The state does not make us more just and often uses us for great injustice such as war and slavery. Even democracies can dominate the minority and individual. He points to the Mexican-American war and says that a few, not the people, are benefited by using the state as a tool. Thoreau argues that government is supposed to be an aid but is most often a hindrance. wrote in his autobiography that he first found the idea of noncooperation with the unjust system as effective means of protest in On Civil Disobedience while studying at Morehouse College in 1944, and that he became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as important as cooperation with good. Many great leaders have been profoundly influenced by the work, including Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Tolstoy, JFK, Hemingway, and John Muir. Moved by the experience, he gave lectures about how it strengthened his convictions and later reworked these lectures into his famous On Civil Disobedience, published in 1849. In 1846, Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay past taxes on the grounds of opposition to the American slave trade and the Mexican-American War. Many know that Thoreau wrote Walden while secluded in a cabin at Walden Pond (on land owned by his mentor and fellow transcendentalist Emerson) but few know that Walden Pond was not very far from civilization and Thoreau accidentally burned down 300 acres of Walden Wood with the help of a friend several years before staying in the cabin. While Thoreau did love nature and despise much of modern society, he argued for balance and did not believe in leaving civilization or abolishing government.

He is sometimes called an anarchist, as he wrote, “ That government is best which governs least,” in On Civil Disobedience.

Thoreau did not believe in leaving society or rugged naturalism, but balancing modernity and city life with an appreciation of nature and the transcendent unity of existence. Like Rousseau, at least one critic wrote that if Thoreau was right we may as well go back to walking on all fours. Like Rousseau, he argued that many comforts and luxuries are not aids but hindrances to the progress of humanity.

Like Rousseau, Thoreau believed that modern society was corruptive and abusive and hoped that people would cease to participate in war, slavery and other brutal practices by returning to nature and simplicity. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was a writer, naturalist, transcendentalist, and abolitionist who is most famous for his proto-environmental and autobiographical book Walden, advocating simple and natural living, and his political work On Civil Disobedience, advocating the right of the individual to non-participation with unjust laws and states. For this lecture, read Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience.

Hd thoreau civil disobedience