wunder beta📘 Civil Disobedience
Late July 1846. Henry Thoreau is walking into Concord for a mended shoe when the jailer, Sam Staples, locks him up for a poll tax he will not pay. He has been living in a cabin at Walden Pond. The United States is holding people as property
What you’ll learn
- The war in the tax billPlace the essay in late-1840s Concord: unpaid poll tax, slavery, and the Mexican War, and state the motto Thoreau accepts and then exceeds.A night in jail on the way to the cobbler. Governs least, then governs not at all — and still a demand for a better government at once. The slave's government is not his.
- Men first, subjects afterwardState why Thoreau refuses to treat majority force as justice, and the test for becoming counter-friction.Majorities rule because they are strongest. The only obligation is to do what you think right. Break the law when you would otherwise be the agent of harm.
- One night in ConcordDescribe the poll-tax refusal as a yearly refusal of allegiance, and keep the jail to the one night the essay records.Face to face with the tax-gatherer. Six years unpaid, one night inside, a mended shoe by morning. Highway tax paid. Allegiance refused.
- Opinion is not withdrawalDistinguish private disapproval from withdrawing cooperation, and name the limit of treating one refusal as a movement.Hands in pockets are not resistance. A neighbor's stolen dollar is the tempo he wants. Voting is a weak instrument. Refusal is not a whole politics.
- The title that traveledGive the 1848–1849–1866 title history, and separate King's and Gandhi's uses of the essay from identity with it.Lecture, Resistance to Civil Government, then Civil Disobedience. King read it at Morehouse. Gandhi borrowed the English phrase after South Africa had already begun.
Questions this course answers
Why, according to Thoreau, is a majority permitted to rule?
He says the practical reason is physical strength, not moral wisdom. The tidy slogan the majority is not always right is a later paraphrase, not his sentence.
When does Thoreau say you should break the law?
Ordinary friction can be left to wear. If you are made the agent of harm to another person, he says, become a counter-friction and break the law.
What does Thoreau's night in jail actually amount to, in his own telling?
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night. Someone interfered and paid the tax.
Why is the poll-tax refusal important in the essay?
He meets the State once a year in the tax-gatherer. He does not care to trace the dollar; he is concerned to trace the effects of his allegiance.
What is a limit of treating personal refusal as a complete political program?
The essay is strongest on personal complicity. Systems of slavery and war also require collective organization he does not supply.
What is the documented publication history?
Digital Thoreau dates the Lyceum lecture 26 January 1848. Peabody's Aesthetic Papers, 1849, uses Resistance to Civil Government. The 1866 collection supplies the later title.
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