Henry David Thoreau was callous to others’ misfortune, puritanical, misanthropic, adolescent, hypocritical, “as parochial as he was egotistical,” and morally despotic, according to the New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz. Given all of that, Schulz ought to praise Thoreau for hiding out in the woods instead of making a nuisance of himself in the town square.

But in fact, in her recent essay eviscerating Thoreau’s politics and character, Schulz is most critical of Thoreau’s preference for solitude. On her view, Thoreau’s moral program of deliberate, simple living is not only impractical, but unpracticed, as Thoreau was not nearly as independent as he makes himself out to be in Walden. As is well known, Thoreau was hardly isolated in his pondside cabin, with neighbors all around and his mother’s house a twenty-minute walk away. Schulz argues that in trying to realize “a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people,” Thoreau offers readers nothing we could use to build a society. For this reason, she laments his canonization as a democratic hero.

Thoreau’s political aims rest upon a radically optimistic assessment of the intellectual and spiritual heights every one of us is capable of.

Schulz is right that Walden is “more revered than read,” but she gets Thoreau’s ethics and politics wrong. Above all, she misses that Thoreau’s political aims rest upon a radically optimistic assessment of the intellectual and spiritual heights every one of us is capable of. Thoreau’s point is that if people could strip away unnecessary consumption, they would free themselves and each other from soul-eating labor, and then begin to realize their higher potential. We would be a nation of philosopher-kings, truly capable of pursuing the common good instead of immediate self-interest.

To read Schulz’s account, you would think that Thoreau’s asceticism was an end in itself, that his “account of how to live reads less like an existential reckoning than like a poor man’s budget, with its calculations of how much to eat and sleep crowding out questions of why we are here and how we should treat one another.” But getting rid of your stuff is only the necessary first step to finding metaphysical or moral answers.

Thoreau summarized his theory of alienation, developed around the same time as Karl Marx’s, by saying that “men have become the tools of their tools.” When you own something—it can equally be a doormat, a retirement account, or a sterling reputation—it often comes to own you as it demands attention and maintenance, adding to your duties. When you lose possessions, you gain time, energy, and focus that can be spent elsewhere. Long before Marie Kondo wrote her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Thoreau was making a “sacrament” of his periodic purges.