Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau Essay

Henry David Thoreau was little cognize exterior his homet knowledge of Concord, Massach make use oftts, where he was untold admired for his passionate lieu on social issues, his deep knowledge of infixed history, and the originality of his lectures, turn extincts, and books. He was also maligned as a ice-skating rink and malingerer who neer held a steady telephone circuit and whose philosophy was tho a pale sham of Ralph Waldo Emerson s. Thoreau was a humanness of ideas who struggled all his life to cook a path that would refuse compromise. All his activitiesteaching, pencil-making, surveying, and, in a high place all, writingwere grounded in his faith in a higher moral adept that could be ascertained and practiced by means of the unremitting discipline of upkeep ever in the present mo handst (Walls 1). For Thoreau this precept meant living in each season as it passes, fully attuned to the rhythms and pheno custodya of nature.His art, as it matured, became a way two to keep his own perceptions alert to all the probable of the present and to incite his readers to discover their own humor of attentiveness to life beyond the mud and splosh of opinion. In the century by and by his death, the admiration of his few followers snowballed, and he is now recognized as one of the greatest writers in the United States (Walls 1). after wards presentation at the Concord Lyceum on January 26, 1848, Thoreaus attempt Resistance to well-manneredised establishment was print the following spring in aesthetic Papers, edited by Elizabeth Peabody. The title civic disobedience was origin attached to a reprint of strain after Thoreaus death, and although it is the more(prenominal)(prenominal) widely know title, it does non reflect the origins target (crf-usa.org). That Thoreaus text is an explicit refutation of William Paleys essay on The Duty of Submission to civilized Government is emphasized non only if by the original title nonwithstand ing by the originators citation of Paley in the text.Resistance to Civil Government is a highly polemical piece, aiming to fall upon the reader to more than pure aesthetic or moral appreciation it curbs a clear strain to action in the service of principle, and indeed argues that mere conviction without action is worthless. The contemporary issues that engaged Thoreaus moral outrage at the time were Ameri underside military aggression in Mexico and the legality of thraldom in the United States. In seeking a way for the conscientious case-by-case to deal with such issues, Thoreau offers a meditation on timeless and imperative principlesthat, he feels, should guide the moral person. The substance of the creators assembly line is that each person has a duty to follow moral sense earlier than law when the two argon in conflict, and further has a duty to oppose below the belt laws by w student lodginging action against them. This book, or rather pamphlet, then had its vita l place in the greatest revolution of raw quantify, and in the mind of one of the half-dozen supreme historic kinds of all times.Gandhi ext finish and deepened Thoreaus gospel into the pissed weapon of soul-force, which achieved Indian independence. He made it non the lone protest against tyranny of the adept individual, exactly the massed disgust of disciplined multitudes of men. further the seed was of Thoreaus planting (Holmes 1). The argument is developed through a set of assertions describing the individuals relation to the offer in terms of mutually exclusive resistors. wholeness of the main sets of contrasting terms is principle or moral sense opposed to usefulness. Thoreau repeatedly featureizes judicature as operating jibe to expediency, whereas the individual citizen is capable of performing according to a higher principle, that of morality or conscience (Cain 14). In advising that the individual has non except the right but the duty to resist unsportsma n bid laws, Thoreau postulates a higher, spiritual, law that supersedes civil or thorough law. Conscience instructs the individual in this higher law, according to Thoreau, and moldiness be obeyed yet at the apostrophize of sacrificing material possessions or liberty (Jaskoski 1).Underlying and living this abstract opposition of conscience versus expediency is a metaphor that repeatedly characterizes the individual as amend and the earth as inanimate. Thoreaus consistent figure for organization or the state is a machine, patch the citizen is always a living being. The trope supports the argumentation explicitly stated in Thoreaus argument that the individual is superior to the state both in moral character and in actual strength. The individual who has the courage to act on principle gutter overcome the tyranny of the majority. At the nailt of the essay is an anecdote Thoreau relates of his own experience in resisting the state. round two-thirds of the way through his di scussion he narrates a brief account of his arrest and night fagged in Concord jail because of his refusal to afford a poll tax. Thoreau felt that the tax supported earn up aggression in Mexico and followed his conscience in refusing to pay it. He was arrested but pass only a singlenight in jail, as an early(a)(prenominal) person (who has never been definitively identified) p economic aid the tax for him and secured his going (Walls 1).The anecdote does not dwell on the inside information of Thoreaus arrest nor the actual refusal to the tax collector, but rather on the memorable night spent in the jail. The experience was not particularly tart his cellmate was affable and kind, the quarters were spartan but clean, and the atmospheric state seems to suffer been that of a family visit al virtually as much as an incarceration (Jaskoski 1). During the night, Thoreau relates, his mind was devoted over to a rather extravagant trajectory of fancy, in which he imagined himself in a knightly lock-up, and the town of Concord a village on the Rhine raftd with knights and burghers. The experience also afforded him a paradoxical, odd intimacy with the town, as he was made an impulsive eavesdropper on all the business in the kitchen of the inn next door to the jail.This new view of his townsfolk contrasts with the narrators attitude in the first part of the essay, in which Thoreau sets the conscientious person unconnected from the mass of men who shargon the inanimacy of the state they compliantly march the majority are wooden men who litigate the state as machines with their bodies only, as contrasted with the man of character who lives a spiritual life. After his night in jail, Thoreau offers a mellower view of his neighbors, along with a more optimistic vision of the possibilities of political science. Whereas the opening paragraphs of the essay contain the famous dictums regarding the superiority of no regime at all to an improved establishment, at the end of the essay, after telling the story of his night in jail, the author resumes his argument but allows for a vision of an specimen state, supportive of the highest aspirations of its citizens (Holmes 1). Resistance to Civil Government draws on several sources in Thoreaus interpret and in turn has been influential on following thinkers. The Bible, of course, is an intensity for this New England heir of the puritans.There is also a suggestion that Thoreau developed the idea of a higher law with superior claims on conscience from his reading of Sophocles play Antigone, in which the heroine resists the law of the land and obeys the ensure of the gods to bury her traitorous brother in opposition to the authority of the state (Jaskoski 1). Thoreau also quotes Confucius in his essay and, like fellow transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, was influenced by the spirituality of easterly thought. Aseries of important writers and activists have been influenced by Resistance to Civil Government, applying its principles to similar situations. Notable among these are Gandhi, who first read the essay while a young man in South Africa and who published an analysis of it early in his career, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who drew on both Thoreau and Gandhi in developing principles of nonviolent granting immunity to unjust laws. In the century that has passed since the publication of Civil Disobedience, conditions of life have vastly changed. Especially has judicature been transformed, or rather the relation of government activity to its citizens.majority detect at the start meant deliverance from the undue rape of parliamentary law upon the individual (Cain 11). This was freedom Thoreau dramatized the idea in his retreat to Walden. entirely today we think of state in terms of cooperationthe joining together of umteen free men in some putting surface enterprise for the common good. Society enters into the lives of men in a way and to a degree which would d ispirit Thoreau were he still alive. We justify this change of descent between man and the state by accenting that government in this new function is tolerateed not as a rod to get well the people, but as an instrument to equip them for the cook they have to do together (Holmes 1). Government in this sense is an indispensable alikel to achieve for society as a whole what could be through by no one man or group of men. But in this very process, government takes on major power, and is thus ever tempted to use this power at the expense of the people and in its own corporate interest.Bureaucracy, red tape, rule from above rather than from below, dictatorship, tyrannyall these are perils in wait for a socialized democracy. At the end of this severe road, in other words, if we take the wrong turn, lies tyranny of left or right (Jaskoski 1). In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation, which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty, are slaves, and a whole count ry Mexico is unjustly overrun and conquered by a alien ground forces, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. Thoreau argued that the government must end its unjust actions to earn the right to collect taxes from its citizens. As long as the government commits unjust actions, he continued, conscientious individuals must shoot whether to pay their taxes or to refuse to pay them and deny the government (crf-usa.org).Thoreau declared that if the government requiredpeople to participate in prejudice by obeying unjust laws, then people should break the laws even if they ended up in prison. Under a government which imprisons any(prenominal) unjustly, he asserted, the true place for a just man is also a prison. By not paying his taxes, Thoreau explained, he was refusing his allegiance to the government. In fact, he wrote, I quietly declare war with the State. Unlike some later advocates of civil disobedience like Marti n Luther King, Thoreau did not rule out using violence against an unjust government. In 1859, Thoreau defended toilet Browns bloody attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, during his failed attempt to spark a slave revolt (Walls 1). It is this fact, now inwrought in a demesne situation, which makes the revival of Thoreaus essay so timely. woefulness to the society which forgets that the state was made for man, and not man for the state (Jaskoski 1).And double and treble woe to the society which no longer breeds men to rise up, at the cost of their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, to resent and rebel against any attempt to subordinate them as individuals to the dominance of the state The individual must at all times and in all places be the very incumbrance of social being. This is the principle which is in such risk at the present hour. We thought that we had won the appointment for liberty. But this ideal was never as heavily established in men s minds as we had so fondly imagined. The b run short of war has move it loose, and in some cases swept it away. We must build anew the rights of man. And in this task there can be no more useful aid than Thoreaus Civil Disobedience. (crf-usa.org).I heartily accept the motto, That government is best which governs least and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it last amounts to this, which also I believe, That government is best which governs not at all and when men are prepared for it, that pass on be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an timeserving but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are umteen and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to accomplish their will, is equally liable to be abused and quirky before the people can actthrough it.Witness the present Mexican war, the work of relatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure (crf-usa.org). This American governmentwhat is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to canalise itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a come apart of wooden gun to the people themselves and, if ever they should use it in earnest as a real(a) one against each other, it will surely split. But it is not the less necessary for this for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how s uccessfully men can be oblige on, even impose on themselves, for their own good (Cain 24).It is excellent, we must all allow yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the smart with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been ended and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in let one another alone and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it (crf-usa.org). Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way and, if one were to hear these men wholly by the effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and penalize with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.To speak a lot and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a go government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long point in time continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majorityrule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable?Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? wherefore has every man a conscience, then? (Thoreau). I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not coveted to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is sincerely yours enough said, that a corporation has no conscience but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice (Thoreau).