The title of Lessons from Walden, an extraordinary book, is puzzling. The word “lessons” brings to mind a kind of education that Thoreau, the central figure of Taylor’s book, might well have balked at. Lessons require compliant, passive students who, doing as they are told, lack any sort of freedom or personal direction over the shape of their education. Thoreau rejected this sort of overly disciplined, utilitarian instruction, instead preferring intellectual expeditions that were risky, passionate, and personal. If a lesson connotes the pap of conventional classrooms, Thoreau opposed it.
The reference to lessons in the book’s title also raises a question: Is Lessons a conventional endeavor, with Taylor instructing us didactically in the central insights of Walden? Such lessons require an authority figure, and Taylor has the credentials to fill this role. He has studied and written about Thoreau for more than 25 years.
For those who are looking for it, the book does provide a conventional argument, a lesson, that fits squarely into current academic debates about Thoreau’s politics. Thoreau has long been viewed as a detached, wry, even disdainful critic of American politics. For some, he is a hermit who washed his hands of the morally corrupting world of public affairs by decamping to Walden Pond on July 4, 1845. Within the burgeoning amount of scholarly attention devoted to Thoreau in recent years, this apolitical or anti-political line of interpretation has been challenged. Thoreau was a vocal critic of the Mexican War, he disapproved of the subjugation of Native Americans, and he advocated protecting the natural environment. Perhaps no other political issue compelled Thoreau more than slavery, an institution that he fought to eradicate in a variety of ways. In addition to speaking publicly about the harms of slavery, Thoreau occasionally assisted on the Underground Railroad, vehemently objected to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and publicly supported John Brown after his doomed assault on Harpers Ferry.
Taylor’s Lessons is firmly in the political camp, depicting Thoreau as an engaged critic of his day who, though skeptical of institutional government, sought to foster political and moral development among his fellow citizens. Indeed, Taylor goes further in arguing that Thoreau’s Walden speaks to two central challenges in American democracy today: disquiet about the character of democratic citizens and the destruction of the natural world. When Taylor speaks about the problems of the “moral character of (relatively) free peoples,” he is mostly concerned with the feckless, unreflective, and changeable nature of US citizens (p. 5). Lacking an ability to control or discipline themselves in the face of a consumer culture that offers an overabundance of choice, US citizens are inconstant and inconsistent. They demonstrate “moral blindness” and engage in “morally obtuse” behavior (p. 14). Taylor sees this propensity most recently in their choice of a national leader; American citizens chose a president in 2016 who “mirrors” them perfectly in his anarchic and capricious tendencies (p. 13).
In the introduction Taylor turns to a number of contemporary critics who have emphasized the rootless and unprincipled character of US citizens, situating Thoreau alongside Stephen Carter, Jean Elshtain, Mark Lilla, and Patrick Deneen. Thoreau, like these present-day thinkers, understood that the feckless tendencies of citizens are best addressed by strengthening personal character and individual responsibility. US citizens can find true freedom, not the ersatz freedom of consumer choice, by withdrawing from society and turning inward. Taylor argues that Thoreau departs from conservative critics, however, in the kind of new democratic citizen he hopes to create. Where conservatives aim to produce citizens who will restore conventional modes of life, Thoreau seeks the opposite: to inspire citizens who are “rebellious…breaker[s] of traditions, and civilly disobedient” (p. 25). His new democratic citizens favor heterodoxy, unconventionality, and nonconformity.
Lessons has three central chapters, each of which explores a theme from Walden that Taylor sees as especially relevant to our day. The first chapter, “Simplicity,” focuses on Thoreau’s suggestion that citizens seek a simpler life, one withdrawn from the never-ending appetite for more and more of everything and from exploitive economic arrangements. Taylor draws on Thoreau’s admonition to seek a life of “voluntary poverty.” He elaborates this concept, first, through a careful reading of Walden and, second, by reference to relevant thinkers such as Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Christopher Lasch, Jill Lepore, and Bill McKibben.
The second chapter, titled “Different Drummers,” takes on the issue of politics most directly by considering Thoreau’s admonition to cultivate our own sense of moral integrity. On Taylor’s reading, withdrawing into the realm of individual conscience does not result in withdrawing from political concerns. Thoreau was focused on the “prepolitical cultivation of character and dispositions he thought of as essential for any decent social and political order” (p. 70). Thus, for Thoreau, politics is derivative of morality, not sovereign from it (p. 96).
The third and final chapter in the body of the book, “Learning from Nature,” carefully attends to Thoreau’s understanding of nature and situates it into modern-day environmentalism. This is a rich, layered chapter that puts Thoreau in conversation with Charles Fish, Carl Becker, Gifford Pinchot, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, and David Deutsch. Wendell Berry, a figure Taylor sees as closely aligned with Thoreau, is discussed as well. The overriding message of the chapter is that Thoreau understood nature as a moral teacher. To learn from nature, we need to withdraw into it, grow wild within it, and open ourselves up to the transcendental moral insights that nature has to give.
Lessons, then, offers a compelling, well-thought out argument about the relevance of Thoreau in our political time. Because Taylor does an impressive job of linking Thoreau to a wide range of contemporary thinkers and critics, Lessons will lend itself well to graduate and advanced undergraduate seminars in democratic theory, American political thought, and environmental politics.
Though this is certainly enough, the book goes further. It offers something less orthodox and, for this reader, more special. At key moments in the text Taylor manages to re-create a central moral tension found in Thoreau’s work and to reanimate it for contemporary readers. In “Simplicity,” for instance, Taylor introduces the Possibility Alliance, a utopian agrarian community that has withdrawn from mainstream society to live as simply and as lightly on the land as possible. The community’s utopian exit has a radical, destructive dimension to it: “This withdrawal…is viewed as the greatest challenge the hated system can face: if people refuse to participate in these broader institutions, they will collapse under their own weight” (p. 46). These “unsettlers” are not able to withdraw as fully as they might like, however. When member Sarah Wilcox-Hughes suffered complications after giving birth and required nine months of hospitalization, the costs were absorbed by Medicaid. Does this show the blatant hypocrisy of Possibility Alliance’s mission or its stunning naiveté? Does it demonstrate the moral absurdity of Thoreauvian exits, or does it reveal a fundamental contradiction within them? Taylor opens up these questions, but in a move that will frustrate some readers, he does not resolve them. At these points the text invites readers to experience a moral quandary, not a lesson. In keeping with the most challenging moments of Walden, Lessons prompts us toward a moral education. Like Thoreau, Taylor is cultivating new democratic citizens who will not, he hopes, be as morally blind or obtuse as their predecessors.
Lessons does suffer from some problems. Gender and race are undertheorized, and the recent literature on Thoreau could be used to greater effect. Taylor’s prose can have an ambling quality to it, and some faith in him as a guide is required. But, even given this hiccup, Taylor manages to channel something essential about the spirit of Thoreau. Thoreau was interested in journeys—moral, intellectual, and physical—as well as destinations, and he understood walking and self-reflection as linked. For these reasons and many others, one suspects that Thoreau would have approved of Taylor as a fellow traveler and would have liked Lessons quite a bit.
