Work · Pragmatism & US Philosophy
Resistance to Civil Government (Civil Disobedience)
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Introduction
Thoreau first gave the text as a lecture at the Concord Lyceum in early 1848 and published it in 1849, under the title “Resistance to Civil Government”, in Aesthetic Papers, a volume edited by Elizabeth Peabody; the familiar title “Civil Disobedience” appeared only in a posthumous edition of 1866. The occasion was a night in jail in July 1846 after he refused to pay a poll tax in protest against slavery and the war against Mexico. The essay asks whether a citizen must ever resign his conscience to the legislator, and answers that one should be a human being first and a subject afterwards. Gandhi and Martin Luther King both referred to it.
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Connections
Taken up in
- Hind Swaraj1909 · Mohandas K. Gandhi
- Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story1958 · Martin Luther King Jr.
More works by Henry David Thoreau
- 1854Walden
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