A Summary and Analysis of Henry David Thoreau's 'Civil.
In his essay, “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau wrote in 1849 after spending a night in the Walden town jail for refusing to pay a poll tax that supported the Mexican War. He recommended passive resistance as a form of tension that could lead to reform of unjust laws practiced by the government. He voiced civil disobedience as “An expression of the individual’s liberty to create change.
The term “civil disobedience” was brought about in 1849 by Henry David Thoreau in his essay and since those times has been sparkling controversies with its ambiguous nature. What exactly falls under civil disobedience? Is it an act of breaking the law, is it a fight for justice, or is it a lawful right of all citizens to the freedom of speech? These questions are a bit hard to answer.
Civil disobedience does, however, involve at least two restrictions: 1) the means of resistance advocated and practiced by Thoreau are nonviolent (though in later political writings, he appears to change his mind on this matter); 2) the act of resistance should specifically target the injustice to be remedied. Moral objection to a particular law does not authorize nonobservance of all laws.
Whereas this theoretical tension remains largely unresolved in the essay, it is important to keep in mind from a purely historical standpoint that Thoreau is writing Civil Disobedience some twenty years before passage of the Fourteenth Amendment (guaranteeing equal protection and due process under the law), which substantially increased the role of the federal government in enforcing.
Civil Disobedience Essay Example Civil disobedience refers to the refusal of a citizen to obey the laws of the state or the controls of a government that are imposed. People, who disobey the law in this way, want to ignore certain orders that are imposed on them in a non-violent manner. This is why this term has sometimes become equated with.
Civil disobedience was started by the American author Henry David Thoreau. Henry Thoreau established the modern theory behind the practice of civil disobedience in his essay, “Civil Disobedience,” originally titled “Resistance to Civil Government,” which was published in 1849. The idea behind this essay was that of self-reliance, and.
The appeal of civil disobedience in the North grew in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, which included the hated Fugitive Slave Law, requiring all citizens to aid in the return of escaped slaves to their owners. Though civil disobedience is usually associated with passive resistance, Thoreau came to endorse the more direct action of John Brown, whose ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.