(1906, 4:362), “Walking”insisted

that “there [were] enough champions of civilization”

(1906, 5:205). Why, at that particular juncture, did

Thoreau decide to lecture on his walks of “ten, f‌ifteen,

twenty, any number of miles”in the woods to places

where “politics are not”(1906, 5:212)?

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Bates College, Lewiston, ME, USA

Corresponding Author:

Lisa Gilson, Politics, Bates College, Pettengill Hall Room 173, Lewiston,

ME 04240, USA.

Email: lgilson@bates.edu