The question that Richard J. Schneider takes up in Civilizing Thoreau is whether an environmentally conscious, outward-looking Henry David Thoreau can be squared with the introspective Thoreau who was committed to a philosophy of subjectivity. This question – in the right hands – has the potential for contemporary pertinence: reductive, well-meaning Thoreaus are common constituents in works of the environmental humanities, and more productive assessments of Thoreau's relevance to sociopolitical issues of the twenty-first century should be welcomed. Regrettably, Civilizing Thoreau offers almost nothing in this line. Schneider instead takes a narrow contextualist approach to Thoreau's engagement with the “emerging social sciences,” confines his ambitions by challenging only the most established of received ideas about his subject (as his conclusion indicates: “Thoreau was not merely the hermit meditating by a pond that so many readers imagine” (191)), and neglects too many major studies of Thoreau's philosophical relevance.

Schneider's core argument aligns Thoreau with contemporaries Arnold Guyot, Louis Agassiz, and Charles Pickering, all of whom inquired “into the history of humanity … through ‘analogy with the rest of the organic world’” (2), much as Thoreau extensively discussed human society through naturalist tropes. Thoreau was exposed to the racial theories propagated by these scientists and others, and Schneider spends time exhaustively detailing how and where Thoreau expresses racist views about “the Irish,” “the Indians,” and “the Black Race.” The purpose of these sections is to provide documentary evidence that Thoreau adhered to the trope of “succession” in nature, in anthropology, and in civilization, according to which the Caucasian race is naturally fated to usurp the peoples it colonizes and controls. The remainder of the text after the survey of Thoreau's apparent racism summarizes how and where the trope of succession appears in the main prose works of the 1850s and 1860s, in a descriptive rather than exegetical fashion.

Two issues render Schneider's approach problematic. The first is glaring, and it is that Civilizing Thoreau never engages fulsomely enough with its subject to offer substantive critique or defense of Thoreau after it has supposed his uptake of racist theories of civilization's development. If Thoreau is to be assessed in terms of his contribution to contemporary ethical problems such as environmental consciousness, this needs at least some discussion. The second issue, however, is more pressing for my sense of Thoreau's continuing relevance, and it underscores the rest of the book. Thoreau was not a natural scientist of the status of Guyot, Agassiz, or Pickering. What brings him into their company in Schneider's discussion is his use of analogy and metaphor as a tool for making sense of natural and social history. And it is this suggestion – that Thoreau might contribute to the new field of social science merely by aiding and abetting its propensity for metaphor – that underpins the argument of this book without Schneider's ever making clear his cognizance of it.

This, of course, is a consideration that might be turned to the issue of Thoreau's relevance for contemporary environmental science, and for the role of disciplines which encompass hermeneutics and linguistics in relation to this science. Is Thoreau's literary sensibility the means of an enriched understanding of the social scientific, or – which is equally possible – does it lead to reductive conceptions of nature's complexity? A more detailed engagement with Thoreau's characteristic method would not be without precedent: Sharon Cameron's Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau's Journal (1985), for instance, suggested that Thoreau employed metaphor in his published works to translate the naturalist observations of the journals into a more meaningful common currency. But Schneider does not include Cameron in his reading. Nor does he include William Howarth's The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life as a Writer (1982), nor Stanley Cavell's Senses of Walden (1972), both major studies which consider how Thoreau's literary style contributes to his objectives and philosophy. Indeed, Civilizing Thoreau barely registers the fact that Thoreau was and remains a writer before he was a scientist, and the consequence is that Schneider repeatedly takes Thoreau at his ambiguous and often contradictory word. The result is a book that feels oddly old-fashioned, regressive in its appraisal of Thoreau's cultural value, no more than a loosely stitched-together survey of what might have influenced Thoreau. If Thoreau has any significance to the social sciences, the much more pertinent question is how and why his influence over us remains effective.