Thoreau's Civil Disobedience

Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience advocates the need to prioritize one's conscience over the dictates of laws. It criticizes American social institutions and policies, most prominently slavery and the Mexican American War. In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau introduces the idea of civil disobedience that was used later by Mohandas Gandhi

and Martin Luther King. In fact, many consider Thoreau as the greatest exponent of passive resistance of the 19th century. The usual title given this essay is Civil Disobedience but despite Gandhi's attribution of this term to Thoreau, Thoreau himself never uses the term anywhere in any of his works. When given as a lecture at the Concord Lyceum on January 26, 1848, the essay was titled "On the Relation of the Individual to the State." Only after Thoreau was dead for four years did the essay assume the title that finally stuck. (Click, 1973)

Thoreau begins Civil Disobedience by arguing that government rarely proves itself useful and that it derives its power from the majority because they are the strongest group, not because they hold the most legitimate viewpoint. He argues that people should not follow the law dictated by the majority but rather do what they believe is right. He contends that when a government is unjust, people should refuse to follow the law and distance themselves from the government in general. According to Thoreau, if the government is an unjust institution than one does not have to be a member. He further argues that the United States fits his criteria for an unjust government, given its support of slavery and its practice of aggressive war.

According to Thoreau, civil disobedience was preferable to pushing for reform from within government because he contends that one cannot see government for what it is when one is working within it. He also doubts the effectiveness of reform within the government arguing that voting and petitioning for change achieves little. In Civil Disobedience not only does Thoreau dissociate himself from the government by refusing to participate in its institutions; he relates his own experiences as a model for how to deal with an unjust government. Protesting slavery in the 1840’s, Thoreau refused to pay taxes and spent a night in jail.

Critics of Thoreau are split over not only over his contentions in Civil Disobedience but the man himself and his real life actions. George Kateb identifies Thoreau as an embodiment of the ideals of modern representative democracy (Kateb,1992 ) but Hannah Arendt dismisses Thoreau's actions as inherently unpolitical, since they are private actions taken merely to free himself from evil. (Arendt, 1969). So who is right? In an attempt to clarify the paradoxes in Civil Disobedience, Lawrence Rosenwald examines the complex relationship between the text and Thoreau’s own actions. Rosenwald contends that Civil Disobedience was forged amid the growing pressures of the preceding decade and culminated with Thoreau's first tax refusal and the first publication of his essay under the significant title "Resistance to Civil Government." (Rosenwald, 2000). In A Historical Guide to henry David Thoreau, he further contends that Thoreau's history-making poll tax refusal is based on "a fiction":

“His account of his tax resistance in the essay revises his tax resistance in the

world, in the community of Concord. In the essay, Thoreau cites the Mexican War

as a reason for refusing to pay the poll tax. In the world, Thoreau's action predated

the war by four years. In the essay, Thoreau refuses the tax because, as he writes,

'I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government

which is the slave's government also.' In the world, he apparently began refusing

taxes out of an unwillingness to recognize any political organization”

Other critics argue over Thoreau’s perception of civil disobedience. Leigh Jenco argues that Thoreau’s act of civil disobedience was a consequence