Reform and the Reformers, which I’ve just added to the Thoreau collection here at The Picket Line, is a real gem.
It deserves to be included alongside Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown, and Life Without Principle in any collection of Thoreau’s better political writings.
The essay was never published in his lifetime, and has been cobbled together from existing lecture notes that Thoreau himself picked over for his other writings, such as Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Probably for this reason it hasn’t received nearly as much attention as his more well-known essays.
But it is much more readable than some of the other writings I’ve been collecting. That is to say that the modern reader can read the essay and follow Thoreau’s arguments without at the same time having to unravel their references to figures of regional notoriety or to political controversies that have long since been forgotten. And it expands on Thoreau’s political philosophy and shows off some good examples of his rhetorical wit.
The lecture reflects Thoreau’s frustration with the multitude of reformers — prohibitionists, utopian communists, free love advocates, religious revivalists, and the like — who were roaming about New England at the time hawking their prescriptions for a better world. (As an aside, Thoreau’s journal entry of is a particularly amusing rant about this.)
Thoreau’s audience in Boston were of the open-minded liberal variety — people who were typically the most interested in and the most vulnerable to the charms of these reformers — and so Thoreau begins his lecture slyly with a fairly superficial but probably sympathetic attack on the Reformer’s great enemy: the Conservative. Further disarming his audience with a witticism or two, he then turns on them by spending the rest of the lecture attacking the major genre of lecturers that they more typically come to hear: the Reformer.
His major complaint is much the same as the one he expressed when reviewing John Etzler’s technological utopianism (see The Picket Line ) — that the utopianists, and Reformers in general, are too concerned with exerting control over and reshaping The World, or Society, or The Government, or The Family, and not concerned enough about better using the control they already exercise over themselves:
He suspects that these Reformers are acting from some subconscious motive (or, using less psychoanalytic terms: “some obscure, and perhaps unrecognized private grievance”) that is overtly philanthropic, but covertly a scheme for avoiding the real necessity for self-reform.
He reminds the Reformers that they speak with their deeds more than with their words — that if “the lecturer against the use of money is paid for his lecture, … that is the precept which [men] hear and believe, and they have a great deal of sympathy with him” — and noting that it’s easy to lecture about “non-resistance” but the proof of the pudding is when “one Mr. Resistance” steps forward to take part in the debate.
He notes:
So he recommends that Reformers, and those interested in Reform, instead work on themselves. He anticipates the objection that would invert his argument by saying that he is recommending a narcissistic evasion of responsibility for grappling with social problems. The problems of the social order, of the political order, of the family, and so on, Thoreau insists, are rooted in individuals — the corrupt institutions are only the symptom:
I’ve also added to the collection Wendell Phillips Before Concord Lyceum. This letter-to-the-editor is full of praise for Phillips, and its contrast with the scolding Reformers essay marks some boundaries of what Thoreau considered valuable in political debate.
