Books with title Walden and Civil Disobedience

In 1845, the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau moved from his home in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, to a small cabin he built by hand on the shores of Walden Pond. He spent the next two years alone in the woods, learning to live self-sufficiently and to take his creative and moral inspiration from nature. Part memoir, part philosophical treatise, part environmental manifesto, Walden is Thoreau's inspirational account of those extraordinary years and one of the most influential books ever written.

First published in 1854, Walden is a manifesto of individualism, self-discovery and awareness and a criticism against a society that forces all men to follow the same drummer, tuned to the capitalist values that Thoreau had stopped to recognize has his own.As the world lives an unprecedented crisis of values and perspectives, Walden stands as an early and yet still actual search for the ultimate goal that man should pursue.

Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience was originally published in 1849 as Resistance to Civil Government. Thoreau wrote this classic essay to advocate public resistance to the laws and acts of government that he considered unjust. The practical application of Civil Disobedience was largely ignored until the twentieth century when, at different times, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and anti-Vietnam War activists applied Thoreau's principles.

Thoreau asserts that because governments are typically more harmful than helpful, they therefore cannot be justified. Democracy is no cure for this, as majorities simply by virtue of being majorities do not also gain the virtues of wisdom and justice. Resistance to Civil Government (Civil Disobedience) is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice.

In the early spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau built and lived in a cabin near the shore of Walden Pond in rural Massachusetts. For the next two years, he enacted his own Transcendentalist experiment, living a simple life based on self-reliance, individualism, and harmony with nature. The journal he kept at that time evolved into his masterwork, Walden, an eloquent expression of a uniquely American philosophy. During the same period, Thoreau endured a one-day imprisonment for his refusal to pay a poll tax, an act of protest against the government for supporting the Mexican War, to which he was morally opposed. In his essay, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau defends the principles of such nonviolent protest, setting an example that has influenced such figures as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and endures to this day.