There are, to be sure, birdcalls as well as disquisitions on the pointlessness of telegraphs, but the beginning of Walden is taken up with an all-too-familiar, particularly modern form of discomfort that we have, a hundred and fifty years on, learned to live with but have yet to fully dispel: the knowledge that we are trapped in a social and economic system that was not of our making, that we have in no real way chosen to inhabit, and that we cannot hope to escape from. Or, put another way, a system that we often fantasize about quitting for good. This is, I suspect, the appeal of apocalypse narratives—wishes disguised as fears. It is also a more plausible or at least interesting explanation for the perennial return to Walden. The idea of our own private Walden is less a desire to be “in nature” than a desperate longing to get out of this awful place. We don’t want to live serenely by a pond rather than a city park so much as we want to stop contributing to a system that requires others suffer so that we might enjoy what we suspect are merely compensatory amusements.

... The “the question of freedom and the question of free trade” and the abdication of freedom for the false freedom of social “progress” were fundamental and pervasive social problems that found their most reprehensible expression in support for slavery and imperial expansion.
This was why Walden was important. Progress required that citizens yoke themselves to an immoral economy in ever more complex ways. Progress could enlist well-meaning people in any number of unethical enterprises by the subtle blandishments of daily practices and basic comforts. Thoreau, however, does not believe that we can have our cake and eat it too. The more dependent we are on the fruits of economic progress the less likely we are to think, let alone act, against the political and moral system that such an economy has created.


from 

The Revolutionary Thoreau

R.H.Lossin