Individual Responsibility or Irresponsible Individualism: Re-examining Thoreau's political ethics.

This paper examines the relationship between responsibility and liberalism. It does so by examining Henry David Thoreau’s account of the individual’s responsibility for the impact that her actions have upon others, one of the most inspiring and demanding accounts associated with the liberal tradition. Particular attention will be paid to Thoreau’s travel literature which has only recently attracted the attention of political theorists, and which provides a more complex and nuanced account of the individual’s relationship to society than is found in Thoreau’s more overtly political writings. While Thoreau’s account of responsibility relies upon the liberal assumption that political society is a contract among consenting individuals, it is also influenced by a variety of moral, literary and philosophic resources. As this paper will demonstrate, Thoreau’s attention to history, community, and character-formation, along with his playfulness and rejection of Cartesian subjectivity mean that his account of responsibility is less vulnerable to communitarian and neo- Nietzschean objections than many other prominent liberal accounts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]