Civil Disobedience - Softcover

Thoreau, Henry David

3.94

17,094 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1505383935 ISBN 13: 9781505383935

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014

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"Resistance to Civil Government" ("Civil Disobedience") 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.

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Review:

"This volume greatly contributes to our ability to understand Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience as a product of a specific historical context. It is a valuable piece of scholarship on the history of political thought regarding Thoreau's essay. The introduction is pitched at a level that is appropriate to undergraduates and is written in a very interesting, engaging, and readable style. But given the historically situated analysis of Thoreau's writing of Civil Disobedience, this volume will also be a valuable resource for established scholars as well. The additional primary texts are thoughtfully selected and relevant, and they help give us a more complete portrait of Thoreau in his time: with these additional readings, we can better grasp the historical context of many of the enigmatic references Thoreau makes in Civil Disobedience." -- Shannon Mariotti, Southwestern University

"A masterful historical contextualization. Bob Pepperman Taylor's introduction is a model of scholarship and his annotations are consistently illuminating. The supplementary voices, ranging from William Paley to Henry Highland Garnet to Daniel Webster to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Abraham Lincoln, help bring Thoreau to life by setting him in his place and time." -- Jack Turner, University of Washington, editor of A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau

About the Author:

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau; July 12, 1817 May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore; while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and "Yankee" love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time imploring one to abandon waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs. He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau is sometimes cited as an individualist anarchist. Though Civil Disobedience seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government" the direction of this improvement aims at anarchism: "'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." Richard Drinnon partly blames Thoreau for the ambiguity, noting that Thoreau's "sly satire, his liking for wide margins for his writing, and his fondness for paradox provided ammunition for widely divergent interpretations of 'Civil Disobedience.'" He further points out that although Thoreau writes that he only wants "at once" a better government, that does not rule out the possibility that a little later he might favor no government.

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