ABSTRACT
Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience received very little attention from scholars or the press until the twentieth century, when Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience served as an inspiration for the social struggles of such important figures as the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The most important early response to the text came from a friend and mentor of Thoreau, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although a good personal friend of Thoreau and the intellectual leader of Transcendentalism, Emerson’s criticism comes as something of a surprise, given his own works were a great source of inspiration for Thoreau. Emerson agreed with the philosophical assumptions of the text, with the critique of government and with the moral dilemma of the conscientious individual whom the state requires to be, directly or indirectly, a part of unjust social practices.
