Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
What Thoreau was defending here, in 1849, was essentially the same concept the English philosopher Herbert Spencer defended two years later, in his book Social Statics , as "the right to ignore the State."... "Thoreau's condemnation of the state was more thorough, and in many other ways he fits more closely into the anarchist pattern than Emerson could ever do."
"I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least,'" Thoreau wrote,
and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe…
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