All his life, Henry David Thoreau resisted being tamed—whether that be by his contemporaries, the state, or the conceits of modernity (one of those conceits being, of course, that the tame is the more civilized, and therefore more desirable, state of existence). “As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame,” he wrote, “so is the wild—the mallard—thought, which ’mid falling dews wings its way against the fens” (“Walking,” in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau [Houghton, Mifflin, 1893], 9:283).

Jonathan McKenzie revives that resistance, defending Thoreau against the inclination in present-day scholarship to tame the wild man of Concord. Specifically, McKenzie takes on the way in which political theorists narrow Thoreau to suit our own purposes—to domesticate him, essentially, in ways Thoreau would resist. That is no insignificant task, given the number of serious political theorists who have attended to Thoreau of late, such as Jane Bennett, Shannon Mariotti, Jack Turner, and Brian Walker.

McKenzie makes a fascinating claim that despite the intelligence that all of those thinkers (and others like them) bring to Thoreau, their readings share the great professional liability of political theory. That liability, simply put, is that we political theorists like to theorize politically. We are good at seeing—we are trained to see—the political dimensions of things, even those that seem a- or anti-political to most. Moreover, many of us who are presently theorists think by reflex in democratic terms, sussing out the resources that any text offers for democratic engagement, participation, or vitalization.

McKenzie argues that these inclinations lead contemporary political theorists to take “Thoreau's ethos of detachment” and “carry it back to a theory of democratic politics or a subaltern means of political engagement” (27). Accordingly, theorists have tended to treat Thoreau's most apparently political writings, such as “Resistance to Civil Government” and the antislavery lectures, as more representative of his thought than they really are. And even when a political theorist takes a more comprehensive view of Thoreau's corpus—such as Bennett does in Thoreau's Nature—she ends up “ultimately privileging Thoreau's political dissent and activity as the core of his political thought” (14). Political theorists keep pulling Thoreau out of the willed-ness of his wildness and pushing him into the polis.

McKenzie, by comparison, ventures that “Thoreau's major political essays do not occupy privileged space in his political theory,” and that in fact “they obscure the relationship that Thoreau wishes to cultivate with the state” (28). Focusing his attentions on Thoreau's Journal, McKenzie argues that, on the model of the later Stoics, “Thoreau uses his writings to shape a philosophical personality that can withstand the seductions of democratic political participation” (1). In McKenzie's telling, Thoreau is a privatist: a person who electively detaches from political life in order to protect his commitment to living philosophically. He “makes a virtue out of political indifference, and that virtue becomes the crowning achievement of his privatist vision” (136).

If we accept that premise, we must ask, as McKenzie does: What do we make of Thoreau's occasional forays into political participation (such as his defense of John Brown or criticism of the Fugitive Slave Act)? Most baldly, McKenzie suggests that we can see “those momentary interludes as failures to properly craft and care for an insulated self”—a suggestion that for Thoreau, all political engagement is born of intellectual or spiritual weakness, and that Thoreau regarded his own political gestures as blunders that marred a lifelong quest to live philosophically (136).

But though there may be some support for that reading in Thoreau's work, the language of “failure” probably overstates the case, as McKenzie seems to recognize. For McKenzie himself reminds us that Thoreau's own words, at least in “Walking,” seem more to make the case that most people, especially in mass society, overvalue politics. “Politics is a narrow field,” which “has its place merely, and does not occupy all space,” writes Thoreau. This, says McKenzie, “allows that political freedom has a place in human conduct, but that, for the individual, overvaluing its contribution to a full and natural life is ‘most alarming’” (128).

What, then, does Thoreau consider the proper valuation of the political? Drawing in particular on Thoreau's letters to Harrison Blake, McKenzie argues that Thoreau's criterion for political engagement “is not the popularity or even the importance of an issue, but the issue's proximity to his own life” (136). What Thoreau values is not that which others deem to be “important” but that which is most personal and most nearby, geographically as well as spiritually.

The interpretation is compelling, casting new light on Thoreau's most famous political texts. Remember, for instance, that in “Resistance to Civil Government,” Thoreau stresses that it is only when the tax man comes to his house, when he encounters American government “face to face,” that he need resist. That the tax man is his “civil neighbor” is critical to Thoreau, who says he “quarrel[s] not with far-off foes but those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless” (Writings, 10:139, 147). For Thoreau, moderns see politics in terms that are too distant; the key spaces of political contemplation and action lie closer to home.

Astutely, McKenzie suggests that “Thoreau's preference for what we might call a ‘home economics’ is a direct response to mid-nineteenth-century America's industrial concept of ‘business,’” a concept which encompassed both the commodification of labor and the explosion of a newspaper trade that made “a business of other people's business.” Thus “minding one's own business is, in Thoreau's view, an antidote to the market revolution,” which has weakened and indebted the American populace (145). For Thoreau, the expansion of scale that lies at the heart of modernity enervates human energies and saps human vitality. The scale of politics is properly “narrow,” linked closely and evidently to the self and its cultivation.

Thoreau's privatism does not, therefore, negate politics. Rather, says McKenzie, the “undeniably distant, deliberating, and calculating individualism” of Thoreau's politics is the necessary precursor to the more positive project of self-cultivation and “rekindling the existential concept of freedom” apart from the roar and hustle of the mass (171).

Even with McKenzie's caution about the liabilities of political theorizing in mind, I cannot help but see here hints of a basis for alternative models of political education and engagement in mass society. In a time where most feel the call of the cosmopolitan and global, Thoreau's defense of the proximate might point as much to a model of political provincialism as to philosophical privatism. Either way, or both, this is a treatment of Thoreau that, in its defenses of wildness, should hit many political theorists close to home.