Exploring a theme in Walden — Economy

Introduction

Although Henry David Thoreau¹ died more than a century ago, his ideas and works are still alive in today’s society. “The breadth of Thoreau’s appeal is enormous.”² His major works include Walden³ and Civil Disobedience³. They covered many topics from nature to civilization, and from philosophy to economics. In this paper we will discuss the economic thought of Thoreau in Walden, which was the summary of his famous economic experiment at Walden Pond, Massachusetts⁴ during the 1850s.

The Economics of “Economy”

Walden is an extraordinary achievement in American literature. Thoreau revealed the economic structure of nineteenth century through the analysis of social and political issues. Thoreau’s economic thought went beyond the scope of pure economy. His major concern with the divorce of “what is” and “ought to be,” the actual and the ideal in philosophy, expressed itself more and more in economic terms.

“Economy”⁵ was the first and the longest chapter in Walden. It indicates that Thoreau’s main work was actually a book about economics. It revealed Thoreau’s philosophy of life. That is “a basic unity of vision, purpose and method.”⁶ The first assumption in Thoreau’s philosophy was that economic life had to be reduced to its bare essentials:

“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”⁷

Therefore, following this philosophy, Thoreau held that the “essential laws of man’s existence”⁸ had not changed over the centuries. They were basically the same for man in nineteenth century as they had been for primitive man. The “necessaries of life”⁹ for man as well as the “methods…to obtain them”¹⁰ were limited to those of “a primitive and frontier life.”¹¹ Setting out from such a model, Thoreau could restrict the necessities of man to a minimal level of keeping what he called the “vital heat.”¹² To survive, man required only those basic items he classified as “Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel.”¹³ As to man’s means of production, they would be limited to “a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow…”¹⁴ Based on such terms, Thoreau went to Walden Pond in 1845 to “transact some private business,”¹⁵ to demonstrate the validity of his theory of economy in the nineteenth-century economic structure:

“It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been take to obtain them.”¹⁶

Since food production ranked as the first necessity of life, Thoreau believed that it was unnecessary to produce more food or exchange it for other goods. According to his model of primitive production, direct consumption would become the controlling factor of food production. That is, it would eliminate surplus and its exchange value:

“…that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground…”¹⁷

Thoreau’s economic scheme followed the classic model of natural economy, in which economic organization was basically formed according to internal demand, excluding the mechanisms of a market economy. The heart and center of Thoreau’s economic thought was in the principle of self-sufficiency, that is, “I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get clothing and fuel.”¹⁸

In building his cabin at Walden Pond for a total of $28.12 1/2, Thoreau gave us the most consistent application of his self-sufficiency principle–Shelter as a necessity of life. The axe Thoreau borrowed¹⁹ to build the house was promptly justified in returning the tool “sharper than received it”²⁰ because “it is difficult to begin without borrowing.”²¹ As to Thoreau’s treatment of Clothing, he had to accept the expediency of the “the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of mankind offer”²² instead of the state when man used to “wear skins.”²³

Fuel–another necessity of life for conserving the vital heat in man, was the easiest problem to solve in Thoreau’s New England:

“My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or my shoulders, … There are enough fagots and waste woods of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the young wood.”²⁴

As a response to the nineteenth-century social structure, Thoreau’s conception of economic man resembled the model of economics of the primitive society.²⁵ But his idea was based on the assumption to satisfy individual needs. His economic man did not have any obligation to family and society. This is an ideal situation which comes from Thoreau’s “single-minded quest”.²⁶ The truth is, no man can cut off the linkage between himself and his family and society in any stage of human civilization. Thoreau’s idea of economic man was misleading in this sense. Consequently, the Walden attempt did not amount to much more than an experiment in utopia. However, Thoreau’s attempt at Walden Pond did not give a final conclusion. The economic principles developed in “Economy” revealed a given moment in the development of his thought. He certainly never considered his individual economic scheme to be applicable to mankind at large, since he “would not have any one adopt [his] mode of living on any account.”²⁷ If Thoreau came back from Walden Pond to become “a sojourner in civilized life again,”²⁸ “for as good a reason as went there,”²⁹ it was because he found it necessary to resume his economic share in the society of his time. For Thoreau, if he were to continue his economic experiment at Walden, he would have to remain outside the working society. But he refused “to take a cabin passage,”³⁰ he would “go before the mast and on the deck of the world.”³¹ After having lasted “two years and two months,”³² the Walden episode had taught Thoreau that he had “several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”³³

Thoreau’s natural economy scheme provided a comparative point of reference, as opposed to the driving force of market economy–profit. The advancement of science and technology in the nineteenth century enabled the revolutions in civilization and industry. As a consequence, economic man’s sources and means of production were deprived from him by the nineteenth-century society. Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel as the necessities of life were subjected to the economic laws of that time. Starting with such a point of view, Thoreau developed his thesis that nineteenth-century economic development actually meant a degradation in economic and social terms on the theme of Shelter:

“While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man’s pursuits are no worthier than the savage’s, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?”³⁴

In fact, Thoreau’s criticism of the nineteenth-century economic system had to face the related social and human problems. He recognized that “a comparatively free country”³⁵ had its rising demand for cheap labor force. Slavery was an integral part of the nineteenth-century production system ,an economically determined relation in the society as a whole. The northern capitalism benefited from it and grew into a more advanced stage of development. In the master and slave relationship, both north and south, economic factors determined the degradation of man. Thoreau believed that a slave could never be a man in and through the nineteenth-century society. The slave had been reduced to a component in production process at the same time, like a machine:

“I hardly need refer now to the laborers in our Southern States who produce the staple exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of the South.”³⁶

Besides the slaves in the South, the farmer’s situation in the north had also become dependent on the laws of the nineteenth-century market economy. Due to mortgage and interest costs, the farmer could no longer own his farm. His productive activity had turned against him, made him the “slave” of the soil, and brought about his economic poverty:

“On applying to the assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. If you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged… The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair springe to catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it. This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries.”³⁷

Consequently, Thoreau pointed out the fundamental economic principle that ruled the market system, namely supply and demand. No one would be able to escape once he was in such a system. The laborer was selling his labor power; the farmer was selling his crop; and the Indian, in the process of his assimilation into the economic structure, was trying to sell baskets:

“Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood… Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off- that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed- he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do.”³⁸

Thoreau’s criticism of the nineteenth-century economic system inevitably led to a criticism of the social structure of his time. At the social level, Thoreau discovered that although material goods were generally available, their availability was actually detrimental to the society. As an example, the railroad was one of the so-called modern improvements. It gave the people in the society an illusion of progress. It acted as the best symbol for the dispossession process. Thus the Irish railroad workers had turned into “sound sleepers”³⁹ under the rails was no accident, but stood in the natural order of things:

“Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over- and it will be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident”.”⁴⁰

In this connection, Thoreau believed that the form of social classes at his time was directly related to the economic development in the society. His position in society determined his social consciousness. It gave him insight into the reality covered by the seemingly economic progression of the nineteenth-century civilization. Significantly, Thoreau addressed Walden to “poor students”⁴¹, and it was the “poor farmer”⁴² whom he found “respectable and interesting.”⁴³ His perspective reflected an approach different from that of the higher classes of the society. But as a member in the nineteenth-century society, Thoreau was well aware that he belonged to a community “where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough,”⁴⁴ and poverty was a subject which could not be easily dismissed.

Another reason why Thoreau rejected the idea of progress in the nineteenth-century society was the living conditions of the laborer. The laborer had become alienated from real human life, living like an extension of the machine. The regulation of industry deprived him of his totality as a human being, “he has no time to be anything but a machine.”⁴⁵ Furthermore, Thoreau opposed the division between intellectual and manual labor, which had been considered as one of the major advantages of modern production, because he believed there was no reason for such kind of a division. Thoreau held that this form of division of man’s active powers would kill creativity and productivity:

Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?… Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.”⁴⁶

In a larger perspective of Thoreau’s thought, his economic and social criticism of nineteenth-century civilization revolved around one question–the alienation of man in all its forms. As conceived by Thoreau, the division of labor would result in a small part of man’s alienation from himself, and total alienation was bound to happen some time in their future. The commercial spirit had changed the true nature of man inevitably. Money had become the external power, the material expression. It had become the standard upon which all was based, including the value of all human beings. Money had been an active force in the process of killing man’s true consciousness and reason. At the same time, it had also created a false consciousness and forced him to lead “a mean and sneaking”⁴⁷ life. Accordingly, Thoreau’s criticism focused on trade, business, supply and demand. The dedication to business meant nothing less than “the way to the devil,”⁴⁸ “trade curses everything it handles.”⁴⁹ Thoreau “too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture,”⁵⁰ but he had “studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling”⁵¹ his baskets. For Thoreau, business was itself negation of life, man’s negation of himself.

It became increasingly evident to Thoreau that in his time “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,”⁵² that an “unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind”⁵³ for these came after work. Thoreau held further that “men labor under a mistake”⁵⁴ because they had actually chosen to live the way they did, and honestly thought there was no alternative. Nineteenth-century man had not improved the conditions of human life for his own benefit. He had not transformed his economic activity into a “pastime,”⁵⁵ as Thoreau had tried to do at Walden Pond. Instead, nineteenth-century man had found himself in conflict with the economic forces he had praised at the turn of the century. He had devised “improved means to an unimproved end,”⁵⁶ and failed to realize that “the cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.”⁵⁷ In this sense, the moral principles of nineteenth-century civilization resulted in the degradation of man. The degradation was so complete that it could be found as both the “degraded rich”⁵⁸ and the “degraded poor.”⁵⁹ If this civilization were to be “a real advance in the condition of man,”⁶⁰ its development should not serve material ends. For Thoreau, the exchange value of material things was determined by another standard other than money:

“and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”⁶¹

Thoreau believed that one possible way to change man’s outside conditions was individualistic in character. He came to this point after his failure helping the Irish worker he described in Walden. He tried to help him to resolve his material problems. The solution he offered was nothing but a duplication of his own experience at Walden–living in a primitive life. Even Thoreau himself as a philosopher was not able to live that way in his own life. Furthermore, he overlooked the fact that the worker was not a philosopher. The Irish worker could not stay as uncommitted as Thoreau because of his relationship with his own family. Such family relationships had always determined the economic basis of social organization in any society, so that Thoreau’s attempt to assist the laborer was bound to fail. Any factor outside the laborer could not force him out of his trouble, it was up to himself to fight against the temptation of materialism.

“I tried to help him with my experience…it cost me but a trifle for my food; but as he began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system.”⁶²

The conclusion to be drawn here is that it depended on the individual to resist the enslavement that resulted from the civilization in nineteenth century, to transform a merely imagined freedom into a fact. Thoreau’s theory of economy addressed itself to the object of living, and would remain valid even if the nineteenth-century economic system had eliminated poverty and brought material comfort to all:

“And if the civilized man’s pursuits are no worthier than the savage’s, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?”⁶³

Conclusively, Thoreau’s theory in “Economy” is a theoretical economic system similar to the primitive nature economy. His concept of economic man was based on the individuality instead of collectivity. The reasoning behind Thoreau’s economic theory still belonged to an idealistic thought reducing the individual to a being disconnected from society. Nevertheless, Thoreau’s economic theory in Walden had the value as a counterpoint to the industrial economic system. The industrial economic system in nineteenth century is similar to today’s industrial economic system, which could be the cause of the spiritual and intellectual alienation of man. Thus “Economy” has it unique values in determining the cause of some social problems today, which “has proved to be more meaningful to our century than his own.”²

Reference

1. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Unitarian / Transcendentalist (social critic, writer)
2. Harding, Walter Roy, Henry David Thoreau–A Profile, New York, Hill and Wang, page XIII
3. Rossi, William, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, Second Edition, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991
4. See the map of Walden Pond in Appendix A
5. Rossi, William, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, Second Edition, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991, page 1
6. Gayet, Claude, The Intellectual Development of Henry David Thoreau, Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1981, page 80
7. Rossi, William, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, Second Edition, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991, page 9
8. ibid, page 7
9. ibid, page 7
10. ibid, page 8
11. ibid, page 7
12. ibid, page 8
13. ibid, page 8
14. ibid, page 9
15. ibid, page 13
16. ibid, page 7
17. ibid, page 37
18. ibid, page 43-44
19. Both Bronson Alcott and W. E. Channing claimed to have lent Thoreau the axe. See Harding, Walter, The Variorum Walden, New York, Washington Square Press, Page 266
20. Rossi, William, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, Second Edition, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991, page 27
21. ibid, page 27
22. ibid, page 27
23. ibid, page 27
24. ibid, page 166
25. Stoller, Leo, After Walden: Thoreau’s Changing Views on Economic Man, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1957, page 71
26. Phillai, A. K. B., Transcendental Self, Lanham, MD, University Press of America, 1985, page 87
27. Rossi, William, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, Second Edition, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991, page 48
28. ibid, page 1
29. ibid, page 215
30. ibid, page 216
31. ibid, page 216
32. ibid, page 1
33. ibid, page 215
34. ibid, page 23
35. ibid, page 3
36. ibid, page 24
37. ibid, page 22
38. ibid, page 12
39. ibid, page 62
40. ibid, page 36
41. ibid, page 1
42. ibid, page 132
43. ibid, page 132
44. ibid, page 116
45. ibid, page 3
46. ibid, page 31
47. ibid, page 4
48. ibid, page 47
49. ibid, page 47
50. ibid, page 12
51. ibid, page 12
52. ibid, page 5
53. ibid, page 5
54. ibid, page 3
55. ibid, page 48
56. ibid, page 35
57. ibid, page 26
58. ibid, page 23
59. ibid, page 23
60. ibid, page 21
61. ibid, page 21
62. ibid, page 137
63. ibid, page 23