Wildness and Disobedience : Thoreau’s Walking

Abstract

In the beginning o f his “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau heartily accepts the Emersonian (“Politics”) motto of that government being best which governs least. Since, ideally, the government which governs least is one which does not govern at all, what we confront is a project of living in a state where there is a government which does not govern, a free state in which the government does not have any right over “my person and property but what I concede to it”. Thoreau came “to this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad”, not to change it but to independently be. The only state in which such a being is thinkable to Thoreau is one in which government is free individual’s neighbour, “which treats the individual with respect as a neighbor” and which would “prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not anywhere seen”.