The
government, according to Thoreau, is not just a little corrupt or unjust
in the course of doing its otherwise-important work, but in fact the government
is primarily an agent of corruption and injustice.
Because of this, it is "not too soon for honest men to rebel and
revolutionize."[7]
Confucius said, "If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame;(7) if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame." Civil Disobedience (Thoreau)
/Lesser Evil In The Circumstances!/
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Civil Disobedience (Resistance
to Civil Government) is an essay by American transcendentalist
Henry David Thoreau that was first published in
1849. 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.
Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican–American War.
Contents |
Title
In 1848, Thoreau gave lectures at the Concord Lyceum
entitled "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to
Government."[1] This formed the basis for his essay,
which was first published under the title Resistance to Civil Government
in 1849 in an anthology called Æsthetic Papers. The latter title
distinguished Thoreau's program from that of the "non-resistants"
(anarcho-pacifists) who
were expressing similar views. 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.e., a resistance) "to stop the machine."[2]
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.
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. For instance, the 1960 New American Library Signet Classics edition
of Walden included a version with this title. On Civil Disobedience
is another common title.
The word civil
has several definitions. The one that is intended in this case is
"relating to citizens and their interrelations with one another or with
the state", and so civil disobedience means "disobedience to
the state". Sometimes people assume that civil in this case means
"observing accepted social forms; polite" which would make civil
disobedience something like polite, orderly disobedience. Although
this is an acceptable dictionary definition of the word civil, it is not
what is intended here. This misinterpretation is one reason the essay is
sometimes considered to be an argument for pacifism or for exclusively
nonviolent resistance. For instance, Mahatma Gandhi used this interpretation
to suggest an equivalence between Thoreau's civil disobedience and his own satyagraha.[3]
Background
The slavery crisis inflamed New England
in the 1840s and 1850s. The environment became especially tense after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. A lifelong
abolitionist, Thoreau delivered an impassioned speech which would later become Civil
Disobedience in 1848, just months after leaving Walden Pond. The speech
dealt with slavery, but at the same time excoriated American imperialism, particularly the
Mexican–American War.[4]
Summary
Thoreau asserts that because governments are
typically more harmful than helpful, they therefore cannot be justified. Democracy is
no cure for this, as majorities simply by virtue of being majorities do not
also gain the virtues of wisdom and justice. The judgment of an individual's conscience is not
necessarily inferior to the decisions of a political body or majority, and so
"[i]t is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for
the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any
time what I think right... Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means
of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of
injustice."[5] He adds, "I cannot for an instant
recognize as my government [that] which is the slave's government also."[6]
The government, according to Thoreau, is not just
a little corrupt or unjust in the course of doing its
otherwise-important work, but in fact the government is primarily an
agent of corruption
and injustice. Because of this, it is "not too soon for honest men to
rebel and revolutionize."[7]
Political philosophers have counseled caution
about revolution because the upheaval of revolution typically causes a lot of
expense and suffering. Thoreau contends that such a cost/benefit analysis is
inappropriate when the government is actively facilitating an injustice as
extreme as slavery. Such a fundamental immorality justifies any difficulty or
expense to bring to an end. "This people must cease to hold slaves, and to
make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence
as a people."[8]
Thoreau tells his audience that they cannot blame
this problem solely on pro-slavery Southern politicians, but must put the blame
on those in, for instance, Massachusetts, "who are more interested in
commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do
justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may... There are
thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in
effect do nothing to put an end to them."[9] (See also: Thoreau's Slavery in Massachusetts which also
advances this argument.)
He exhorts people not to just wait passively for
an opportunity to vote for justice, because voting for justice is as
ineffective as wishing for justice; what you need to do is to actually be
just. This is not to say that you have an obligation to devote your life to
fighting for justice, but you do have an obligation not to commit
injustice and not to give injustice your practical support.
Paying taxes is one way in which otherwise well-meaning people collaborate
in injustice. People who proclaim that the war in Mexico is wrong and that it
is wrong to enforce slavery contradict themselves if they fund both things by
paying taxes. Thoreau points out that the same people who applaud soldiers for
refusing to fight an unjust war are not themselves willing to refuse to fund
the government that started the war.
In a constitutional republic like the United
States, people often think that the proper response to an unjust law is to try
to use the political process to change the law, but to obey and respect the law
until it is changed. But if the law is itself clearly unjust, and the lawmaking
process is not designed to quickly obliterate such unjust laws, then Thoreau
says the law deserves no respect and it should be broken. In the case of the
United States, the Constitution itself enshrines the
institution of slavery, and therefore falls under this condemnation. Abolitionists,
in Thoreau's opinion, should completely withdraw their support of the
government and stop paying taxes, even if this means courting
imprisonment.
Under a government which
imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.… where
the State places those who are not with her, but against her,–
the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.… Cast
your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A
minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a
minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the
alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the
State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay
their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as
it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed
innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if
any such is possible.[10]
Because the government will retaliate, Thoreau
says he prefers living simply because he therefore has less to lose. "I
can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts…. It costs me less in every
sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey.
I should feel as if I were worth less in that case."[11]
He was briefly imprisoned for refusing to pay the
poll tax,
but even in jail felt freer than the people outside. He considered it an
interesting experience and came out of it with a new perspective on his
relationship to the government and its citizens. (He was released the next day
when "someone interfered, and paid that tax.")[12]
Thoreau said he was willing to pay the highway
tax, which went to pay for something of benefit to his neighbors, but that he
was opposed to taxes that went to support the government itself—even if he
could not tell if his particular contribution would eventually be spent on an
unjust project or a beneficial one. "I simply wish to refuse allegiance to
the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually."[13]
Because government is man-made, not an element of
nature or an act of God, Thoreau hoped that its makers could be
reasoned with. As governments go, he felt, the U.S. government, with all its
faults, was not the worst and even had some admirable qualities. But he felt we
could and should insist on better. "The progress from an absolute to a
limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward
a true respect for the individual.… Is a democracy, such as we know it, the
last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step
further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never
be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the
individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and
authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."[14]
"That government is best which governs least"
An aphorism sometimes attributed to either Thomas
Jefferson or Thomas Paine, "That government is best which
governs least", actually was first found in this essay.[15] Thoreau was paraphrasing the motto of The United States
Magazine and Democratic Review: "The best government is that which
governs least."[16]
Influence
Mohandas Gandhi
Main article: Salt Satyagraha
Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi (a.k.a. Mahatma Gandhi)
was impressed by Thoreau's arguments. In 1907, about one year into his first satyagraha
campaign in South Africa, he wrote a translated synopsis of
Thoreau's argument for Indian Opinion, credited Thoreau's essay with
being "the chief cause of the abolition of slavery in America", and
wrote that "Both his example and writings are at present exactly
applicable to the Indians in the Transvaal."[17] He later concluded:
Thoreau was a great writer,
philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing
he was not prepared to practice in himself. He was one of the greatest and most
moral men America has produced. At the time of the abolition of slavery
movement, he wrote his famous essay "On the Duty of Civil
Disobedience". He went to gaol for the sake of his principles and suffering humanity.
His essay has, therefore, been sanctified by suffering. Moreover, it is written
for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.
—"For Passive
Resisters" (1907)[18]
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was also influenced
by this essay. In his autobiography, he wrote:
During my student days I read Henry David
Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience for the first time. Here, in this
courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail
rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I
made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by
the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved
that I reread the work several times.
I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral
obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent
and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a
result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of
creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights
movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch
counters, a freedom ride into
Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in
Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence
that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to
injustice.
—"The Autobiography of
Martin Luther King, Jr."[19]
Martin Buber
Existentialist Martin Buber
wrote, of Civil Disobedience
I read it with the strong feeling that here was
something that concerned me directly.… It was the concrete, the personal
element, the "here and now" of this work that won me over. Thoreau
did not put forth a general proposition as such; he described and established
his attitude in a specific historical-biographic situation. He addressed his
reader within the very sphere of this situation common to both of them in such
a way that the reader not only discovered why Thoreau acted as he did at that
time but also that the reader– assuming him of course to be honest and
dispassionate– would have to act in just such a way whenever the proper
occasion arose, provided he was seriously engaged in fulfilling his existence
as a human person.
The question here is not just about one of the
numerous individual cases in the struggle between a truth powerless to act and
a power that has become the enemy of truth. It is really a question of the
absolutely concrete demonstration of the point at which this struggle at any
moment becomes man's duty as man.…
—"Man's Duty As Man"
(1962)[20]
Others
Author Leo Tolstoy
has cited Civil Disobedience as having a strong impact on his
non-violence methodology. Others who are said to have been influenced by Civil
Disobedience include: President John
F. Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and various writers such as,
Marcel
Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Upton
Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, and William Butler Yeats.[21]
References
3.
^ Rosenwald, Lawrence The Theory, Practice &
Influence of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience quoting Gandhi, M. K. Non-Violent
Resistance pp. 3-4 and 14
20.
^ Buber, Martin Man's Duty As Man from Thoreau in
Our Season University of Massachusetts Press (1962) p. 19
External links
 |
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
|
 |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Civil
Disobedience (Thoreau)
|
- Peabody, Elizabeth, Ed. Æsthetic Papers. The Editor, Boston, 1849, a digitized copy from the Internet Archive.
- Thoreau, H.D. A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers. Ticknor and Fields, Boston, 1866, a digitized copy from the Internet Archive.
- Civil Disobedience - complete work with audio
- Hypertext version from American Transcendentalist Web
- A well-footnoted version at panarchy.org.
- Full text at Project Gutenberg.
- Annotated version at The Thoreau Reader
- Resistance to Civil Government with external references and individually hyperlinked paragraphs
- The Theory, Practice, and Influence of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience by Lawrence Rosenwald
- Henry David Thoreau and "Civil Disobedience" by Wendy McElroy
- Highway Tax vs. Poll Tax: Some Thoreau Tax Trivia by Carl Watner
- Introduction by Howard Zinn, The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform
- Civil Disobedience– Audio Book, Free public-domain Librivox Audio Recording (full text)
- "All Things New: On Civil Disobedience Now" by Steven Schroeder, Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 2, June 2007
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hidden categories:
Personal tools
Namespaces
Variants
Views
Actions
Search
Navigation
Interaction
Toolbox
Print/export
Languages
- This page was last modified on 3 February 2012 at 17:39.
- Text is
available under the Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
See Terms of
use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. - Contact us
ምንም አስተያየቶች የሉም:
አስተያየት ይለጥፉ