Henry David Thoreau "Civil Disobedience"

Topics: Writer

Essay, Pages 2 (300 words)

Views

It is simple to say that Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “Civil Disobedience,” influenced two of the most well known political figures of
the past hundred years, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

It might be less easy to connect Thoreau’s ideas with those of more flamboyant€”and one might also propose less wildly successful€”political reformers such as hilip Berrigan.Yet that connection can be made, and moreover, it can be made in a way few students of Thoreau might have considered.

Don’t waste time
Get Your Custom Essay on

“Henry David Thoreau “Civil Disobedience””

Get High-quality Paper

helping students since 2016

Perhaps few commentators on the lives and work of Gandhi, King and Berrigan would have thought of it either.And yet, in the post-feminist age, the age of a new masculinism,’ Thoreau can be proposed as the intellectual forebear of a new masculinism,’ one that forswears guns and violence in favor of passive resistance of the sort carried out by Gandhi, King and Berrigan.

Interestingly, Thoreau was one of a group of New England transcendentalists that included Emerson and the Alcott family, whose aughter Louisa May, produced the well loved but rarely critiqued Little Women.

Also included in the group were novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and poet Walt Whitman, as well as abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

It was the underlying principles of this group, the commonality that held them together, that influenced Thoreau in all his writings, and perhaps especially in “Civil Disobedience,” which arose specifically because Thoreau had had the opportunity to put the principles into practice after refusing to pay the poll tax.

The principles themselves were developed by well-educated people, such as Emerson, who was a Harvard graduate, and had begun to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, basically unknown in the United States until then.