Was Thoreau Selfish? The Question of Self-Reliance

Henry David Thoreau's Walden has a reputation problem, and John Kaag knows it from the inside. The book is taught as a monument to American individualism, the man who walked away from society to prove he needed no one. When Kaag co-wrote a book on Thoreau called Henry at Work, the reviews handed him the standard objection. "It got trashed in the newspapers," he says, "primarily because I didn't take or we didn't take enough of a socialist perspective on Thoreau." Kaag's response is surprising: he thinks the critique is partly right, and that the usual reading of Thoreau as a champion of pure self-reliance gets the philosophy backward. His answer to the question is no — Thoreau was not selfish, because the solitude of Walden is not a celebration of the sealed-off self but the clearing-away that makes genuine connection possible. The book of American individualism rests, in Kaag's reading, on a conviction of interdependence the textbooks leave out.