Looking to Thoreau
by Sarah Kennedy
16/06/09
Revisiting Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience has put me in mind of Demos' recent publication, The Liberal Republic.
Thoreau says, "There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly".
These ideas weren't new in 1849, so why, 160 years on, is it still considered radical to propose that the power of government be derived from the consent of the governed? Why is the concept of a society of empowered individuals, capable and free enough to make choices and live in the manner of their own choosing, a manifesto rather than the norm?
An interesting twist to consider is in relation to the limits of individual loyalty and responsibility to the state, and how easy it is (or not) to withdraw from society. In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau imagines a state that "treats the individual with respect as a neighbour" and where those who choose to distance themselves from the State are allowed to live aloof from it. Thoreau famously 'opted out' in protest at slavery and the war with Mexico, choosing to live in isolation on Walden Pond for a year and spending one night in prison for refusal to pay his taxes (before a neighbour bailed him out).
To what extent are we, in 2009, able to 'opt out' of a society in which we do not agree with the policies of the government? What would happen if I were to refuse to pay my taxes in protest to the war in Iraq, or to live in rural isolation and refuse to accept an ID card? Clearly, we are only free to live as individuals so long as the independent life of our choosing is rooted within the community of the state.
JOHN R-V
I concur with Michael's aspiration that the Citizen might one day be in the ascendant. Very simple ethical philosophy backs Michael's and Sarah's arguments: Plato's 'The Republic' defines an ethical State as one which is there to serve the people, not vice versa; it would seem this has been followed to a greater and lesser extent depending very much on a country's system of government - i.e. one might say the State in the People's Republic of China is an example of the Nemesis of Plato's definition, whereas a close parallel might be the Canadian State, which is liberal by all accounts. I might have used England as exemplar, but it really has slipped from the high ideals of liberalism it once extolled. We have a government currently sadly deluded that the way to control the people (this in itself contradicts the serving state) is to watch, investigate, believe nothing, trust no-one, so that the individual citizen increasingly has to back up any credentials with documentary evidence and be subject to positive vetting etcetera. This inherant and insidious mistrust by the State of its own citizens, which permeates through all of society so that many if not all employers independent of the State echo the State's paranoia, is in my belief extremely destructive and bad for society and is Stalinist in the respect that that tyrant was synonymous with this attitude.
The current State has veered and is veering further and further from the ethical ideal; the current administration may bleat democracy but is fundamentally autocratic and is therefore a danger to the concept of a free and liberal society; it is certainly far from a state which actually wants to empower and respect the independence of the individual.
Michael
Part of the answer is implied in the very semantics used to frame the question; all too often 'the State' is hypostatised, which serves to place it as an objective 'Other' to relate to, depend on, battle against etc. etc. The principal consequence is that, as it is deemed also to be a universal (though a false universal) with regard to its rule over the citizens within its boundaries, then it contructs a vertical relationship of power that neatly dissects civic society into an artificially simple 'State' and 'citizen' dialectic. So, the incarnated, universal 'State' can never really be understood , when defined thus, as anything other than an instrument of power in perpetual struggle with the autonomy of the citizens over whom it seeks to rule.
One day, hopefully, the grammar will change, and we'll have a 'state' and a 'Citizen'.