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Locke, Emerson, and Nature: Thoreau's Transcendental Social Contract Theory

The present paper examines Henry David Thoreau's principle of civil disobedience in terms of John Locke's social contract theory, Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalism, and nature. Locke and Emerson provided Thoreau with the theoretical frameworks, while nature offered him the material and spiritual ground on which to unfold and to integrate the two theories. First, following Locke, Thoreau’s civil disobedience was predicated on the premises that all men are free and independent and that the government is and must be established for the purpose of protecting the people's lives, liberty, and estate. Antebellum America, however, turned out to be established on the Constitution, an unfair social contract that embraced slavery as its integral part. Moreover, it expanded this corrupt institution only for capitalist profit. Hence Thoreau's resistance began. In order to practice his civil disobedience, Thoreau then turned to Emerson's transcendentalism. This philosophy defined the individual as politically equivalent to the nation, thereby assuming that one person's secession could effectively disintegrate a corrupt government. It also contributed to Thoreau's definition of a peaceable revolution: one individual's heroic reason for resistance could spread throughout a nation by means of personal influence, eventually overthrowing the government. However, Thoreau’s romantic theory of civil disobedience proved to be increasingly unworkable for the following reasons: the middle class chronically suffered from moral lethargy; and slavery became so formidable as to threaten nature, his moral stronghold. In response to this situation, Thoreau requested the government and positive laws actively to serve nature’s justice and higher laws, while urging every individual to facilitate them. Moreover, he even justified violence as a necessary human action, as revealed by his fervent support for John Brown. Thoreau's explicit justification of violence, however, merely reflected the grim social atmosphere of antebellum America: to use Locke’s terms, the corrupt American government enslaved conscientious citizens to the point of forcing them to accept self-destruction through their violent resistance. Even so, Thoreau was inspired by Brown’s heroic aspects: his social imagination to embrace the oppressed, his transcendental capability squarely to confront the government, and his strenuous efforts to achieve a seemingly impossible goal. Consequently, he in turn exploited such heroism on Brown's part to alarm antebellum America in torpor. Thus, Thoreau in the space of nature did not represent escapism. Rather, nature worked as a main source of his moral imagination. Through and in nature, he could stay morally awake, to remind his contemporaries of the primary values that a just social contract should cherish and seek to protect at any cost. Consequently, the symbol of Thoreau in nature still serves as a lasting reminder of the duty of and mandate for conscientious citizens to see through social institutions and, sometimes, to resist them if they are found to be unjust. This symbol is indeed an indispensable means to make a person a truly free individual in modern capitalism, where prejudices and delusions endlessly enslave people.