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📘 Thoreau asks what your cooperation is doing

In the essay now called On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Thoreau starts from a sharp premise: a government can be legal and still be wrong.

2
lessons
~10 min
to learn
Adults
level
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What you’ll learn

  1. Conscience and refusalExplain Thoreau's premise that legal government can be unjust and why he refused the poll tax.Majority power and payment can make a person an agent of harm unless conscience refuses.
  2. Limits and legacyPlace the essay's first title, later movements, and the question of what your conduct supports.Personal refusal witnesses against injustice but does not alone dismantle a system.

Questions this course answers

Why does Thoreau say a majority is not automatically right?

Majority rule can measure power rather than truth.

Why does the poll tax matter in the essay?

He wants opposition to slavery and war to change his participation, not remain a private complaint.

What is a limitation of reading Thoreau as a complete protest strategy?

Later movements needed collective organization and discipline in addition to the individual refusal Thoreau emphasizes.

What was the essay's first published title?

It appeared in Elizabeth Peabody's Aesthetic Papers in 1849; Civil Disobedience was a later title.

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