Henry David Thoreau → his writings → his juvenilia

This is a collection of excerpts from the school- and college-era writing of Henry David Thoreau on themes concerning law, government, man in society, ethics, economics, duty, and conscience.

These are based on the transcriptions in Early Essays and Miscellanies (edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser, with Alexander C. Kern, Princeton University Press: 1975). Footnotes are mine.

On men whose pursuit is power
On the appropriate severity of legal punishment
On Sir Henry Vane
On compulsory public education
On regional and national identity
On the morality of lying
On duty and conformity
On moral excellence
On Titus Pomponius Atticus as an example
On the commercial spirit of modern times

In my increasingly-obsessive project of collecting Thoreau’s political writings on-line, I’ve taken a detour into his surviving school-age essays.

I sure wouldn’t want my political philosophy judged by what I turned in to my professors, or even on what I wrote on my own time back when I was in school, so I try to be cautious on the one hand and forgiving on the other when reading this stuff.

Thoreau wrote these pieces between the ages of 17 and 20, while he was attending Harvard University. Most are short essays on particular themes, and I don’t know to what extent his treatment of the themes was his own choice and to what extent it was dictated by his professors.

One essay in particular, on conformity, seems to show that Thoreau was already rehearsing the themes that would come out in Resistance to Civil Government a dozen years later.

Others of the essays show Thoreau as an astute wrestler with ethical philosophy, choosing his words carefully and being skeptical of philosophies that presumed to have come up with a rulebook that would make conscience obsolete, or those whose moral precepts were asserted to have been proved when they were merely intuitions backed with logical arm-waving.

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