This essay makes a distinction between the roles that activists and social critics can play in democratic societies and defends the separate tasks of a non-activist social critic. Drawing on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings, I argue that non-activist social critics are better situated than activists to reach certain audiences, cultivate certain democratic capacities, and preserve their audience’s agency while doing so. In Emerson’s case, his concerns about his activist contemporaries led him to craft new ways of critically engaging his peers. At the same time, as Emerson’s life also illustrates, non-activist critics are limited by their roles and must forgo some of their distinctive advantages in order to do activist work. Clarifying the scope of the social critic’s role in this way helps critics to draw on the benefits of their position and avoid overstepping its constraints, thereby allowing them to more effectively promote political reform.
Recent scholarship on Thoreau’s thought has pushed in two opposing directions: some have maintained that Thoreau’s withdrawals from political engagement were actually intended to serve democratic ends, whereas others have argued that Thoreau’s political engagement was a lapse in his better judgment. In this essay, I contend that neither interpretation of Thoreau’s thought fully captures the roles that political engagement and disengagement played in his life as a dissident. Instead, via an examination of Thoreau’s “Walking” and his reform papers, I argue that Thoreau modeled a dialectical approach to dissent, where the “antithesis” of withdrawal served as a specific antidote to the personal toll of the “thesis” of political action. As I show, Thoreau’s attention to the potential costs of radical dissent makes his dialectical model especially relevant for those for whom the costs are highest, including contemporary women activists of color. For these women, normalizing a practice of continual disengagement from activism might benefit them in ways that collaborative solidarity cannot.
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