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
             Philip Berrigan. Yet that connection can be made, and moreover, it can be
             made in a way few students of Thoreau might have considered. 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
             daughter 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. The transcendentalists, informed by these
             eastern influences, began to develop the idea of a loving God (contrary to
             the fire-and-brimstone ...