Henry David Thoreau is Cavell’s other bellwether American philosopher; he has an entire volume devoted to commentary on Thoreau’s Walden. This chapter will discuss the radical individualism Thoreau advocated in that classic, as well as his revolutionary treatise On Civil Disobedience. Martin Luther King made specific reference to this groundbreaaking work, and then engaged in successful attempts to put Thoreau’s principles into action. The recent Hollywood epic Selma celebrates one of the outstanding examples of such disobedience as leading directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.