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Civil Disobedience
Thoreau's Disobedience
Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience not only gives a startlingly strong argument against paying one's taxes (which is in itself a difficult task), it also gives a subtle but clear image of Thoreau himself. In this essay, the reader discovers a writer who is at once romantic and cynical, idealistically self-sacrificing and fiercely self-centered, areligious and mystical. It would be tempting to portray Thoreau as inconsistent or somehow duplicitous, but it would be more accurate to recognize him as merely complex.
The romantic in Thoreau comes through clearly when he describes his experience in jail, where "It was like traveling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night... It was to see my native village in the light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me." He addresses his experience in jail like a medieval gothic adventure, and actually seems to be enjoying his monastic cell for the night. Flights of fancy overcome him, as he considers how free his soul must be while his body is confined, and how dark the hearts of his neighbors must be that they tolerate the existence of this jail. At the same time that he is so fanciful, Thoreau shows a certain cynical sense, for there is nothing particularly romantic about his understanding of America's position...
Thoreau obviously considers revolution somewhat soberly, for after all his words, he suggests a revolution consisting of nothing more or less than tax evasion.
This mild-mannered revolution which he has in mind highlights another complexity to his character. On the one hand, Thoreau seems like quite the pleasure seeker, and seems to be a less-than-fervent revolutionary. After all, he says "It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it..." (Thoreau) which is in itself not a precisely revolutionary statement. Yet at the same time, his suggestion that one need not make such grand sacrifices for a cause, he later suggests that he would accept death before he would become complicit to the crimes of the state. " But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded?" (Thoreau) A critic might suggest that Thoreau is a lazy…
Civil Disobedience The Trial of Socrates The Athenians suffered a crushing defeat in 404 B.C.E. with the end of the Peloponnesian War. A Spartan occupation force controlled the city, and instituted the rule of the Thirty Tyrants to replace Athenian democracy. While a form of democracy was reinstated it lacked the acceptance of ideas and freedom of speech that had been such an integral part of Athenian society (Rogers). In Athens at this
John Locke's social theory not only permits disobedience but also a revolution if the State violates its side of the contract. Martin Luther King, Jr. says that civil disobedience derives from the natural law tradition in that an unjust law is not a law but a perversion of it. He, therefore, sees consenting to obey laws as not extending or including unjust laws. At present, a new and different form
Civil Disobedience: Thoreau's research on civil disobedience puts it as the refusal by the citizens to obey laws or even pay taxes in a country. The end result of the disobedience is normally war, especially when the citizens want to take laws into their hands. The decision by citizens to take the law into their hands forces the government to act forcefully, which results in the war. However, when proper procedures
Regardless, to condemn Brown to death in Thoreau's view demoted the far greater human destruction of life via the institution of enslavement Brown attempted to end. This does not seem so much to be a contradiction or a defense of violence but a tempering of the anger that Brown created in the hearts of many Americans, and an attempt to put the violent acts of Brown in the context
Pharisaical practices are as popular today as they may be supposed to have been in the time of Christ -- and one of the biggest hypocrisies of our time is what Roosevelt called "the great arsenal of democracy," the shield-phrase with which the U.S. would pursue its policy of "manifest destiny" all over the globe (and an ideology it had been pursuing since the end of the 19th century when
Civil Disobedience The concept of "Civil Disobedience" was first put forward by the American author, Henry David Thoreau in his famous essay "Civil Disobedience" initially published in 1849 as "Resistance to Civil Government." Although Thoreau's essay had little impact in the nineteenth century, his ideas about civil disobedience were put into practice in the twentieth century by leaders such as Mohandas Ghandhi during India's struggle for independence and by Martin Luther