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.At issue is how he conceives and practices his notion of the right. 10Clearly, he feels authorized because he imagines a prepolitical moralsense and conscience inside the self, which empowers the self againstworldly authority.Neither a social voice internalized nor a citadel rulinga conquered city, as Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud argue, conscience is apermissive authority enabling and entitling an I ; as Blake claims, Thevoice of honest indignation is the voice of God. 11 But Thoreau splits thesubject: The divine/manly is wholly distinct from the brute/diabolical.In his masculinized individualism, moral sense names a pure insidethreatened by contamination from culture, the outside, and a higherauthority threatened by lower passions associated with material inter-est, compromise politics.To serve any other authority is to becomea brute or slave; to honor it redeems the human from its debasement.Depicting a mass of men because each is emasculated, he projects (ma-ternal) abjection to dramatize moral autonomy as separation, (re)birthof manliness.Slaves who accept being ruled by man rather than God, FrederickDouglass likewise argues, commit a sin; they must see their submissionas a sin, even if they cannot overcome it.Though masters call defiance 50 Thoreau, the Reluctant Propheta sin, Douglass calls his fight with his master, Edward Covey, a resur-rection from the tomb of slavery to the heaven of freedom because however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed whenI could be a slave in fact. But he insists on the worldly reality of violentdomination: Slaves are taunted with a want of the love of freedom, bythe very men who stand upon us and say, submit or be crushed. Hesees the abyss between slavery as a trope and a fact, even as he uses oneto contest the other.But Thoreau presents an idealized persona whosemoral integrity, pure and heroic, signals an unconditioned capacity todefy any worldly condition.12By this persona of potency and plenitude, Thoreau struggles to over-come his own sense of weakness, write himself into being, and addressthe docility of his peers, but by abstracting conscience and action fromthe actualities always conditioning them.Never able to inhabit fully hisimpossible ideal, he casts what is political as a wholly ignoble contami-nation.So he fumes, We are not a religious people but we are a nationof politicians ( Slavery, 24).Separating pure principle from contami-nating involvement with others, he insists, the only obligation whichI have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right ( Dis-obedience, 2).Hannah Arendt thus claims, Thoreau argued his case not on theground of a citizen s moral relation to law, but on the ground of indi-vidual conscience, and conscience s moral obligation. Seeking purityby fidelity to moral principle, his language of conscience is unpolitical.It is not primarily interested in the world where the wrong is committedor in the consequences that the wrong will have for [its] future course. In contrast, Lincoln frames politics by the same moral claim about slav-ery, but he also argues that citizens must recognize other authorities ofthe Constitution (which permits slavery in the South) and of majorityrule (which reflects pervasive racism) as well as recalcitrant historicalcircumstance and the worldly plurality of opinions and interests.Politicalresponsibility means mediating such conflicting claims to build a consen-sus that sustains community.13If prophecy means orienting action only by conscience or by what is right, it seems inimical to political responsibility.It displaces a politi-cal sensitivity to context and unintended consequences.It avoids theMachiavellian lesson that a principle holds good only if advanced bygroups exercising power on its behalf which puts every actor at moralrisk.It avoids the fact that political judgment must be forged by counting Thoreau, the Reluctant Prophet 51as real and engaging a plurality of others.Absolute standards, and self-righteous certainty about them, thus seem to sanction either disunion from evil or its violent purification, but not a politically mediated andmorally ambiguous engagement with it.Addressed repeatedly not onlyto Thoreau but to abolitionism, these arguments link prophecy to a dog-matic, invasive, purifying, and polarizing approach to politics that seemsantithetical to democratic norms and practices.But consider anotherreading.14Thoreau s Abolitionist Prophecy as PoliticsStart with Thoreau s claim to speak practically and as a citizen ( Dis-obedience, 2).15 Simply put, he believes he exercises political judgmentby attending to context, weighing the cost of prevailing practices andof inaction about them, addressing the idioms and concerns of a specific(abolitionist) audience, and modeling forms of minority action. Heknows that critics of abolitionism tend to minimize the injustice andpolitical danger of slavery as its critics even today tend to presume thatslavery would have died by itself.Because of his sense of the grip of slav-ery, indeed, he is unsure if moral suasion (or peaceable revolution )can work.But he is rethinking the forms of judgment and action avail-able to an abolitionist minority.Partly, he uses prophecy to make slavery and its consequences theparamount issue for the Republic as a whole and for every enfranchisedmember.Partly, then, he uses prophecy to demonstrate the office ofcitizen: He models capacities for judgment, dialogue, and action hewould cultivate in his neighbors.He thus weighs the costs of injustice toidentify when action is necessary. If the injustice is part of the necessaryfriction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go.If the injus-tice has a spring, or pulley.exclusively for itself, then perhaps you mayconsider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil. But,when friction comes to have its machine and oppression and robbery are or-ganized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer
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