Henry David Thoreau

[Prinskaj]

I can't seem to figure out much about this person, poltically atleast, both Murray Rothbard and Emma Goldman admire him.. So is he on the left or the right?

[Polyphonic Foxes]

he was an Enlightenment figure and a pre capitalist: his ideas were based on a person owning their own labour and that it's actually a horrible inhumane thing to have to sell your labour to someone (wage labour), atl east I think that's what someone told me; and that if he saw modern wage labour he'd be disgusted.

People like Murray Rothbard love these guys because they talk about economic freedom and individual liberty, but really; people like Adam Smith and Rossaeu would have considered the Autrian School one of the most inhumane ideas ever conceived, since it's basically built around the idea that selling your labour in order to stay alive is not only the only system that works: it works and is moral.

These Englisghtenment figures believes in men owning themselves, in having free choice, when theyl ook at emerging capitalism they saw - as Adam Smith said - a system that will, in his words, turn us into mindless creatures who exist to consume and consent to a system.

[∞]

I found him very annoying because we always had to read about him in English. Politically he's left-leaning. But he is moralistic and a romanticist. He would dislike Marxist Materialism, and the type of politics (violent revolution, class warfare, etc.) that many leftists today associate with. He would call himself a primmy if anything, if he spoke politics today. His work is boring as hell anyway.

[Искра]

He was an individualist anarchist. At least they like him... for example that git Tucker.

[blake 3:17]

I like him.

[Ostrinski]

I like his writings. He was a cool cat. He was a bourgeois-proto-socialist that used enlightenment ideology and the romantic ideals of liberalism as the framework for his views. He was also a dumbass. Butt p. cool. He supported John Brown.

[∞]

Oh yeah. I forgot that. He did support John brown. He wasn't a total ass then. He knew when violence was necessary in that case.

[NoMasters]

Henry David Thoreau can be summed up into a very short sentence.

Individualist, Anarchist, Extractionist, Spiritualist, Environmentalist.

[ad novum orbem]

Ahhh Thoreau. The author of one of my all time favorite quotes:


A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

Truer words were never spoken (or written, whatever the case may be). I think he'd probably be a left libertarian today.