According To Thoreau How Can A Minority Exercise Power

Originally delivered as a lecture by Henry David Thoreau in 1849 to explain why he refused to pay his taxes, 'Resistance to Civil Government,' subsequently known as 'Civil Disobedience' argues that we all have a moral obligation not to support a government with unjust laws. This is truthful even if withholding our support ways breaking the police and risking penalty, such as imprisonment or loss of property.

Thoreau'south protest was against slavery and unjustified war. While many people in the mid-nineteenth century shared Thoreau's disgust with slavery and war, his call to non-violent protest was ignored or misunderstood during his ain lifetime. Later, in the 20th century, Thoreau's work would go on to inspire some of history's most significant protest leaders, such every bit Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Background and Context for 'Civil Defiance'

In 1845, 29-year-old Henry David Thoreau decided to temporarily exit behind his life in the town of Agree, Massachusetts, and to live a alone life in a cabin he would build for himself on the shores of nearby Walden Swimming. Having graduated from Harvard nearly a decade earlier, Thoreau had experienced moderate success as a schoolmaster, a writer, an engineer in the Thoreau family-owned pencil manufacturing plant, and a surveyor. Feeling a vague dissatisfaction with his life, he went to Walden "to live" in his own words, "deliberately, to see if I could not learn what information technology had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had non lived."²

Thoreau is Jailed

Thoreau was non completely isolated during this experiment. In addition to the friends, well-wishers, and curious passers-past who would visit (and occasionally spend the night) with Thoreau at Walden, he would also regularly make the trek back into Concur, where he would drop off a bag of laundry and eat dinner with his family. Information technology was during one such trip in the summer of 1846 that Sam Staples, the local tax-collector, ran into Thoreau on the streets of Concord.

Staples and Thoreau were friendly acquaintances, and when he approached Thoreau to remind him that he hadn't paid his taxes in over four years, there was no hint of a threat or anger. Recalling the issue later in life, Staples claimed that he had "spoken to him [Thoreau] a expert many times about his tax and he said he didn't believe in it and shouldn't pay."²

Staples even offered to pay the tax for Thoreau, but Thoreau insistently refused, proverb, "No, sir; don't you do information technology." The alternative, Staples reminded Thoreau, was jail. "I'll go now," responded Thoreau, and calmly followed Staples to be locked up.ⁱⁱ

A prison house prison cell, Pixabay.

The corporeality of the tax—$one.50 per year—was modest even when adapted for aggrandizement, and it was non the fiscal burden itself that Thoreau objected to. Thoreau and his family had long been active in the anti-slavery abolitionist move, and their house was likely already a finish on the famous Hush-hush Railroad by 1846 (though they remained highly secretive about the extent of their interest in it).²

Already deeply unhappy with a authorities that allowed slavery to go along existing, Thoreau's dissatisfaction only grew with the start of the Mexican War in 1846, just a few months prior to his arrest for refusal to pay taxes. Thoreau viewed this war, which was started by the President with approval from Congress, as an unjustifiable act of aggression.² Between the Mexican War and Slavery, Thoreau wanted cypher to do with the U.S. government.

The Hugger-mugger Railroad was the name of a secret network of households that would assist escaped slaves travel to gratis states or Canada.

Thoreau would spend merely one night in jail, after which an bearding friend, whose identity is still unknown, paid the tax for him. Three years after, he would justify his refusal to pay taxes and explain his feel in a lecture, afterward published equally an essay, chosen 'Resistance to Civil Government,' more usually known today as 'Civil Disobedience.' The essay was not well-received in Thoreau's own lifetime, and was almost immediately forgotten.² In the 20th century, however, leaders and activists would re-discover the piece of work, finding in Thoreau a powerful tool to make their voices heard.

Summary of Thoreau's 'Resistance to Civil Government' or 'Ceremonious Defiance'

Thoreau begins the essay past quoting the maxim, fabricated famous past Thomas Jefferson, that "That government is best which governs least."¹ Thoreau adds his own twist here: nether the correct circumstances, and with sufficient grooming, the saying should exist "That government is best which governs not at all."¹ All governments, according to Thoreau, are merely tools through which people do their will. Over time, they are liable to be "abused and perverted" past a small number of people, as Thoreau had witnessed during his lifetime in the Mexican War, which was started without blessing from Congress past President James One thousand. Polk.

The positive accomplishments that people typically attributed to the authorities in Thoreau's time, which he thinks include keeping "the country complimentary", settling "the W," and educating people, were in fact achieved by "the character of the American people," and would have been washed in any case, maybe even improve and more efficiently without regime interference.¹

The Mexican-American State of war (1846-1848) was fought over territory that includes nowadays-24-hour interval California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New United mexican states. As the United States expanded westwards, it originally tried to buy this land from Mexico. When that failed, President James K. Polk sent troops to the border and provoked an assault. Polk declared state of war without Congress' consent. Many suspected that he wanted to add together the new territory as slave-holding states to secure the s'due south predominance in Congress.

Thoreau acknowledges the impracticality of having no regime at all, however, and thinks that we should instead focus on how to brand a "better government," one that would "command [our] respect."^ane The problem that Thoreau sees with contemporary regime is that it is dominated past a "majority" who are "physically the strongest" rather than existence "in the right" or concerned with what is "fairest to the minority."ⁱ

The majority of citizens, insofar as they contribute to government at all, do then in the constabulary force or the armed forces. Here they are more than like "machines" than humans, or on a level with "wood and earth and stones," using their physical bodies merely not their moral and rational capacities.¹

Those who serve the state in a more intellectual function, such every bit "legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders," practice their rationality only only rarely make "moral distinctions" in their piece of work, never questioning whether what they exercise is for good or for evil. Just a small number of true "heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers" in history have always dared to question the morality of the actions of the state.¹

The worry that a commonwealth could be hijacked by a majority who would show no involvement in minority rights is known equally the tyranny of the bulk. It was a major concern of the authors of The Federalist Papers (1787), equally well equally later writers such as Thoreau.

This brings Thoreau to the crux of the essay: how should anyone living in a country that claims to be "a refuge of liberty" only where "a sixth of the population...are slaves" respond to their government?¹ His answer is that no one can be associated with such a regime "without disgrace," and that anybody has a duty to attempt to "rebel and revolutionize."¹ The duty is even more urgent than that felt during the American Revolution since information technology is not a foreign occupying force, just our own government on our ain territory that is responsible for this injustice.

Despite the fact that a revolution would cause a great amount of upheaval and inconvenience, Thoreau thinks that his Americans have a moral obligation to practise it. He compares slavery with a state of affairs where someone has "unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man" and must now make up one's mind whether to give the plank back, letting himself struggle and possibly drown, or sentry the other homo sink.¹

Thoreau thinks there is no question that the plank must exist given back, equally "he that would salvage his life, in such a case, shall lose it."^ane In other words, while saved from physical death by drowning, this hypothetical person would endure a moral and spiritual decease that would transform them into someone unrecognizable. Such is the case with the United states of america, which volition lose its "existence as a people" if it fails to take activity to stop slavery and unjust wars of assailment.¹

Easily Reaching Out from the Sea, Pixabay

Thoreau thinks that a number of selfish and materialistic motives have made his contemporaries besides complacent and conformist. Foremost amidst these is a business organization with business and turn a profit which, ironically, has become more important to "the children of Washington and Franklin" than liberty and peace.¹ The American political organisation, which relies entirely on voting and representation, also plays a part in nullifying individual moral choice.

While voting may make us experience that nosotros are making a alter, Thoreau insists that "Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it."^one Then long as the majority of people are on the wrong side (and Thoreau thinks that this is likely, if not necessarily, going to be the case) a vote is a meaningless gesture.

A terminal contributing factor is the politicians in a representative democracy, who may well start off as "respectable" people with skilful intentions, only presently come under the influence of a modest class of people who control political conventions. Politicians then come up to represent not the interests of the unabridged country, but of a select elite to whom they owe their position.

Thoreau doesn't think that any one individual has a duty to completely eradicate a political evil like slavery. Nosotros are all in this world "not importantly to make this a good place to alive in, but to live in it," and we would need to devote literally all of our time and energy into fixing the globe's wrongs.¹ The mechanisms of autonomous government are also too flawed and ho-hum to make any real divergence, at to the lowest degree within one human lifetime.

Thoreau's solution, then is to simply withhold support from the government that supports injustice, to "Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the automobile...to see, at any rate, that I practise not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn."¹

Since the average person (among whom Thoreau counts himself) but really interacts with and is recognized by the government in one case a year when they pay their taxes, Thoreau thinks this is the perfect opportunity to become a counter-friction to the machine by refusing to pay. If this results in imprisonment, and then much the ameliorate, since "under a government which imprisons whatsoever unjustly, the truthful place for a only man is also a prison."¹

Not merely is it morally necessary for united states to have our place every bit prisoners in a slave-holding club, if anybody who objected to slavery were to decline to pay their taxes and accept a prison sentence, the lost revenue and overcrowded prisons would "clog the whole weight" of the government mechanism, forcing them to human action on slavery.

Refusing to pay taxes deprives the country of the money that information technology needs to "shed blood," absolves you of any participation in the bloodshed, and forces the government to listen to your vox in a fashion that merely voting does non.

For those who own property or other assets, refusing to pay taxes presents a greater gamble since the government tin can simply confiscate it. When that wealth is needed in lodge to support a family, Thoreau concedes that "this is hard," making it impossible to live "honestly and at the aforementioned fourth dimension comfortably."^one

He argues, however, that any wealth accumulated in an unjust state should be "a subject area of shame" that nosotros must exist willing to surrender. If this means living modestly, and not owning a house or even having a secure source of food, then nosotros must simply accept information technology as a event of the country's injustice.

Reflecting on his own brief fourth dimension in prison house for refusing to pay six years of taxes, Thoreau notes how ineffective the regime's strategy of imprisoning people actually is:

I did not for a moment experience confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of rock and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townspeople had paid my tax [...] the Land never intentionally confronts a human being's sense, intellectual or moral, but but his torso, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical force. I was not born to exist forced. I will breathe later my own fashion. Let the states run into who is the strongest.¹

Thoreau notes that the government is unable to strength people to change their minds regardless of the superiority of the physical forcefulness they tin can apply. This is especially true when the regime is enforcing a law that is fundamentally immoral and unjust, such as slavery. Ironically, the contrast between his bodily confinement and his moral and spiritual liberty acquired Thoreau to find the experience of imprisonment liberating.

Thoreau also notes that he has no problem with taxes that back up infrastructure, like highways or education. His refusal to pay taxes is a more general refusal of "allegiance to the State" more than an objection to the specific use of any of his tax dollars.¹ Thoreau also concedes that, from a certain perspective, the U.S. Constitution is in fact a very good legal document.

Indeed, the people who dedicate their lives to interpreting and upholding information technology are intelligent, eloquent, and reasonable people. They fail, notwithstanding, to run into things from a larger perspective, that of a college police force, a moral and spiritual law that is above that legislated by any nation or gild. Instead, most devote themselves to upholding whatever status quo they happen to find themselves in.

Throughout his career, Thoreau was concerned with what he chosen a Higher Law. He showtime wrote nearly this in Walden (1854), where it meant a kind of spiritual purity. Later, he described it every bit a moral police that was above any kind of ceremonious law. It is this higher law that tells us that things like slavery and state of war are in fact immoral, even if they are perfectly legal. Thoreau thought, in a manner like to his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, that such a higher law could but be understood by engaging with the natural earth.²

Thoreau concludes by noting that autonomous government, despite its flaws, gives more rights to the individual than absolute and limited monarchies do, and so represents genuine historical progress. He wonders, notwithstanding, whether it may not still be further improved.

For this to happen, the government must "recognize the individual as a college and independent ability, from which all power and authorisation are derived, and [treat] him accordingly."^ane This would involve not merely, of course, an end to slavery, but also the selection for people to live independently of government control as long equally they "fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and boyfriend-men."ⁱ

A Definition of 'Civil Disobedience'

The term "civil defiance" was probably not coined by Henry David Thoreau, and the essay was but given this title later his death. Notwithstanding, Thoreau's principled refusal to pay his taxes and willingness to go to jail shortly came to be seen as the origin of a grade of peaceful protest. By the 20th century, anyone who peacefully bankrupt a police force as a course of protest while fully accepting whatever punishment they would receive were said to be engaged in an human activity of civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience is a form of peaceful protest. It involves knowingly breaking a law or laws that are seen as immoral or unjust, and fully accepting whatever consequences, such every bit fines, imprisonment, or bodily impairment, that may come as a result.

Examples of Civil Defiance

While Thoreau'due south essay was almost entirely ignored during his own lifetime, it has exercised an enormous influence on politics in the 20th century. In our own fourth dimension, civil disobedience has come to be widely accustomed equally a legitimate way to protestation perceived injustice.

Thoreau's refusal to pay his taxes and the night he spent in the Concord jail may have been 1 of the showtime acts of civil defiance, only the term is maybe best known every bit the method that Mahatma Gandhi would use to protestation British occupation of India in the early 20th century and as the favored strategy of many leaders of the American civil rights motion, such as Martin Luther Rex, Jr.

Mahatma Gandhi, Pixabay

Gandhi first encountered Thoreau's essay while working as a lawyer in South Africa. Having grown up in colonial India and studied law in England, Gandhi considered himself a British subject with all the rights that entailed. Arriving in South Africa, he was shocked by the bigotry he faced. Gandhi likely wrote several articles in the Due south African newspaper, Indian Stance, either summarizing or directly referencing Thoreau's 'Resistance to Civil Government.'

When the Asiatic Registration Deed or "Black Act" of 1906 required all Indians in Due south Africa to register themselves in what looked very much like a criminal database, Gandhi took action in a way heavily inspired by Thoreau. Through Indian Opinion, Gandhi organized big scale opposition to the Asiatic Registration Human action, which eventually resulted in a public protest in which Indians burned their registration certificates.

Gandhi was imprisoned for his interest, and this marked a critical phase in his development from an unknown lawyer to the leader of a mass political motion. Gandhi would continue to develop his own principle of nonviolent resistance, Satyagraha, inspired by but singled-out from Thoreau'due south ideas. He would lead peaceful mass protests, about famously the Salt March in 1930, that would take an enormous touch on on Britain's decision to grant Republic of india independence in 1946.³

A generation later on, Martin Luther King, Jr. would also find inspiration in Thoreau's work. Fighting for desegregation and equal rights for America's blackness citizens, he first made use of the idea of civil disobedience on a large scale during the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Famously begun by Rosa Parks' refusal to sit at the dorsum of the double-decker, the cold-shoulder called national attention to Alabama's legally encoded racial segregation.

King was arrested and, unlike Thoreau, served a great bargain of jail time under harsh weather over the course of his career. At some other, afterwards non-violent protestation confronting racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, King would be arrested and imprisoned. While serving his time, Male monarch wrote his now-famous essay, "Alphabetic character from a Birmingham Jail," outlining his theory of peaceful non-resistance.

King'south thinking is heavily indebted to Thoreau, sharing his ideas virtually the danger of majority rule in democratic governments and the necessity to protest injustice by peacefully breaking unjust laws and accepting the penalty for doing then.⁴

Martin Luther King, Jr., Pixabay

Thoreau'south thought of ceremonious disobedience continues to be a standard form of nonviolent political protest today. While it is not e'er practiced perfectly - information technology is difficult to coordinate large numbers of people, peculiarly in the absence of a leader withthe stature of Gandhi or King - it is the basis of almost protests, strikes, conscientious objections, sit-ins, and occupations.Examples from contempo history include the Occupy Wall Street move, the Black Lives Thing movement, and the Fridays for Future climate change protests.

Quotes from 'Ceremonious Disobedience'

The Authorities

I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to come across information technology acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, information technology finally amounts to this, which I also believe,—'That authorities is best which governs non at all.'"

Thoreau thinks that regime is just a ways to an end, namely living peacefully in a society. If the authorities grows too big or starts playing also many roles, it will likely be subject to abuse, and treated as an terminate in itself by careerist politicians or people who benefit from corruption. Thoreau thinks that, in a perfect world, at that place would be no permanent government at all.

There volition never be a actually free and enlightened State, until the Land comes to recognize the private equally a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and say-so are derived, and treats him accordingly."

Thoreau thought that democracy was a genuinely good form of authorities, far better than monarchy. He also thought there was a lot of room for improvement. Not only did slavery and state of war need to end, but Thoreau also thought that the perfect form of government would requite individuals complete liberty (equally long as they didn't practise impairment to anyone else).

Justice and the Constabulary

Under a government which imprisons whatever unjustly, the true identify for a only man is also a prison.

When the regime enforces a law that imprisons anyone unjustly, it is our moral duty to interruption that law. If we too go to prison as a result, then this is only further proof of the police's injustice.

...if [a police force] requires y'all to exist the agent of injustice to another, so, I say, intermission the police. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

Thoreau believed in something that he called a "higher law." This is a moral law, which may not always coincide with civil police. When civil law asks us to suspension the college law (as information technology did in the case of slavery in Thoreau's lifetime), we must refuse to do it.

They only tin can force me who obey a college constabulary than I.

Nonviolent resistance

If a thousand men were not to pay their revenue enhancement-bills this yr, that would non be a violent and bloody measure, as it would exist to pay them, and enable the State to shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible."

This is perhaps every bit close as Thoreau comes to offer a definition of what we would today recognize as civil disobedience. Withholding support from the state non but allows us as citizens to not support what we see as an immoral law, but if skilful by a large group can actually forcefulness the country to change its laws.

Civil Disobedience - Key takeaways

• Originally called "Resistance to Civil Authorities," "Civil Defiance" was an 1849 lecture by Henry David Thoreau justifying his refusal to pay taxes. Thoreau disagreed with the being of slavery and with the Mexican-American State of war, and argued that we all accept a moral obligation not to support the actions of an unjust state.
• Democracy does not allow minorities to effectively protestation injustice through voting, and so some other method is needed.
• Thoreau suggests that refusing to pay taxes is the best form of protest bachelor in a autonomous state.
• Thoreau as well thinks that we need to accept the consequences of our actions, fifty-fifty if this includes imprisonment or confiscated property.
• Thoreau's thought of ceremonious disobedience has been enormously influential in the 20th century.

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References

1. Baym, N. (General Editor). The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Book B 1820-1865. Norton, 2007.

two. Dassow-Walls, 50. Henry David Thoreau: A Life, 2017

3. Hendrick, K. "The Influence of Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' on Gandhi'southward Satyagraha." The New England Quarterly, 1956

4. Powell, B. "Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther Rex, Jr., and the American Tradition of Protestation." OAH Mag of History, 1995.

Source: https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/english-literature/essayists/civil-disobedience/

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