Here There Is No State

What is life like away from the powers of the State? Only a handful of people have sought to answer this question as fully as Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau strove to see liberty in action in his life. Thinking and theorizing about liberty was not enough for this man.

Here There Is No State is a collection of the best of Thoreau’s works on living a life devoted to freedom. Liberty.me has brought these works together with the ideas of three contemporary scholars to show how essential Thoreau’s works are to our tradition.

Wendy McElroy writes the introduction to Civil Disobedience and explains its importance to those devoted to individualism. Sarah Skwire sets the record straight on what Thoreau’s work Walden is and is not, and where it fits in our tradition. Finally, Jeff Riggenbach argues why we can consider Thoreau as “one of the founding fathers of American libertarian thought.”

Thoreau focused his energy on investigating what it meant to live, rather than merely exist. His ideas in these works show us the essential difference between the two — the necessity of individual freedom from the State.