On the Duty of Civil Disobedience By Henry David Thoreau COMPLETE CLASSICSResistance to Civil Government (Civil Disobedience) is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849.
On Civil Disobedience is another common title..
For instance, the 1960 New American Library Signet Classics edition of Walden included a version with this title.
Today, the essay also appears under the title On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, perhaps to contrast it with William Paley\'s Of the Duty of Civil Obedience to which Thoreau was in part responding. e., a resistance) "to stop the machine."In 1866, four years after Thoreau\'s death, the essay was reprinted in a collection of Thoreau\'s work (A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers) under the title Civil Disobedience.
Resistance also served as part of Thoreau\'s metaphor comparing the government to a machine: when the machine was producing injustice, it was the Duty of conscientious citizens to be "a counter friction" (i.
The latter title distinguished Thoreau\'s program from that of the "non-resistants" (anarcho-pacifists) who were expressing similar views.
Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).
In 1848, Thoreau gave lectures at the Concord Lyceum entitled "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government." This formed the basis for his essay, which was first published under the title Resistance to Civil Government in 1849 in an anthology called Aesthetic Papers.
In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a Duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice.
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience By Henry David Thoreau COMPLETE CLASSICSResistance to Civil Government (Civil Disobedience) is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849
