What do self-reliance and civil disobedience have in common?

Both are concepts based on essays written by two Transcendentalists in the 1840s—“Self-Reliance,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1841; and “Civil Disobedience,” then called “Resistance to Civil Government,” by Emerson’s main protégé, Henry David Thoreau, published in 1849. Both speak to the power of the individual and the importance of people to step up and to claim their individuality, their opinions, and their personalities. Conformity is wrong. Embrace your nonconformity, your individuality. But while...

Both are concepts based on essays written by two Transcendentalists in the 1840s—“Self-Reliance,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1841; and “Civil Disobedience,” then called “Resistance to Civil Government,” by Emerson’s main protégé, Henry David Thoreau, published in 1849. Both speak to the power of the individual and the importance of people to step up and to claim their individuality, their opinions, and their personalities. Conformity is wrong. Embrace your nonconformity, your individuality. But while Emerson speaks more generally about individual words and deeds, Thoreau addresses the specifics of how an individual can coexist with a government which he disagrees with. He uses his own example from an incident in July 1846, when he spent a night in jail because he had not paid the state poll tax. It should be noted that while we now associate Thoreau with any act of “civil disobedience,” the truth is that he never used this term in his essay or in any of his writings. The title of his essay was changed by a publisher or editor when it was re-printed after Thoreau’s death in 1862.