Thoreau

Is Thoreau’s political vision practical?

Any single or unitary statement to explain Henry David Thoreau’s political vision is in vain. On the one hand, Thoreau’s was a devoted advocate of liberal democracy for his desperate pursue for spiritual freedom and individualism as well as the abolition of slavery. On the other hand, his was discontent with current democratic government. Moreover, his emphasis on moral obligation conflicts with the theory and practice of democracy. In order to show his protest to the US invasion to the Mexico, which in Thoreau’s view, stands for a pro-slavery action, he refused to pay the poll tax because he believed this tax went to the government supported the slavery. Thoreau’s article “ civil disobedience” was a multi-dimensional work in terms of practicability. Thoreau use a practical way to show his resistance to the government. However, his conscience-based theory which should value over government rules and laws was impractical to conduct. And it is vague to see whether his resistance achieve its original goal.

As transcendentalists, both Thoreau and Margaret Fuller was deeply influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who insisted on the importance of nature to help establishing a human being’s religious faith and by human beings own perception to achieve their own values. Thoreau embodied the ideas of individualism and the spiritual freedom like Fuller who also highlighted a sort of self-conscious mind and self-culture which women should possess. In Fuller’s essay Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she pointed out that women should be independent and removed themselves from men’s influence. She said: “God gave a wife a mind of her own”. (399). However, the women’s situation was just like slaves. Their freedom was deprived of by men. In this angle, Fuller and Thoreau were at exactly the same position. Both were fervent abolitionists. Thoreau pursued for the freedom of slaves while Fuller pursued for the freedom of women. Both utilized...