Civil Disobedience

Overview

A twenty-five page essay, published in 1849, based on a lecture Thoreau gave after spending a night in the Concord jail in 1846 for refusing to pay a poll tax that supported slavery and the Mexican War. He argues that the best government is the one that governs least, that a person’s first obligation is to do what he thinks right rather than what the majority decides, and that when a government commits injustice a citizen should withdraw his support from it, even at the cost of prison.

Published as Resistance to Civil Government in 1849, it was retitled after his death and later influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

What happens

The government that governs least. Thoreau opens by accepting the motto that the best government governs least, and pressing it further: when men are ready for it, the best government will govern not at all. Government is at most an expedient, and the standing army and the Mexican War show how it is abused.

Conscience against the majority. He asks whether a citizen should resign his conscience to the legislator, and answers that we should be men first and subjects afterward. A majority rules not because it is right but because it is strongest, and the mass of men serve the state as machines, with their bodies.

Slavery and the war. Thoreau turns to Massachusetts, which he says cannot be honestly called a free state while it tolerates slavery and supports the war, and rejects the counsel to wait for the majority to be persuaded: if the law requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, break the law.

Withdrawing support. The practical remedy is to withdraw allegiance, in person and property, from the state. He describes his own refusal to pay the poll tax for six years, and argues that if a thousand men refused this year, the machine would stop.

The night in jail. Thoreau recounts his night in the Concord jail, the thick walls that could not lock up his thoughts, his cellmate, and his release when someone paid the tax without his consent, after which he went huckleberrying with a party of boys.

The state’s limits. He closes by granting that the state does some good and that he will obey it where he can, but insists that a state which cannot recognise the individual as a higher and independent power is not yet a truly free and enlightened one.

How to read it

Read the essay as the record of an act rather than a doctrine, the night in the Concord jail standing behind every general claim, and ask how much of the argument the act itself carries.

Pay close attention to the claim that a person’s first obligation is to do what he thinks right rather than what the majority decides, and to what it implies about whether a democratic vote can make an unjust law binding.

Notice how the insistence that a just man’s true place under an unjust government is prison turns refusal into a position rather than a withdrawal, and how the essay makes the jail a place of freedom.

Consider how the opening claim about the government that governs least has let the essay be claimed by movements of very different kinds, and decide whether Thoreau’s individualism belongs to any of them.

Read this essay alongside Plato’s Crito to set Thoreau’s refusal against Socrates’s argument that a citizen who has accepted the laws’ benefits must accept their sentence.

Questions it raises

• Can conscience really be placed above the vote without dissolving the possibility of common life, or is Thoreau describing a limit that any democracy needs?
• Is the withdrawal of a single citizen’s support an effective act against injustice, or does its power depend entirely on the thousand others Thoreau imagines joining him?
• Why does the jail become, in Thoreau’s telling, a place of freedom, and what does the huckleberrying afterward add to or subtract from the seriousness of his stand?
• How did Gandhi and King transform an essay about one man’s refusal into a strategy for mass movements, and what did they have to change?
• Does the essay’s opening vision of a government that governs not at all sit easily with the moral demands it makes, or does Thoreau want both a minimal state and a righteous one?
• What did Thoreau think a citizen owes the state that does some good, and where exactly does his obligation to it end?