In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should prioritize their conscience over compliance with unjust laws, asserting that passive submission to government authority enables injustice.

The essay has had a significant impact on political thought and activism, influencing figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, who adopted its principles in the struggle for Indian independence, and Martin Luther King Jr., who cited it as a key influence during the American civil rights movement.

Its themes of individual responsibility and resistance to injustice have made it a foundational text in the philosophy of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience.

In 1848, Thoreau gave lectures at the Concord Lyceum entitled "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government".

[1] This formed the basis for his essay, which was first published under the title Resistance to Civil Government in an 1849 anthology by Elizabeth Peabody called Æsthetic Papers.

Nonetheless, Thoreau was initially inspired by the Christian anarchist ideals espoused by Ballou and Garrison.

For instance, the 1960 New American Library Signet Classics edition of Walden included a version with this title.

For instance, Mahatma Gandhi used this interpretation to suggest an equivalence between Thoreau's civil disobedience and his own satyagraha.

A lifelong abolitionist, Thoreau delivered an impassioned speech which would later become Civil Disobedience in 1848, just months after leaving Walden Pond.

The judgment of an individual's conscience is not necessarily inferior to the decisions of a political body or majority, and so "[i]t is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Abolitionists, in Thoreau's opinion, should completely withdraw their support of the government and stop paying taxes, even if this means courting imprisonment, or even violence.

"[14] Because government is man-made, not an element of nature or an act of God, Thoreau hoped that its makers could be reasoned with.

In 1907, about one year into his first satyagraha campaign in South Africa, he wrote a translated synopsis of Thoreau's argument for Indian Opinion, credited Thoreau's essay with being "the chief cause of the abolition of slavery in America", and wrote that "Both his example and writings are at present exactly applicable to the Indians in the Transvaal.

At the time of the abolition of slavery movement, he wrote his famous essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.

Its incisive logic is unanswerable.American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was also influenced by this essay.

In his autobiography, he wrote: During my student days I read Henry David Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience for the first time.

Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance.

Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.

Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.Existentialist Martin Buber wrote, of Civil Disobedience I read it with the strong feeling that here was something that concerned me directly....

Others who are said to have been influenced by Civil Disobedience include: Suffragist Alice Paul, President John F. Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and various writers such as, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, and William Butler Yeats.