wrote essay on civil disobedience

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Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience: A Critical Literary Analysis

• Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” is a classic work of American literature that has been studied and analyzed for its political and philosophical implications. This critical literary analysis will examine the themes, style, and historical context of the essay, exploring how Thoreau’s ideas about individual conscience, nonviolent resistance, and the role of government continue to resonate with readers today. Through close reading and interpretation, we will gain a deeper understanding of Thoreau’s message and its relevance to contemporary debates about social justice and political activism.

The Historical Context of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience

The mid-19th century was a time of great social and political upheaval in the United States. Slavery was a contentious issue, with abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates engaged in a bitter debate over the morality and legality of the institution. The Mexican-American War had just ended, and many Americans were questioning the government’s motives for engaging in the conflict. Additionally, the country was experiencing rapid industrialization and urbanization, leading to concerns about the impact of these changes on society and the environment. Against this backdrop, Henry David Thoreau wrote his essay “Civil Disobedience,” which would become a seminal text in the history of American political thought. Thoreau’s ideas about individual conscience, nonviolent resistance, and the duty to disobey unjust laws continue to resonate with readers today, making “Civil Disobedience” a timeless work of literature.

Thoreau’s Concept of Civil Disobedience

Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience is a powerful and influential idea that has shaped the way we think about political protest and resistance. At its core, civil disobedience is a form of nonviolent resistance that involves breaking unjust laws or disobeying unjust orders in order to bring attention to a particular issue or cause. Thoreau believed that individuals had a moral obligation to resist unjust laws and that this resistance could be a powerful force for social change. In his essay “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau argues that individuals have a duty to follow their conscience and to act on their beliefs, even if this means breaking the law. He also emphasizes the importance of individual action and the need for individuals to take responsibility for their own actions. Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience has been influential in many social and political movements, including the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the environmental movement. Today, it continues to inspire individuals and groups who seek to challenge unjust laws and promote social justice.

Thoreau’s Critique of Democracy

Thoreau’s critique of democracy is a central theme in his essay “Civil Disobedience.” He argues that democracy is not a perfect system and that it can be corrupted by the majority’s tyranny. Thoreau believes that the government should be based on individual conscience and not on the will of the majority. He argues that the government should be limited in its power and that individuals should be free to act according to their own conscience. Thoreau’s critique of democracy is a powerful reminder that the government should be accountable to the people and that individuals should be free to express their opinions without fear of retribution.

The Role of Individual Conscience in Civil Disobedience

The concept of individual conscience plays a crucial role in civil disobedience, as it is the driving force behind the decision to break unjust laws. Thoreau believed that individuals have a moral obligation to resist unjust laws, even if it means facing punishment. He argued that blindly following the law without questioning its morality is a form of slavery, and that individuals must use their conscience to determine what is right and wrong. Thoreau’s emphasis on individual conscience in civil disobedience has influenced many social justice movements, including the civil rights movement and the fight for LGBTQ+ rights. However, the role of individual conscience in civil disobedience is not without controversy, as some argue that it can lead to chaos and anarchy. Despite this, Thoreau’s ideas continue to inspire individuals to stand up for what they believe in and fight for a more just society.

Thoreau’s Influence on Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr

Thoreau’s influence on Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. is undeniable. Both leaders were inspired by Thoreau’s ideas of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance. Gandhi, in particular, was deeply influenced by Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” which he read while studying law in England. Gandhi later wrote that Thoreau’s ideas “greatly influenced” his own philosophy of nonviolent resistance. Similarly, Martin Luther King Jr. was also inspired by Thoreau’s ideas and often cited “Civil Disobedience” in his speeches and writings. Thoreau’s legacy continues to inspire activists and leaders around the world who seek to bring about social change through peaceful means.

The Relationship between Civil Disobedience and Anarchism

The relationship between civil disobedience and anarchism has been a topic of debate for many years. Some argue that civil disobedience is a form of anarchism, while others believe that civil disobedience is a means of achieving social change within a democratic society. Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” has been interpreted in both ways. On one hand, Thoreau’s emphasis on individual conscience and the rejection of government authority aligns with anarchist principles. On the other hand, Thoreau’s call for nonviolent resistance and his belief in the power of the individual to effect change through peaceful means suggests a more democratic approach. Ultimately, the relationship between civil disobedience and anarchism is complex and multifaceted, and Thoreau’s essay continues to inspire debate and discussion on this topic.

Thoreau’s Views on Slavery and Abolitionism

Thoreau’s views on slavery and abolitionism were deeply rooted in his belief in individual freedom and the importance of standing up for one’s principles. He was a vocal opponent of slavery and believed that it was not only morally wrong, but also a violation of the principles of democracy and human rights. Thoreau’s commitment to abolitionism was evident in his writings, including his famous essay “Civil Disobedience,” in which he argued that individuals have a duty to resist unjust laws and policies, including those that support slavery. Thoreau’s views on slavery and abolitionism were influential in shaping the political and social landscape of his time, and continue to inspire activists and thinkers today.

Thoreau’s Critique of Materialism and Consumerism

Thoreau’s critique of materialism and consumerism is a central theme in his essay “Civil Disobedience.” He argues that the pursuit of material possessions and wealth is a distraction from the true purpose of life, which is to live deliberately and to pursue one’s own individual path. Thoreau believes that consumerism and materialism lead to a loss of individuality and a conformity to societal norms. He writes, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” Thoreau’s critique of materialism and consumerism is a call to action for individuals to reject societal pressures and to live a life that is true to themselves.

Thoreau’s Transcendentalist Philosophy and its Impact on Civil Disobedience

Thoreau’s Transcendentalist philosophy played a significant role in shaping his views on civil disobedience. As a Transcendentalist, Thoreau believed in the inherent goodness of individuals and the importance of self-reliance and non-conformity. He also believed in the power of nature and the need for individuals to connect with it in order to find spiritual fulfillment. These beliefs influenced his views on civil disobedience, as he saw it as a way for individuals to assert their own moral principles and resist unjust laws. Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” is a powerful example of his Transcendentalist philosophy in action, as he argues that individuals have a duty to disobey unjust laws and to follow their own conscience, even if it means facing punishment or imprisonment. Thoreau’s ideas on civil disobedience have had a lasting impact on political and social movements, inspiring individuals to stand up for their beliefs and to resist oppression and injustice.

The Literary Style and Structure of Civil Disobedience

Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience is a masterpiece of American literature that has been widely studied and analyzed for its literary style and structure. The essay is written in a simple and straightforward language that is easy to understand, yet it is also rich in metaphors and allusions that add depth and complexity to the text. Thoreau’s use of rhetorical devices such as repetition, parallelism, and irony also contribute to the essay’s literary quality.

The structure of Civil Disobedience is also noteworthy. Thoreau begins with a personal anecdote about his experience in jail, which serves as a hook to draw the reader in. He then transitions into a philosophical discussion about the role of government and the duty of the individual to resist unjust laws. Thoreau’s argument is structured in a logical and persuasive manner, with each point building upon the previous one. The essay concludes with a call to action, urging readers to take a stand against injustice and to live according to their own conscience.

Overall, Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience is a masterful example of literary craftsmanship. Its simple yet powerful language, effective use of rhetorical devices, and well-structured argument make it a timeless piece of American literature that continues to inspire readers today.

Thoreau’s Use of Metaphors and Symbolism in Civil Disobedience

In his essay “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau employs various metaphors and symbols to convey his message of nonviolent resistance against unjust laws. One of the most prominent metaphors he uses is that of the government as a machine. Thoreau argues that the government has become so mechanized that it no longer serves the people but rather oppresses them. He writes, “The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.” This metaphor highlights the idea that the government is not a living entity but rather a tool that can be manipulated by those in power.

Another metaphor Thoreau employs is that of the individual as a machine. He argues that individuals have become so accustomed to following the rules and regulations set by the government that they have lost their ability to think for themselves. Thoreau writes, “The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.” This metaphor emphasizes the idea that individuals have become dehumanized and are no longer able to exercise their own free will.

Thoreau also uses symbolism to convey his message of civil disobedience. One of the most significant symbols he employs is that of the Concord River. Thoreau describes the river as a symbol of freedom and resistance against oppression. He writes, “I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.” This passage highlights the idea that the river represents a force that cannot be controlled or contained by the government.

Overall, Thoreau’s use of metaphors and symbolism in “Civil Disobedience” serves to emphasize his message of nonviolent resistance against unjust laws. By employing these literary devices, Thoreau is able to convey complex ideas in a way that is both accessible and powerful.

Thoreau’s Views on Nature and their Connection to Civil Disobedience

Thoreau’s views on nature were deeply intertwined with his philosophy of civil disobedience. He believed that nature was a source of inspiration and guidance for individuals seeking to resist unjust laws and government policies. Thoreau saw nature as a symbol of freedom and self-reliance, and he believed that individuals who spent time in nature were better equipped to resist the pressures of conformity and social norms. In his essay “Walking,” Thoreau wrote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” This statement reflects his belief that nature is essential to the preservation of individual freedom and the natural world. Thoreau’s views on nature were not just aesthetic or romantic; they were deeply political and had practical implications for his philosophy of civil disobedience. By connecting nature to civil disobedience, Thoreau was able to articulate a powerful critique of the state and its laws, and he inspired generations of activists to resist unjust authority in the name of freedom and justice.

Thoreau’s Critique of War and Militarism

Thoreau’s critique of war and militarism is a central theme in his essay “Civil Disobedience.” He argues that war and militarism are not only immoral but also ineffective in achieving their stated goals. Thoreau believes that war only leads to more violence and destruction, and that it is the duty of individuals to resist it through nonviolent means. He writes, “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.” Thoreau’s critique of war and militarism is rooted in his belief in individual freedom and the importance of living a life of conscience. He argues that individuals have a responsibility to resist unjust laws and policies, even if it means breaking the law. Thoreau’s ideas about civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance have had a profound impact on social and political movements throughout history, from the civil rights movement to the anti-war movement.

Thoreau’s Views on Education and their Connection to Civil Disobedience

Thoreau’s views on education were closely tied to his philosophy of civil disobedience. He believed that education should not be limited to the traditional classroom setting, but rather should encompass a broader understanding of the world and one’s place in it. Thoreau argued that true education comes from experience and self-reflection, rather than simply memorizing facts and figures. This belief is evident in his famous essay “Civil Disobedience,” where he encourages individuals to question authority and think for themselves. Thoreau believed that education should empower individuals to challenge unjust laws and systems, and to actively work towards creating a more just society. In this way, his views on education were intimately connected to his philosophy of civil disobedience, as both were rooted in the idea of individual empowerment and social change.

The Reception and Legacy of Civil Disobedience

The reception and legacy of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience have been significant and far-reaching. The essay has been widely read and studied, and its ideas have influenced many social and political movements throughout history. Thoreau’s call for individual conscience and resistance to unjust laws has inspired civil rights leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The essay’s emphasis on the importance of personal responsibility and nonviolent resistance has also been influential in environmental and anti-war movements. Despite some criticism of Thoreau’s ideas, his legacy as a writer and social critic continues to be celebrated today.

Thoreau’s Influence on Environmentalism and Ecological Ethics

Thoreau’s influence on environmentalism and ecological ethics is undeniable. His writings on the importance of preserving nature and living in harmony with the environment have inspired generations of environmental activists and thinkers. Thoreau’s belief in the intrinsic value of nature and his call for a simpler, more sustainable way of life continue to resonate with those who seek to protect the planet and promote ecological ethics. His ideas have been instrumental in shaping the modern environmental movement and continue to inspire new generations of environmentalists.

Thoreau’s Views on Religion and Spirituality and their Connection to Civil Disobedience

Thoreau’s views on religion and spirituality played a significant role in his philosophy of civil disobedience. He believed that individuals should follow their own conscience and inner voice, rather than blindly obeying the laws and rules set by the government. Thoreau saw religion as a personal and individual experience, rather than a set of dogmatic beliefs imposed by an external authority. He believed that spirituality was a way of connecting with the divine within oneself and the natural world, rather than a means of seeking salvation or redemption from an external deity. Thoreau’s emphasis on individualism and self-reliance in his philosophy of civil disobedience was rooted in his belief in the power of the individual to effect change in society. He saw civil disobedience as a means of expressing one’s own moral convictions and challenging the unjust laws and practices of the government. Thoreau’s views on religion and spirituality were thus intimately connected to his philosophy of civil disobedience, as he saw both as ways of asserting one’s own autonomy and challenging the authority of external institutions.

The Contemporary Relevance of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience

Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience is a literary masterpiece that has stood the test of time. Its relevance in contemporary society cannot be overstated. Thoreau’s call for individuals to resist unjust laws and government policies is as relevant today as it was in the 19th century. The world is still grappling with issues of inequality, discrimination, and oppression, and Thoreau’s message of nonviolent resistance remains a powerful tool for social change. In a world where governments are increasingly becoming authoritarian and repressive, Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience serves as a reminder that individuals have the power to challenge the status quo and bring about meaningful change. The essay’s emphasis on individual conscience and the importance of taking a stand against injustice is a message that resonates with people of all ages and backgrounds. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience is a timeless classic that continues to inspire generations of activists and social reformers.

Henry David Thoreau online

Civil disobedience.

by Henry D. Thoreau

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe--"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. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.

This American government--what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed upon, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. _It_ does not keep the country free. _It_ does not settle the West. _It_ does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient, by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievious persons who put obstructions on the railroads.

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not _at once_ no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

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Civil Disobedience

What makes a breach of law an act of civil disobedience? When is civil disobedience morally justified? How should the law respond to people who engage in civil disobedience? Discussions of civil disobedience have tended to focus on the first two of these questions. On the most widely accepted account of civil disobedience, famously defended by John Rawls (1971), civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies. On this account, people who engage in civil disobedience are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions, as this shows their fidelity to the rule of law. Civil disobedience, given its place at the boundary of fidelity to law, is said to fall between legal protest, on the one hand, and conscientious refusal, revolutionary action, militant protest and organised forcible resistance, on the other hand.

This picture of civil disobedience raises many questions. Why must civil disobedience be non-violent? Why must it be public, in the sense of forewarning authorities of the intended action, since publicity gives authorities an opportunity to interfere with the action? Why must people who engage in civil disobedience be willing to accept punishment? A general challenge to Rawls's conception of civil disobedience is that it is overly narrow, and as such it predetermines the conclusion that most acts of civil disobedience are morally justifiable. A further challenge is that Rawls applies his theory of civil disobedience only to the context of a nearly just society, leaving unclear whether a credible conception of either the nature or the justification of civil disobedience could follow the same lines in the context of less just societies. Some broader accounts of civil disobedience offered in response to Rawls's view (Raz 1979; Greenawalt 1987) will be examined in the first section of this entry.

This entry has four main sections. The first considers some definitional issues and contrasts civil disobedience with both ordinary offences and other types of dissent. The second analyses two sets of factors relevant to the justification of civil disobedience; one set concerns the disobedient's particular choice of action, the other concerns her motivation for so acting. The third section examines whether people have a right to engage in civil disobedience. The fourth considers what kind of legal response to civil disobedience is appropriate.

1.1 Features of Civil Disobedience

1.2 ordinary offences, 1.3 other types of dissent, 2.1 mode of action, 2.2 motivation for acting, 4.1 theories of punishment, 4.2 punishing civil disobedience, 5. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. definitions.

The term ‘civil disobedience’ was coined by Henry David Thoreau in his 1848 essay to describe his refusal to pay the state poll tax implemented by the American government to prosecute a war in Mexico and to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. In his essay, Thoreau observes that only a very few people – heroes, martyrs, patriots, reformers in the best sense – serve their society with their consciences, and so necessarily resist society for the most part, and are commonly treated by it as enemies. Thoreau, for his part, spent time in jail for his protest. Many after him have proudly identified their protests as acts of civil disobedience and have been treated by their societies – sometimes temporarily, sometimes indefinitely – as its enemies.

Throughout history, acts of civil disobedience famously have helped to force a reassessment of society's moral parameters. The Boston Tea Party, the suffragette movement, the resistance to British rule in India led by Gandhi, the US civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and others, the resistance to apartheid in South Africa, student sit-ins against the Vietnam War, the democracy movement in Myanmar/Burma led by Aung San Suu Kyi, to name a few, are all instances where civil disobedience proved to be an important mechanism for social change. The ultimate impact of more recent acts of civil disobedience – anti-abortion trespass demonstrations or acts of disobedience taken as part of the environmental movement and animal rights movement – remains to be seen.

Certain features of civil disobedience seem vital not only to its impact on societies and governments, but also to its status as a potentially justifiable breach of law. Civil disobedience is generally regarded as more morally defensible than both ordinary offences and other forms of protest such as militant action or coercive violence. Before contrasting civil disobedience with both ordinary offences and other types of protest, attention should be given to the features exemplified in the influential cases noted above. These features include, amongst other things, a conscientious or principled outlook and the communication of both condemnation and a desire for change in law or policy. Other features commonly cited – publicity, non-violence, fidelity to law – will also be considered here though they prove to be less central than is sometimes assumed. The second part of this section contrasts civil disobedience with ordinary offences and the third part contrasts it with legal protest, rule departures by officials, conscientious objection, radical protest (often labelled ‘terrorism’), and revolutionary action.

Conscientiousness : This feature, highlighted in almost all accounts of civil disobedience, points to the seriousness, sincerity and moral conviction with which civil disobedients breach the law. For many disobedients, their breach of law is demanded of them not only by self-respect and moral consistency but also by their perception of the interests of their society. Through their disobedience, they draw attention to laws or policies that they believe require reassessment or rejection. Whether their challenges are well-founded is another matter, which will be taken up in Section 2.

On Rawls's account of civil disobedience, in a nearly just society, civil disobedients address themselves to the majority to show that, in their considered opinion, the principles of justice governing cooperation amongst free and equal persons have not been respected by policymakers. Rawls's restriction of civil disobedience to breaches that defend the principles of justice may be criticised for its narrowness since, presumably, a wide range of legitimate values not wholly reducible to justice, such as transparency, security, stability, privacy, integrity, and autonomy, could motivate people to engage in civil disobedience. However, Rawls does allow that considerations arising from people's comprehensive moral outlooks may be offered in the public sphere provided that, in due course, people present public reasons, given by a reasonable political conception of justice, sufficient to support whatever their comprehensive doctrines were introduced to support (Rawls 1996). Rawls's proviso grants that people often engage in the public sphere for a variety of reasons; so even when justice figures prominently in a person's decision to use civil disobedience, other considerations could legitimately contribute to her decision to act. The activism of Martin Luther King Jr. is a case in point. King was motivated by his religious convictions and his commitments to democracy, equality, and justice to undertake protests such as the Montgomery bus boycott. Rawls maintains that, while he does not know whether King thought of himself as fulfilling the purpose of the proviso, King could have fulfilled it; and had he accepted public reason he certainly would have fulfilled it. Thus, on Rawls's view, King's activism is civil disobedience.

Since people can undertake political protest for a variety of reasons, civil disobedience sometimes overlaps with other forms of dissent. A US draft-dodger during the Vietnam War might be said to combine civil disobedience and conscientious objection in the same action. And, most famously, Gandhi may be credited with combining civil disobedience with revolutionary action. That said, despite the potential for overlap, some broad distinctions may be drawn between civil disobedience and other forms of protest in terms of the scope of the action and agents' motivations (Section 1.3).

Communication : In civilly disobeying the law, a person typically has both forward-looking and backward-looking aims. She seeks not only to convey her disavowal and condemnation of a certain law or policy, but also to draw public attention to this particular issue and thereby to instigate a change in law or policy. A parallel may be drawn between the communicative aspect of civil disobedience and the communicative aspect of lawful punishment by the state (Brownlee 2012; 2004). Like civil disobedience, lawful punishment is associated with a backward-looking aim to demonstrate condemnation of certain conduct as well as a forward-looking aim to bring about a lasting change in that conduct. The forward and backward-looking aims of punishment apply not only to the particular offence in question, but also to the kind of conduct of which this offence is an example.

There is some dispute over the kinds of policies that civil disobedients may target through their breach of law. Some exclude from the class of civilly disobedient acts those breaches of law that protest the decisions of private agents such as trade unions, banks, private universities, etc. (Raz 1979, 264). Others, by contrast, maintain that disobedience in opposition to the decisions of private agents can reflect a larger challenge to the legal system that permits those decisions to be taken, which makes it appropriate to place this disobedience under the umbrella of civil disobedience (Brownlee 2012; 2007). There is more agreement amongst thinkers that civil disobedience can be either direct or indirect. In other words, civil disobedients can either breach the law they oppose or breach a law which, other things being equal, they do not oppose in order to demonstrate their protest against another law or policy. Trespassing on a military base to spray-paint nuclear missile silos in protest against current military policy would be an example of indirect civil disobedience. It is worth noting that the distinction often drawn between direct civil disobedience and indirect civil disobedience is less clear-cut than generally assumed. For example, refusing to pay taxes that support the military could be seen as either indirect or direct civil disobedience against military policy. Although this act typically would be classified as indirect disobedience, a part of one's taxes, in this case, would have gone directly to support the policy one opposes.

Publicity : The feature of communication may be contrasted with that of publicity. The latter is endorsed by Rawls who argues that civil disobedience is never covert or secretive; it is only ever committed in public, openly, and with fair notice to legal authorities (Rawls 1971, 366). Hugo A. Bedau adds to this that usually it is essential to the dissenter's purpose that both the government and the public know what she intends to do (Bedau 1961, 655). However, although sometimes advance warning may be essential to a dissenter's strategy, this is not always the case. As noted at the outset, publicity sometimes detracts from or undermines the attempt to communicate through civil disobedience. If a person publicises her intention to breach the law, then she provides both political opponents and legal authorities with the opportunity to abort her efforts to communicate (Smart 1991, 206). For this reason, unannounced or (initially) covert disobedience is sometimes preferable to actions undertaken publicly and with fair warning. Examples include releasing animals from research laboratories or vandalising military property; to succeed in carrying out these actions, disobedients would have to avoid publicity of the kind Rawls defends. Such acts of civil disobedience nonetheless may be regarded as ‘open’ when followed soon after by an acknowledgment of the act and the reasons for acting. Openness and publicity, even at the cost of having one's protest frustrated, offer ways for disobedients to show their willingness to deal fairly with authorities.

Non-violence : A controversial issue in debates on civil disobedience is non-violence. Like publicity, non-violence is said to diminish the negative effects of breaching the law. Some theorists go further and say that civil disobedience is, by definition, non-violent. According to Rawls, violent acts likely to injure are incompatible with civil disobedience as a mode of address. ‘Indeed’, says Rawls, ‘any interference with the civil liberties of others tends to obscure the civilly disobedient quality of one's act’ (Rawls 1971, 366).

Even though paradigmatic disobedients like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr embody Rawls's image of non-violent direct action, opponents of Rawls's view have challenged the centrality of non-violence for civil disobedience on several fronts. First, there is the problem of specifying an appropriate notion of violence . It is unclear, for example, whether violence to self, violence to property, or minor violence against others (such as a vicious pinch) should be included in a conception of the relevant kinds of violence. If the significant criterion for a commonsense notion of a violent act is a likelihood of causing injury, however minor, then these kinds of acts count as acts of violence (see Morreall 1991). Second, non-violent acts or legal acts sometimes cause more harm to others than do violent acts (Raz 1979, 267). A legal strike by ambulance workers may well have much more severe consequences than minor acts of vandalism. Third, violence, depending on its form, does not necessarily obscure the communicative quality of a disobedient's action as Rawls and Peter Singer suggests it does (Singer 1973, 86). Limited violence used to achieve a specific objective might heighten the communicative quality of the act by drawing greater attention to the dissenter's cause and by emphasising her seriousness and frustration.

These observations do not alter the fact that non-violent dissent normally is preferable to violent dissent. As Raz observes, non-violence avoids the direct harm caused by violence, and non-violence does not encourage violence in other situations where violence would be wrong, something which an otherwise warranted use of violence may do. Moreover, as a matter of prudence, non-violence does not carry the same risk of antagonising potential allies or confirming the antipathy of opponents (Raz 1979, 267). Furthermore, non-violence does not distract the attention of the public, and it probably denies authorities an excuse to use violent countermeasures against disobedients.

Non-violence, publicity and a willingness to accept punishment are often regarded as marks of disobedients' fidelity to the legal system in which they carry out their protest. Those who deny that these features are definitive of civil disobedience endorse a more inclusive conception according to which civil disobedience involves a conscientious and communicative breach of law designed to demonstrate condemnation of a law or policy and to contribute to a change in that law or policy. Such a conception allows that civil disobedience can be violent, partially covert, and revolutionary. This conception also accommodates vagaries in the practice and justifiability of civil disobedience for different political contexts: it grants that the appropriate model of how civil disobedience works in a context such as apartheid South Africa may differ from the model that applies to a well-ordered, liberal, just democracy. An even broader conception of civil disobedience would draw no clear boundaries between civil disobedience and other forms of protest such as conscientious objection, forcible resistance, and revolutionary action. A disadvantage of this last conception is that it blurs the lines between these different types of protest and so might both weaken claims about the defensibility of civil disobedience and invite authorities and opponents of civil disobedience to lump all illegal protest under one umbrella.

In democratic societies, civil disobedience as such is not a crime. If a disobedient is punished by the law, it is not for civil disobedience, but for the recognised offences she commits, such as blocking a road or disturbing the peace, or trespassing, or damaging property, etc. Therefore, if judges are persuaded, as they sometimes are, either not to punish a disobedient or to punish her differently from other people who breach the same laws, it must be on the basis of some feature or features of her action which distinguish it from the acts of ordinary offenders.

Typically a person who commits an offence has no wish to communicate with her government or society. This is evinced by the fact that usually an offender does not intend to make it known that she has breached the law. Since, in most cases, she wishes to benefit or, at least, not to suffer from her unlawful action, it is in her interests to preserve the secrecy of her conduct. An exception might be where a person's breach is sufficiently minor, such as jaywalking, that concealment is unnecessary since sanction is unlikely to follow. Another exception might be where a person wishes to thumb her nose at authorities by advertising that she has committed a crime. By making an exception of herself and by distancing herself from a legal rule, this ordinary offender communicates a certain disregard for the law. This communication, however, does not normally reflect an aim either to demonstrate conscientiously held objections to that law or to lead society to reform the law. Civil disobedients, by contrast, seek to make their disobedience known to specific members of the community either before or after the fact to demonstrate both the seriousness of their condemnation of that law or policy and their sincere desire for policy change. The difference in communication between the civil disobedient and the ordinary offender reflects a deeper difference in motivation for breaching the law (Brownlee 2012).

A further difference between civil disobedience and common crimes pertains to the willingness of the offender to accept the legal consequences. The willingness of disobedients to accept punishment is taken not only as a mark of (general) fidelity to the law, but also as an assertion that they differ from ordinary offenders. Accepting punishment also can have great strategic value, as Martin Luther King Jr observes: ‘If you confront a man who has been cruelly misusing you, and say “Punish me, if you will; I do not deserve it, but I will accept it, so that the world will know I am right and you are wrong,” then you wield a powerful and just weapon’ (Washington 1991, 348). Moreover, like non-violence, a willingness to accept the legal consequences normally is preferable, and often has a positive impact on the disobedient's cause. This willingness may make the majority realise that what is for them a matter of indifference is for disobedients a matter of great importance (Singer 1973, 84). Similarly, it may demonstrate the purity or selflessness of the disobedient's motives or serve as a means to mobilise more broad-based support (Raz 1979, 265). And yet, punishment can also be detrimental to dissenters' efforts by compromising future attempts to assist others through protest (Greenawalt 1987, 239). Furthermore, the link between a willingness to accept punishment and respect for law can be pulled apart. A revolutionary like Gandhi was happy to go to jail for his offences, but felt no fidelity toward the particular legal system in which he acted.

Although civil disobedience often overlaps broadly with other types of dissent, nevertheless some rough distinctions may be drawn between the key features of civil disobedience and the key features of these other practices.

Legal Protest : The obvious difference between legal protest and civil disobedience is that the former lies within the bounds of the law, but the latter does not. Most of the other features exemplified in civil disobedience can be found in legal protest including a conscientious and communicative demonstration of protest, a desire to bring about through moral dialogue some lasting change in policy or principle, an attempt to educate and to raise awareness, and so on. The difference in legality translates into a more significant, moral difference when placed against the backdrop of a general moral obligation to follow the law. If it is morally wrong to breach the law, then special justification is required for civil disobedience which is not required for legal protest. However, the political regime in which obedience is demanded may be relevant here. David Lyons maintains that the Jim Crow laws (racial segregation laws in force in the southern US until 1964), British colonial rule in India, and chattel slavery in antebellum America offer three refutations of the view that civil disobedience requires moral justification in morally objectionable regimes. According to Lyons, there can be no moral presumption in favour of obedience to the law in such regimes, and therefore no moral justification is required for civil disobedience. ‘Insofar as civil disobedience theory assumes that political resistance requires moral justification even in settings that are morally comparable to Jim Crow,’ says Lyons, ‘it is premised on serious moral error’ (Lyons 1998, 39). If one takes the view that there is no general moral obligation to follow the law (irrespective of regime), then both adherence to the law and breach of law must be judged not on their legality, but on their character and consequences. And this would mean that, even in morally reprehensible regimes, justification may be demanded for civil disobedience that either has significant negative consequences or falls below certain moral standards.

Although questions of justification will be addressed more fully in the next section, it is worth noting here one point in favour of civil disobedience over legal protest. As Bertrand Russell observes, typically it is difficult to make the most salient facts in a dispute known through conventional channels of participation. The controllers of mainstream media tend to give defenders of unpopular views limited space to make their case. Given the sensational news value of illegal methods, however, engaging in civil disobedience often leads to wide dissemination of a position (Russell 1998, 635). John Stuart Mill observes, with regard to dissent in general, that sometimes the only way to make a view heard is to allow, or even to invite, society to ridicule and sensationalise it as intemperate and irrational (Mill 1999). Admittedly, the success of this strategy depends partly on the character of the society in which it is employed; but it should not be ruled out as a strategy for communication.

Rule Departures : A practice distinct from, but related to, civil disobedience is rule departure on the part of authorities. Rule departure is essentially the deliberate decision by an official, for conscientious reasons, not to discharge the duties of her office (Feinberg 1979). It may involve a decision by police not to arrest offenders (cf. Smith 2012) or a decision by prosecutors not to proceed to trial, or a decision by a jury or by a judge to acquit an obviously guilty person. Whether these conscientious acts actually contravene the general duties of the office is debatable. If an official's breach of a specific duty is more in keeping with the spirit and overall aims of the office than a painstaking respect for its particular duties is, then the former might be said to adhere better than the latter does to the demands of the office (Greenawalt 1987, 281)

Rule departures resemble civil disobedience in that both involve dissociation from and condemnation of certain policies and practices. Moreover, both are communicative, though their audiences may differ. The official who departs from the rules of her office addresses her action principally to the individuals or groups whom she intends to assist through her breach of a specific duty. Her action demonstrates to these parties both that she disagrees with a policy that would treat them in a certain way and that her actions align with her commitments. Where civil disobedience and rule departure differ is, first, in the identity of their practitioners. Whereas rule departure typically is an action taken by an agent of the state (including juries), civil disobedience typically is an action taken by citizens (including officials acting as ordinary citizens and not in the capacity of their official role). Second these practices differ in their legality. Whether rule departure actually involves a breach of law is unclear. Civil disobedience, by contrast, involves the breach of a law currently on the books. A third difference between rule departure and civil disobedience is that, unlike civil disobedience, rule departure does not usually expose those who employ it to the risks of sanction or punishment (Feinberg 1979)

Conscientious Objection : This kind of protest may be understood as a violation of the law motivated by the dissenter's belief that she is morally prohibited to follow the law because the law is either bad or wrong, totally or in part. The conscientious objector may believe, for example, that the general character of the law in question is morally wrong (as an absolute pacifist would believe of conscription), or that the law extends to certain cases which it should not cover (an orthodox Christian would regard euthanasia as murder) (Raz 1979, 263). While commonly taken to refer to pacifist objections to military service, conscientious objection, says Raz, may apply to any law, negative or positive, that a person believes for moral reasons she is compelled to disobey. A narrower conception of conscientious objection, described as conscientious refusal, characterises this kind of disobedience as non-compliance with a more or less direct legal injunction or administrative order (Rawls 1971, 368). Examples would be the refusal of Jehovah's Witnesses to salute the flag or Thoreau's refusal to pay his taxes (it is interesting that the action of the man who coined the term ‘civil disobedience’ is regarded by many as lying at the periphery of what counts as civil disobedience). Whereas conscientious refusal is undertaken with the assumption that authorities are aware of the breach of law, conscientious evasion is undertaken with the assumption that the breach of law is wholly covert. The devout person who continues to practice her religion in secret after it has been banned does not protest against the law, but breaches it covertly for moral reasons. The personal nature of this disobedience commands respect, as it suggests modesty and reflection, which more vocal and confident displays of conviction may lack.

The differences between civil disobedience and conscientious evasion are easier to identify than those between civil disobedience and conscientious refusal or conscientious objection. Although conscientious objection typically is not characterised by the aim to communicate to government and society either that a law has been breached or the reasons behind the breach, nevertheless many acts commonly classified as conscientious objection – tax avoidance and resistance to conscription – have a public or communicative component. Moreover, when such actions are taken by many people their collective impact can approximate the kind of communicative protest exemplified in civil disobedience.

A more obvious difference between civil disobedience and conscientious objection is that, whereas the former is invariably illegal, sometimes the latter is legal. In the context of military conscription, some legal systems regard conscientious objection as a legitimate ground for avoiding frontline military service.

Radical Protest : Some forms of dissent such as coercive violence, organised forcible resistance, militant action, intimidation, and terrorisation lie further outside the realm of tolerated (or tolerable) political action than civil disobedience does. There are reasons to avoid labelling such disobedience (or anything else) as ‘terrorism’. Not only is the term ‘terrorism’ inflammatory, but also it is bandied about by governments to capture an overly broad range of actions. Whereas ‘civil disobedience’ has developed as a positive term which many people apply to their own protests, ‘terrorism’ is an epithet applied only to the actions of others. Given the highly negative connotations of this term, its (philosophical) usefulness is questionable. Less loaded notions of intimidation, terrorisation, forcible resistance, and severe violence offer greater space for a proper analysis of the justifiability of using such measures in political protest.

While a civil disobedient does not necessarily oppose the regime in which she acts, the militant or radical protester is deeply opposed to that regime (or a core aspect of that regime). This protester uses modes of communication unlikely to persuade others of the merits of her position. Her aims are more urgent and extreme than those of the civil disobedient; she seeks rapid change through brutal strategies of coercion and intimidation, not through strategies of persuasion and moral appeal. And often her action includes force or extreme violence as a key component. Given the nature of her conduct and objectives, she is likely to try to evade the legal consequences of her action. This is less often the case for civil disobedients.

Revolutionary Action : The difference between radical protest and revolutionary action may be as difficult to specify as that between revolutionary action and civil disobedience. One point of difference amongst the three concerns the nature of the objectives. Acts of civil disobedience often have focused and limited objectives. Acts of terrorisation or large-scale coercive violence are typically associated with a general aim of generating fear and insecurity while keeping any specific aims or demands oblique. Revolutionary action is typified by a comprehensive objective to bring about a regime change. Both acts of radical protest and acts of civil disobedience can of course fall within a revolutionary project, and may even coincide with each other (as they perhaps did in the sabotage strategies used by Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress).

As a general practice, revolution, like radical protest, does not seek to persuade the government to change established policies. But, unlike much radical protest, revolutionary action may seek to persuade the society under that government that a change in regime is required. If revolutionaries seek to persuade the government of anything, it is that it should cease to be the government. In India, Gandhi had some success in this project. Once the movement became irresistible, the British left India fairly peacefully. But Gandhi's revolutionary project may be contrasted with other revolutions such as the French revolution, or even the South African revolution, where there were endorsements of revolutionary terror. Large-scale resistance that incorporates terrorisation is quite a different enterprise from the non-violent resistance that distinguished Gandhi's protest. Since, as noted above, people may engage in dissent for numerous reasons, acts of civil disobedience like Gandhi's that are guided by conscientious commitments can also be driven by revolutionary aims.

The various points of contact and overlap amongst different types of political protest suggest that there is no one-dimensional continuum from weak to strong dissent. There is more plausibility in the idea of a multi-dimensional continuum of protest, which recognises the complexities in such critical points of contrast as legality, violence, harm, communication, motivation, and persuasiveness.

2. Justification

On many views, an analysis of the justifiability of civil disobedience must consider not only the dissenter's particular action and its likely consequences, but also her motivation for engaging in this act of civil disobedience. Factors relevant to a disobedient's choice of action include: its illegality, its use as a last resort or first resort, any coordination with other dissenters, the likelihood of success, the directness or indirectness of the action, and the expected harm. Factors relevant to motivation include: the merit or lack thereof in the dissenter's cause, her reasons for defending that cause, and her reasons for engaging in this form of protest. Although they are examined separately below, these two sets of factors inevitably overlap.

The task of defending civil disobedience is commonly undertaken with the assumption that in reasonably just, liberal societies people have a general moral obligation to follow the law. In the history of philosophy, many arguments have been given for legal obligation (often called ‘political obligation’). Plato's Socrates, in the Crito , offers at least two lines of argument for legal obligation in order to defend his decision not to escape from prison. First, Socrates emphasises the importance of moral consistency; he would prefer to give up his life than to compromise his principles. A basic principle for Socrates is that a person must never do wrong or injury in return for wrong. To escape without persuading the state would be to try to destroy it and its laws. Second, Socrates maintains that he has an obligation to follow the laws of Athens since he has tacitly agreed to do so and since he enjoys the rights and benefits of citizenship. This voluntarist line of argument is also espoused later by John Locke, who argues that we have a duty to follow the law only when we have consented to its rule. This view contrasts with the non-voluntarist position of David Hume, according to which the obligation to follow the law is rooted in the value of government under law. From these two traditions rise the principal contemporary arguments for legal obligation, which concern respectively consent, gratitude, promise-keeping, fairness, necessary institutions, and public good. Many of the contemporary voluntarist and non-voluntarist arguments have been criticised in recent debates, giving rise to the view that, while there are both ordinary reasons to follow the law and strong moral obligations to follow particular laws, there is no general moral obligation to follow the law. One reason to think there is no such obligation is that the legality of an action does not significantly affect its moral status (Smith 1973). The claim is that jaywalking across an empty street, for example, is hardly reprehensible and its illegality does not make it more reprehensible. Similarly, spitting at someone's feet or refusing without cause to acknowledge that person is reprehensible and its legality does not diminish that.

On the assumption that people have a pro tanto obligation to follow the law (or at least those laws that are not excessively unjust), it follows that people then have a pro tanto obligation to use the proper legal channels of political participation before resorting to illegal methods. On this view, civil disobedience can be justified only when employed as a last resort. But since causes defended by a minority are often those most opposed by persons in power, legal channels may be less than wholly effective. Moreover, it is unclear when a person could claim to have reached the situation of last resort; she could continue to use the same tired legal methods without end. To ward off such challenges, Rawls suggests that, if past actions have shown the majority to be immovable or apathetic, then further attempts may reasonably be thought fruitless and one may be confident one's civil disobedience is a last resort.

Another condition for civil disobedience to be justified, according to Rawls, is that disobedients coordinate with other minorities. Since minority groups are equally justified in resorting to civil disobedience when they have sufficiently weighty objections, these groups should avoid undermining each others' efforts through simultaneous appeals to the attention of society and government. Some coordination of activities is required, says Rawls, to regulate the overall level of dissent (Rawls 1971, 374–5). While there is some merit to this condition, civil disobedience that does not meet it might still be justifiable. In some cases, there will be no time or opportunity to coordinate with other minorities. And in other cases, other minority groups may be unable or unwilling to coordinate. It is an open question then whether the refusal or inability of other groups to cooperate should affect the ultimate defensibility of a person's decision to engage in civil disobedience.

A reason for Rawls to defend this coordination requirement is that, in most cases, it serves a more important concern, namely, the achievement of good consequences. It is often argued that civil disobedience can only be justified if there is a high probability of producing positive change through that disobedience. Only this can justify exposing one's society to the risk of harm. The harms usually identified with civil disobedience are as follows. First, civil disobedience can be a divisive force in society. Second, since civil disobedience is normally designed to attract public attention, it can lead people, as a result, to think of resorting to disobedience to achieve whatever changes in law or policy they find justified (Raz 1979, 262). Third, civil disobedience can encourage more than just other civil disobedience; it can encourage a general disrespect for the law, particularly where the law is perceived as being lenient toward certain kinds of offences.

In response to these challenges, one might question the empirical claims that civil disobedience is divisive and that it has the consequence of leading others to use disobedience to achieve changes in policy. One might also question whether it necessarily would be a bad thing if civil disobedience had these consequences. Concerning likelihood of success, civil disobedience actually can seem most justifiable when the situation appears hopeless and when the government refuses to listen to conventional forms of communication. Additionally, even when general success seems unlikely, civil disobedience might be defended for any reprieve from harm that it brings to victims of a bad law or policy. Tree-hugging, for example, can delay or curtail a clear-cut logging scheme and thereby prolong the protection of an eco-system.

Two final factors concerning a disobedient's choice of action are non-violence and directness. Many theorists regard non-violence as necessary to the justifiability of civil disobedience. But, as noted earlier, there can be good reasons to prefer strategic use of violence in civil disobedience to the harm and injustice of the law. Sometimes the wrong that a dissenter perceives may be so iniquitous that it is right to use violence to root it out. Such violence may be necessary to preserve or to re-establish the rights and civil liberties that coercive practices seek to suspend (Raz 1979). Concerning directness, some argue that civil disobedience is more justifiable the more direct it is since direct disobedience targets the specific legal wrong that prompted it (Greenawalt 1987, 235). While directness may ensure that the objective of the dissent is understood, it has disadvantages; and in some contexts direct action cannot be justified. When direct disobedience would fail to treat others with respect or would cause far greater harm than either adherence to the law or indirect disobedience would cause, then indirect disobedience has a greater claim to justification. But, when indirect civil disobedience would be either misconstrued or viewed in isolation from the law opposed, then direct disobedience, assuming it meets certain moral requirements (which are determined by the content of the law opposed), may have greater justification. People who use indirect disobedience have, other things being equal, no objective reasons to breach the law that they breach. This means that the justification for their disobedience must turn solely on the value of that action as the appropriate vehicle through which to communicate their objection.

As a vehicle for communication, civil disobedience has much to be said for it. It was noted in Section 1.3 that civil disobedience can often better contribute to a dialogue with society and the state than legal protest can since controllers of mainstream media tend not to give unpopular views a hearing unless they are advocated through sensational means such as illegal protest. But, as the above points have indicated, the justifiability of an act of civil disobedience depends greatly on its specific features. Civil disobedience sometimes serves primarily to inform and to educate the public about an issue. But other times, it acts by confronting the majority with the higher costs of retaining a given law or policy in the face of continued, concerted opposition. The nature of these strategies and, as discussed below, the motivations for selecting one over another inform an analysis of justifiability.

On many views, for an act of civil disobedience to be justified, it is insufficient that the dissenter's act meet criteria such as those noted above. It is equally important that she choose that action for the right reasons. The first requirement she must satisfy is that her cause be well-founded. A dissenter may believe that her cause is just and that her disobedience is morally permissible, but she might be mistaken either about the facts or about her principles. Assuming her challenge is well-founded, there are two further issues. The first pertains to her reasons for supporting this cause. The second pertains to her reasons for taking this particular act of disobedience.

Concerning the former, if a person advocates a legitimate cause such as equal rights for black Americans simply for the reason that she seeks re-election or promotion or the admiration of friends while having no real sympathy for this cause, then she acts not for decisive reasons. To be fully justified in her defence of this cause, she must act on the basis of good reasons to support equality amongst peoples; such reasons could include her sense of injustice for the ill-treatment of black Americans or her respect for the dignity of persons or her appreciation that real equality of rights best serves the interests of all American people. It would be appropriate to judge negatively the character of a person who was improperly motivated to take praiseworthy action in defence of others' rights.

Concerning the latter, sometimes reasons apply to a situation but do not favour the particular action that a person takes. When deciding how best to defend a legitimate cause, a person must give thought to the appropriate strategy to adopt. A person may have reasons for engaging in one form of disobedience, but choose to engage in another form that is not supported by these reasons. For example, she may have an undefeated reason to participate in a road block because this action is well suited to her political concerns and is one that her government understands and responds well to or because this action has a public impact that does not greatly harm the interests of others; but, she has no undefeated reason, say, to trespass on government property or to engage in vandalism. In taking the latter actions, she is guilty of a certain error of judgment about which actions are supported by reasons that admittedly apply (See Gardner and Macklem 2002). Given her error, the best she could claim is that her conduct is excused, as she had reason to believe that she had reason to undertake that particular form of civil disobedience. When, by contrast, a person's civilly disobedient action is supported by undefeated reasons that apply to her situation then her choice of action is justified. The justification for her action stems from its appropriateness as the action to take. Its appropriateness is structured in part by the political regime, the tone of the social environment, the actions taken by other political participants, and so on. All of these factors bear on the appropriateness of a given action and the manner in which it is performed, and thus determine to what extent the reasons that support it provide a justification.

The various constraints and requirements discussed above do not amount to a complete defence for civil disobedience. A fuller defence would appeal to the social value of civil disobedience. Justified civil disobedience, says Rawls, can serve to inhibit departures from justice and to correct departures when they occur; thus it can act as a stabilising force in society (Rawls 1971, 383). Justice aside, civil disobedience and dissent more generally contribute to the democratic exchange of ideas by forcing the champions of dominant opinion to defend their views. Mill maintains in On Liberty that if there are any persons who contest a received opinion, we should thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is someone to do for us what we otherwise ought to do ourselves (Mill 1999, 90). In fact, one could argue that those who breach the law in justified civil disobedience demonstrate responsible citizenship or civic virtue. Richard Dagger argues that

To be virtuous…is to perform well a socially necessary or important role. This does not mean that the virtuous person must always go along with the prevailing views or attitudes. On the contrary, Socrates and John Stuart Mill have persuaded many people to believe that questioning and challenging the prevailing views are among the highest forms of virtue (Dagger 1997, 14).

This view of dissent and justified civil disobedience aligns with an increasingly common perception that our responsibilities as citizens go well beyond any obligation to follow the law. Indeed, under certain conditions, our obligations are to resist unjust and unfair schemes, and this can include a duty to disobey the law (Delmas 2014).

An issue associated with, but distinct from, that of justification is whether people have a right to engage in civil disobedience. Most thinkers who have considered civil disobedience defend a limited right to such protest. Rawls, for example, maintains that, even in a nearly just society, a person may be supposed to have a right to engage in civil disobedience when three conditions are met. These are the conditions he sets for justified civil disobedience: it is undertaken 1) in response to an instance of substantial and clear injustice, 2) as a last resort and 3) in coordination with other minority groups. Rawls's approach has been criticised for not clearly distinguishing his account of justified civil disobedience from an account of the disobedience which people have a right to take. There is much disagreement over the kinds of actions that can be captured by rights. Some theorists, such as John Mackie, argue that there can be no right to perform a morally wrong action since wrong actions are acts we are morally required not to perform (Mackie 1978). Others, such as Raz, argue that to restrict rights to morally right actions is to misunderstand the nature of rights. Rights of conduct protect a certain sphere of autonomy and liberty for the agent with which interference by others is restricted, that is to say, rights of conduct imply that interference with that conduct is unjustified even when the conduct is itself unjustified. One does not require a right, Raz observes, to do the right thing. But one often does require a right to do what one should not do (cf. Waldron 1981). On this view, the limits of the right to political participation, for example, are set not by the nature of people's political objectives, but by the form of the actions they employ to realise those objectives.

According to Raz, when one considers the idea of a moral right to civil disobedience, one must appreciate that this right extends to cases in which people should not exercise it. To say that there is a right to civil disobedience is to allow the legitimacy of resorting to this form of political action to one's political opponents. It is to allow that the legitimacy of civil disobedience does not depend on the rightness of one's cause (Raz 1979, 268).

In his account of a right to civil disobedience, Raz places great emphasis on the kind of regime in which a disobedient acts. Raz argues that only in an illiberal regime do certain individuals have a right to civil disobedience.

Given that the illiberal state violates its members' right to political participation, individuals whose rights are violated are entitled, other things being equal, to disregard the offending laws and exercise their moral right as if it were recognised by law… [M]embers of the illiberal state do have a right to civil disobedience which is roughly that part of their moral right to political participation which is not recognised in law (Raz 1979, 272–273).

By contrast, in a liberal state, Raz argues, a person's right to political activity is, by hypothesis, adequately protected by law. Therefore, in such a regime, the right to political participation cannot ground a right to civil disobedience.

Against Raz, one could argue, as David Lefkowitz does, that when a person appeals to political participation rights to defend her disobedience she does not necessarily criticise the law for outlawing her action. Lefkowitz maintains that members of minorities can appreciate that democratic discussions often must be cut short so that decisions may be taken. As such, persons who engage in political disobedience may view current policy as the best compromise between the need to act and the need to accommodate continued debate. Nonetheless, they also can observe that, with greater resources or further time for debate, their view might have held sway. Given this possibility, the right to political participation must include a right to continue to contest the result after the votes are counted or the decisions taken. And this right should include suitably constrained civil disobedience because the best conception of political participation rights is one that reduces as much as possible the impact that luck has on the popularity of a view (Lefkowitz 2007; see also Ceva 2015).

An alternative response to Raz questions whether the right to civil disobedience must be derived from rights to political participation. Briefly, the right to civil disobedience could be grounded on something other than participation rights such as a right to object on the basis of conscience. Whether such a right to conscience would fall under participation rights depends on the expansiveness of the latter rights. When the right to participate is understood to accommodate only legal protest, then the right conscientiously to object, which commonsensically includes civil disobedience, must be viewed as distinct from political participation rights.

A further challenge to Raz might be that real societies do not align with this dichotomy between liberal and illiberal regimes; rather they fall along a spectrum of liberality and illiberality, being both more or less liberal relative to each other and being more or less liberal in some domains than in others. Given the stringency of Raz's notion of a liberal regime, it is unlikely that any society could be wholly liberal. So, although Raz may have grounds to hold that in the truly liberal society a right to civil disobedience would not exist and that, to the extent that our society approximates such a regime, the case for such a right diminishes, nevertheless in the majority of real societies, if not all real societies, a right to civil disobedience does exist. Note that to make legally protected participation fully adequate, the liberal society would have to address Russell's charge that controllers of the media give defenders of unpopular views few opportunities to make their case unless they resort to sensational methods such as disobedience.

Ronald Dworkin rests the right to civil disobedience not just on a person's right to political participation, but on all of the rights that she has against her government. People may be supposed to have a fundamental right against the government, such as freedom of expression, when that right is important to their dignity, to their standing as persons equally entitled to concern and respect, or to some other personal value of consequence. A person has a right to disobey a law, says Dworkin, whenever that law wrongly invades her rights against the government (Dworkin 1977, 192). Thus, the moral right to breach the law is not a separate right, like a right of conscience, additional to other rights against the government. It is that part of people's rights against the government which the government fails to honour.

Together the three above positions bring out some key points of disagreement amongst philosophers on the issue of a right to civil disobedience. First, philosophers disagree over the grounds of this right. Is it derivative of a right to participate in the political decision-making process? Is it derivative of other rights? Is it founded on a person's equal status as a being worthy of concern and respect? Second, philosophers disagree over the parameters of the right. Does it extend to all acts of civil disobedience or only to those acts that meet certain conditions of justifiability? Third, philosophers differ over the kinds of regimes in which the right arises. Does it exist only in illiberal regimes or does it hold in all regimes including just regimes? A final issue, not brought out in any of the above views, is whether the right to civil disobedience extends to indirect civil disobedience. Presumably, it should, but none of the above positions offer arguments on which one could base such a claim.

4. Punishment

The final issue to consider is how authorities should respond to civil disobedience. The question of appropriate legal response applies, first, to the actions of law-enforcers when deciding whether and how to intervene in a civilly disobedient action, whether to arrest, whether to charge, and so on. It applies, second, to the actions of prosecutors when deciding whether to proceed to trial. Finally, it applies to the actions of judges (and juries) when deciding whether to convict and (for judges) how much to punish. The focus here will be the issue of appropriate punishment.

To determine when, if ever, punishment of civil disobedience is appropriate, it is necessary first to say a few things about the nature, purposes, and justification of lawful punishment by the state. The three basic issues of punishment are: Why punish?, Whom to punish?, and How much to punish? The justifications for punishment can be forward-looking, backward-looking or some combination of the two. Jeremy Bentham, for one, takes a forward-looking, consequentialist view of punishment. He holds that punishment is an evil that is only ever justified if its employment prevents some greater evil that would arise from not punishing (Bentham, 1789, 158).

A key variant of the consequentialist approach focuses on deterrence. Punishment is justified on deterrence grounds if it prevents and/or discourages both the offender and others from breaching the law. Deterrence theories are criticised for treating people as brutes not rational agents capable of responding to moral reasons because the deterrent element of punishment gives people a prudential reason (relating to the prospect of punishment), not a moral reason, to refrain from breaching the law. Deterrence theories also are criticised for allowing persons who are not proper objects of punishment to be punished when this succeeds in deterring other people from breaching the law. Finally, deterrence theories are criticised for making the parameters for appropriate punishment excessively broad in allowing that whatever punishment is needed to deter people is the justified punishment.

Desert theory, by contrast, takes a backward-looking view of the purpose and justification of punishment, focusing on what the offender deserves for her action. Desert theory is much more concerned than is deterrence theory with punishing only persons who are the proper objects of punishment and with punishing those persons only as much as they deserve. Desert theory aims at a response to the offence that is proportionate to its seriousness as an offence. Seriousness is determined by two factors: an offender's culpability and the harm caused by her action. Desert theories are criticised for insufficiently defending the view that the guilty always should be punished. Although the intuition that the guilty deserve to suffer is widely shared, it is not obvious why they deserve this. Desert theories are also criticised for assuming both that fact-finders can determine what offenders deserve and that the deserved punishment is necessarily the justified punishment: should people always be punished as they deserve?

A variant of desert theory is the communicative theory of punishment, which takes both a forward-looking and a backward-looking view of the purposes of punishment. The purposes of punishment on a communicative account are both to convey the state's condemnation of the action and to lead the offender to repent her action and to reform her conduct. On a communicative conception of punishment, the state aims to engage with the offender in a moral dialogue so that she appreciates the moral reasons she has to follow the law. According to some communicative theories, condemnation itself sufficiently justifies punishment. Punishment may be seen as a secular form of penance that vividly confronts the offender with the effects of her crime (Duff 1998, 162). According to other, less monistic communicative theories, communication of censure alone is insufficient to justify punishment; added to it must be the aim of deterrence (von Hirsch 1998, 171). Still other communicative theories add different considerations to the grounds for justification. On one pluralistic view, a distinction is drawn between the punishment that is deserved according to justice and the punishment that is actually justified. When, for example, an offender demonstrates repentance for her offence prior to punishment, the law has reason to be merciful toward her and to impose a less severe punishment than that which she deserves (Tasioulas 2006). Mercy involves a charitable concern for the well-being of the offender as a potential recipient of deserved punishment. Given this offender's repentance, the justified punishment in this case is less than it would be were there no grounds for mercy.

Deterrence systems of punishment recommend a simple approach to civil disobedience. Since the purpose and justification of punishment is to deter people from breaching the law, a deterrence system would impose on civil disobedients whatever punishment was necessary and sufficient to achieve that end. Whether that punishment would be less or more severe than, or equal to, that imposed on ordinary offenders depends on empirical considerations. Sometimes greater punishment than that required for ordinary offenders would be in order since disobedients who are serious in their moral conviction may not be deterred by standard punishments. Other times, however, less punishment than that for ordinary offenders would be in order since disobedients usually are not ‘hardened’ criminals and thus may need less severe treatment to deter them from offending.

In contrast to deterrence systems, monistic desert systems and communicative systems of punishment would only punish civil disobedients if, and to the extent that, they deserve to be punished. A pluralistic communicative system, which gives weight to considerations of mercy as well as retribution or desert, would only punish to the extent that the punishment was justified (not to the extent that it was deserved) since mercy toward the offender might recommend punishing her less than she deserves according to justice. The pluralistic approach raises the question whether being motivated by civil disobedience might give the law a reason to show mercy towards an offender. One might argue that a disobedient's conviction and commitments, which make it very difficult for her both to adhere to norms that violate those commitments and to desist from using effective means of protest, are facts about her circumstances that give the law reason to show mercy toward her. This would lessen the severity of any justified response from the law.

For desert and communicative theories concerned solely with justice-based desert, the key question is whether disobedients deserve censure, and if so, how much? There are at least three possible replies. One is that disobedients deserve the same punishment as the ordinary offenders who breach the same laws. There are several reasons to take this view. First, as Greenawalt puts it, the demands of proportionality would seem to recommend a uniform application of legal prohibitions. Since trespass is prohibited, persons who breach trespass laws in protest of either those laws or other laws are equally liable to persons who breach trespass laws for private purposes. Second, also from Greenawalt comes the suggestion that any principle that officials may excuse justified illegal acts will result in some failures to punish unjustified acts, for which the purposes of punishment would be more fully served. Even when officials make correct judgments about which acts to excuse, citizens may draw mistaken inferences, and restraints of deterrence and norm acceptance may be weakened for unjustified acts that resemble justified ones (Greenawalt 1987, 273). Therefore all such violations, justified and unjustified, should be treated the same.

But much of this turns on the assumption that civilly disobedient breaches of law are in fact comparable to ordinary offences and deserve a comparable response from the law. The discussion in Section 1 of the key features of civil disobedience showed that it differs greatly from ordinary offences both in motivation and in mode of action, let alone moral justification. This would suggest that civil disobedience should be regarded in the eyes of the law as a different kind of disobedience from common crimes. This leaves two options: civil disobedience deserves greater censure or it deserves less censure than ordinary crimes do.

There are reasons to believe that civil disobedients should be dealt with more severely than ordinary offenders are. First, there is the fact that disobedients seem to have put themselves above the law in preferring their own moral judgment about a certain issue to that of the democratic decision-making process and the rule of law. (Although some judges have endorsed this caricature, it is worth noting that it clashes with how both dissenters and many theorists characterise their activities; cf. Rawls 1971; Greenawalt 1987; Markovits 2006.) Second, the communicative aspect of civil disobedience could be said to aggravate such offences since it usually is attended by much greater publicity than most covert violations are. This forces legal authorities to concern themselves with the possibility that law-abiding citizens will feel distressed, insecure and perhaps imposed on if no action is taken. So, notes Greenawalt, while authorities may quietly let minor breaches pass, failure to respond to violations performed, in some respect, in the presence of authority, may undercut claims that the rules and the persons who administered them deserve respect (Greenawalt 1987, 351–2). Third, any use of violence would seem to aggravate civil disobedience particularly when it increases the harm of the offence or when it directly incites further and unjustified instances of violence. And although violence may eloquently communicate a dissenter's seriousness and frustration, it changes the nature of the dialogue. It pushes authorities to respond in ways consonant with their stance on violence – responses which may be harsher than those they would otherwise wish to make toward acts of civil disobedience that defend values they can appreciate.

The final possible view is that civil disobedients should be dealt with more leniently than ordinary offenders are, at least when their disobedience is morally justified. These offenders are conscientiously motivated and often their protests serve the interests of society by forcing a desirable re-examination of moral boundaries. That said, moral justifications do not usually translate into legal justifications and disobedients have been notoriously unsuccessful at advancing a defence of necessity (a defence that their action was legally justified being the lesser of two evils). Whether the law should be more accommodating of their conscientious motivation and efforts to engage in moral dialogue with government and society is a topic for further debate.

Some theorists maintain that civil disobedience is an outdated, overanalysed notion that little reflects current forms of political activism, which tend toward more extreme modes of engagement. Herbert Storing has suggested that ‘The most striking characteristic of civil disobedience is its irrelevance to the problems of today.’ (Storing 1991, 85). He said, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, that the fashion of civil disobedience is as likely to die out as it was to burst forth under the words of King. There is of course much evidence to show that Storing was mistaken in his predictions for the popularity of civil disobedience as a mode of dissent. Certainly though there have been shifts in the paradigm forms of civil disobedience in recent years; yet these shifts have occurred largely within the framework of conscientious communication discussed at the outset. The historical paradigms of Gandhi, King, the suffragettes, and Mandela are representative of that kind of civil disobedience which aims to guarantee legal protection for the basic rights of a specific constituency. Such disobedience contrasts with much contemporary civil disobedience, which focuses not on individuals' basic rights, but on broader issues or special interests such as the environment, animal rights, nuclear disarmament, globalisation, foreign policy, and so on.

Civil disobedience taken in support of concerns such as the environment or animal rights may be seen in part as a response to some breakdown in the mechanisms for citizen engagement in the decision-making process. This breakdown might be termed a democratic deficit (Markovits 2005). Such deficits in that dialogue may be an inevitable part of real democracies, and disobedience undertaken to correct those deficits may be said to reflect, to varying degrees, dissenters' sensitivity to democratic ideals. Civil disobedience remains today very much a vibrant part of liberal democracies and there are significant issues concerning civil disobedience for philosophers to address, particularly in how this practice may be distinguished from more radical forms of protest and how this practice should be treated by the law.

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• Duff, Antony and Garland David (eds.), 1994. A Reader on Punishment , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dworkin, Ronald, 1977. Taking Rights Seriously , London: Duckworth.
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• Enoch, David, 2002. ‘Some Arguments against Conscientious Objection and Civil Disobedience Refuted,’ in Israel Law Review , 36: 227–253.
• Farrell, Daniel M., 1977. ‘Paying the Penalty: Justifiable Civil Disobedience and the Problem of Punishment,’ in Philosophy and Public Affairs , 6 (2): 165–184.
• Feinberg, Joel, 1979. ‘Civil Disobedience in the Modern World,’ in Humanities in Society , 2 (1): 37–60.
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• Gans, Chaim, 2002. ‘Right and Left: Ideological Disobedience in Israel,’ in Israel Law Review , 36: 19–71.
• Gardner, John and Macklem, Timothy, 2002. ‘Reasons,’ in Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law , Jules Coleman and Scott Shapiro (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Green, Leslie, 2003. ‘Civil Disobedience and Academic Freedom,’ in Osgoode Hall Law Journal , 41 (2–3): 381–405.
• –––, 2002. ‘Law and Obligations,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law , Jules Coleman and Scott Shapiro (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Greenawalt, Kent, 1987. Conflicts of Law and Morality , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Goodin, Robert, 2005. ‘Towards an International Rule of Law: Distinguishing International Law-Breakers from Would-Be Law-Makers,’ in Journal of Ethics , 9 (1-2): 225–246.
• Haksar, Vimit, 1976. ‘Rawls and Gandhi on Civil Disobedience,’ in Inquiry , 19: 151–192.
• Hammer, Leonard, 2002. ‘Selective Conscientious Objection and International Human Rights,’ in Israel Law Review , 36: 145–169.
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• Kasher, Asa, 2002. ‘Refusals: Some Neglected Aspects,’ in Israel Law Review , 36: 171–180.
• King, Martin Luther Jr., 1991. ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ in Civil Disobedience in Focus , Hugo A. Bedau (ed.), London: Routledge.
• –––, 2001. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr , Claybourne Carson (ed.) New York: IPM/Warner Books.
• Lefkowitz, David, 2007. ‘On a Moral Right to Civil Disobedience,’ in Ethics , 117 (January): 202–233.
• Lippman, Matthew, 1991. ‘Nuremburg and American Justice,’ in Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy , 5 (4): 951–977.
• Lyons, David, 1998. ‘Moral Judgment, Historical Reality, and Civil Disobedience,’ in Philosophy and Public Affairs , 27 (1): 31–49.
• Mackie, John, 1978. ‘Can There Be a Right-based Moral Theory?,’ in Midwest Studies in Philosophy , 3: 350–359.
• Mandela, Nelson, 1994. Long Walk to Freedom: the Autobiography of Nelson Mandela , Toronto: Little, Brown and Company.
• Markovits, Daniel, 2005. ‘Democratic Disobedience,’ in Yale Law Journal , 114: 1897–1952.
• McEwen, Stephen J. Jr., 1991. ‘The Protester: A Sentencing Dilemma,’ in Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy , 5 (4): 987–993.
• Mill, John Stuart, 1999. On Liberty , Edward Alexander (ed.), Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.
• Morreall, John, 1991. ‘The Justifiability of Violent Civil Disobedience,’ in Civil Disobedience in Focus , Hugo A. Bedau (ed.), London: Routledge.
• Murphy, Jeffrie (ed.), 1971. Civil Disobedience and Violence , Belmont, California: Wadsworth.
• Nussbaum, Martha, 2010. Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality , New York: Basic Books.
• Paz-Fuchs, Amir and Sfard, Michael, 2002. ‘The Fallacies of Objections to Selective Conscientious Objection,’ in Israel Law Review , 36: 111–143.
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• Simmons, A. John, 2003. ‘Civil Disobedience and the Duty to Obey the Law,’ in Blackwell Companion to Applied Ethics , R. G. Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell.
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• Storing, Herbert J., 1991. ‘The Case Against Civil Disobedience,’ in Civil Disobedience in Focus , Hugo A. Bedau (ed.), London: Routledge.
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• Thoreau, Henry David, 1991. ‘Civil Disobedience,’ in Civil Disobedience in Focus , Hugo A. Bedau (ed.), London: Routledge.
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• Zinn, Howard, 1968. Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order , New York: Random House.

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• Comprehensive website on Mahatma Gandhi , maintained by the 3 institutes: Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal, Gandhi Book Centre, and Gujarat Vidyapith Ahmedabad
• The Martin Luther King Jr Research and Education Institute

civil rights | legal obligation and authority | -->legal philosophy --> | punishment | Socrates | terrorism | Thoreau, Henry David

Acknowledgments

I thank Adrian Blau, Adam Cureton, Alan Hamlin, Jonathan Quong, Ben Saunders, Hillel Steiner, Zofia Stemplowska, and John Tasioulas for their useful suggestions. I thank Joseph Raz and John Tasioulas for valuable discussions on this topic.

Copyright © 2013 by Kimberley Brownlee < k . brownlee @ warwick . ac . uk >

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Civil Disobedience

Henry david thoreau, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Civil Disobedience: Introduction

Civil disobedience: plot summary, civil disobedience: detailed summary & analysis, civil disobedience: themes, civil disobedience: quotes, civil disobedience: characters, civil disobedience: terms, civil disobedience: symbols, civil disobedience: literary devices, civil disobedience: theme wheel, brief biography of henry david thoreau.

Historical Context of Civil Disobedience

Other books related to civil disobedience.

• Full Title: Civil Disobedience or Resistance to Civil Government.
• When Written: 1848
• Where Written: Concord, Massachusetts
• When Published: 1849
• Literary Period: Early 19th century American Literature, Transcendentalism, Abolitionism
• Genre: Essay; Nonfiction
• Setting: The United States of America; Massachusetts
• Climax: Thoreau entreats the American people to give up their rights to property and protection from the state
• Antagonist: The American Government
• Point of View: First-person 

Extra Credit for Civil Disobedience

Friends Forever: Thoreau first met Emerson during a Harvard lecture Emerson delivered on “The American Scholar.” The speech was so inspiring that Thoreau approached Emerson afterwards, which was the beginning of what would go on to be a lifelong friendship.

Thoreau: Writer and Railroad Conductor. Thoreau was an ardent abolitionist. For a time he served as a conductor for the Underground Railroad, a system that helped fugitive enslaved people make their way to free states and Canada.

• The Columbian Exchange
• De Las Casas and the Conquistadors
• Early Visual Representations of the New World
• Failed European Colonies in the New World
• Successful European Colonies in the New World
• A Model of Christian Charity
• Benjamin Franklin’s Satire of Witch Hunting
• The American Revolution as Civil War
• Patrick Henry and “Give Me Liberty!”
• Lexington & Concord: Tipping Point of the Revolution
• Abigail Adams and “Remember the Ladies”
• Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” 1776
• Citizen Leadership in the Young Republic
• After Shays’ Rebellion
• James Madison Debates a Bill of Rights
• America, the Creeks, and Other Southeastern Tribes
• America and the Six Nations: Native Americans After the Revolution
• The Revolution of 1800
• Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase
• The Expansion of Democracy During the Jacksonian Era
• The Religious Roots of Abolition
• Individualism in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”
• Aylmer’s Motivation in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”

Thoreau’s Critique of Democracy in “Civil Disobedience”

• Hester’s A: The Red Badge of Wisdom
• “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
• The Cult of Domesticity
• The Family Life of the Enslaved
• A Pro-Slavery Argument, 1857
• The Underground Railroad
• The Enslaved and the Civil War
• Women, Temperance, and Domesticity
• “The Chinese Question from a Chinese Standpoint,” 1873
• “To Build a Fire”: An Environmentalist Interpretation
• Progressivism in the Factory
• Progressivism in the Home
• The “Aeroplane” as a Symbol of Modernism
• The “Phenomenon of Lindbergh”
• The Radio as New Technology: Blessing or Curse? A 1929 Debate
• The Marshall Plan Speech: Rhetoric and Diplomacy
• NSC 68: America’s Cold War Blueprint
• The Moral Vision of Atticus Finch

Advisor: Charles Capper, Professor of History, Boston University; National Humanities Center Fellow. Copyright National Humanities Center, 2014

Lesson Contents

Teacher’s note.

• Text Analysis & Close Reading Questions

Follow-Up Assignment

• Student Version PDF

What criticisms of representative democracy does Thoreau raise in “Civil Disobedience”?

Understanding.

In “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau not only calls for resistance to immoral and unjust government actions, he also criticizes the foundations of representative democracy — majority rule, voting, and representation.

1. According to Thoreau, what is the basis of majority rule? He contends that majority rule is not based on justice or fairness but rather on nothing more than the fact that the majority is physically stronger than the minority.

2. According to Thoreau, how do governments decide questions of right and wrong? They do so on the basis of majority rule, on mere numbers, on the simple fact that one side of a question gets more votes than the other.

3. In Thoreau’s view what should determine right and wrong? Conscience.

4. Why does Thoreau object to governing through legislators? Thoreau objects to governing through legislators because it means turning one’s conscience over to someone else. It means letting someone else decide our views on what is right and what is wrong. We each have a conscience. We should not delegate its use to another person.

5. In his view what sort of questions can legitimately be decided by majority rule? The majority is fit to decide only questions to which the “rule of expediency” can be applied. Teacher’s Note: Here Thoreau is referring to logistical or instrumental issues — taxes, roads, etc. — issues in which the public must select a means to a specific goal in a particular set of circumstances, issues that raise no moral questions.

6. The decisions of government are expressed as laws. According to Thoreau, how should individuals relate to the law and why? Men and women should value the right more than the law because the law, decided by mere numbers and not moral principles, may not embody the right.

7. What two dangers does Thoreau see in paying the law “undue respect”? First, if a law is unjust, and we follow it, we are made “agents of injustice,” that is, we commit injustice ourselves. Second, an “undue respect for the law” can lead us to follow it blindly, thereby giving up our humanity, as Thoreau suggest in his description of soldiers whose unthinking embrace of their orders has turned them into “movable forts.”

8. Based on your reading of this paragraph, why does Thoreau assert that “a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice”? The key word here is “all.” Were the majority to rule in “some” cases, those in which the “rule of expediency” could be applied, and reserved issues of right and wrong to the individual conscience, its rule would be just. But in leaving all issues — the expedient and ethical — up to the majority, when justice is at stake, it cannot be just because the majority will inevitably violate the conscience of someone.

Teacher’s Note: To clarify Thoreau’s grammar here, you might point out that since “majority” is a collective noun, it can be either singular or plural. Here he uses it in the plural. Today we would probably use it in the singular: “…in which the majority rules.”

Paragraph 11

9. How is voting like betting? They are both passive. In both we relinquish our ability to influence outcomes through action. In both hope takes the place of action. When we bet, we put our money down and hope that our team wins. When we vote, we put our money down and hope that our candidate wins.

10. What does Thoreau mean when he says that “the character of the voters is not staked” in voting? He means the voter’s character is not at stake in the election; the voter has nothing personal to lose because he has turned over responsibility for the decision to the majority.

11. On what grounds does Thoreau believe the majority will make its decision? On the grounds of expediency, on what will be most useful to the greatest number of people.

12. According to Thoreau, when is the majority likely to vote for morality and justice? The majority is likely to vote for morality and justice when the issue has already been decided, when it takes no courage to vote for the right, when, in other words, its vote no longer matters.

“It is not desirable,” wrote Thoreau, “to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.” Many have been influenced by Thoreau’s distinction between what is law and what is right (moral), including Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, President John F. Kennedy, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Your task is to choose an example from history or current events in which a law was seen to conflict with what was right. Develop an oral argument that might be used in a mock trial to defend someone who has violated such a law. You might investigate war protests, civil rights struggles, police brutality, or other events as directed by your teacher.

Divide your argument into three parts: state the law, explain why it is not moral, and offer a solution to resolve the conflict between the law and morality: should the law be abolished or should it be rewritten, and if so, how? Share your oral argument with your class.

Vocabulary Pop-Ups

• conscientious: governed by moral conscience
• whit: small amount
• palpitation: beat, throb
• unscrupulous: unprincipled, dishonest
• gaming: gambling
• tinge: the quality of being slightly marked or influenced by something
• staked: bet
• prevail: win, triumph
• expediency: practical, used here with the connotation of ignoring morality
• feebly: weakly
• indifferent: uninterested in
• hasten: to bring about more quickly
• Rowse, Samuel Worcester. Henry David Thoreau, 1854 (crayon portrait). Courtesy Concord Free Public Library.
• Henry David Thoreau, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing slightly right. Photographic print. c. 1879. From Library of Congress Miscellaneous Items in High Demand. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95513963/ (October 10, 2014)
• Maxham, Benjamin D. Henry David Thoreau. Ninth-plate Daguerreotype. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of anonymous donor. http://npgportraits.si.edu/eMuseumNPG/code/emuseum.asp?rawsearch=ObjectID/,/is/,/31401/,/false/,/false&newprofile=CAP&newstyle=single (October 10, 2014)

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Social Movements — Civil Disobedience

Essays on Civil Disobedience

Hook examples for civil disobedience essays, the echoes of thoreau hook.

Begin your essay by revisiting the influential writings of Henry David Thoreau. Explore his essay "Civil Disobedience" and its enduring impact on movements for social and political change.

The Power of Nonviolent Resistance Hook

Examine the concept of nonviolent resistance as a form of civil disobedience. Discuss iconic figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., who used peaceful protest to effect transformative change.

From Suffragettes to Sit-Ins Hook

Trace the history of civil disobedience movements. Highlight pivotal moments, such as the suffragette movement or lunch counter sit-ins during the civil rights era, to illustrate the diversity of causes and methods.

The Moral Obligation Hook

Explore the ethical and moral underpinnings of civil disobedience. Discuss the idea that individuals engage in acts of protest not only to challenge unjust laws but also as a moral duty to uphold justice.

Environmental Activism and Civil Disobedience Hook

Connect civil disobedience to contemporary environmental movements. Analyze the actions of activists who engage in acts of protest to raise awareness about climate change and environmental conservation.

The Digital Age of Civil Disobedience Hook

Discuss the role of technology and social media in modern civil disobedience. Explore how digital platforms have empowered activists to mobilize, organize, and advocate for change on a global scale.

The Legal and Ethical Boundaries Hook

Examine the fine line between civil disobedience and lawbreaking. Discuss the ethical considerations of breaking the law for a just cause and the consequences faced by individuals who engage in acts of protest.

Lessons from International Movements Hook

Look beyond national borders and explore civil disobedience in international contexts. Investigate movements like the Arab Spring or Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests to gain insights into global struggles for change.

Artistic Expression and Civil Disobedience Hook

Highlight the intersection of art and civil disobedience. Discuss how artists have used their creative talents to convey powerful messages and challenge societal norms, sparking conversations and change.

Civil Disobedience Thesis Statement: Tool for Social Change

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Civil Disobedience in Sophocles' Antigone

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Civil Disobedience and Its Importance for Better Changes

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Review of Henry David Thoreau’s Writing, Civil Disobedience

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Civil disobedience is a form of nonviolent resistance characterized by the deliberate and conscientious violation of laws, rules, or policies enacted by a governing authority, with the aim of challenging perceived injustices or promoting social change. Rooted in the belief that certain laws or actions are morally or ethically unacceptable, civil disobedience involves individuals or groups engaging in peaceful acts of protest or defiance to bring attention to and challenge oppressive systems, discriminatory practices, or unjust policies.

Civil disobedience, as a concept and practice, has its origins in various historical contexts and philosophical traditions. It traces its roots back to ancient times, with examples of individuals and groups engaging in acts of resistance against unjust laws or oppressive regimes. However, the modern concept of civil disobedience emerged prominently in the 19th and 20th centuries. One significant influence on the development of civil disobedience was the philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, an American writer and transcendentalist. In his essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849), Thoreau advocated for the idea that individuals have a moral duty to resist unjust laws and government actions. His writings inspired many subsequent activists and thinkers, including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., who employed civil disobedience as a means of achieving social and political change. Throughout history, civil disobedience has been utilized by various movements and individuals advocating for different causes, such as the suffragettes fighting for women's rights, the civil rights movement in the United States, and protests against oppressive regimes worldwide. Civil disobedience has often been employed as a nonviolent strategy to challenge unjust policies, raise awareness, and prompt dialogue and reform.

1. Mahatma Gandhi: Gandhi, a leader in India's struggle for independence from British rule, popularized the concept of nonviolent resistance. His approach to civil disobedience, known as Satyagraha, emphasized peaceful resistance, civil disobedience, and self-sacrifice. 2. Martin Luther King Jr.: A prominent leader in the American civil rights movement, King advocated for racial equality and justice. He utilized civil disobedience tactics, such as peaceful protests and boycotts, to challenge racial segregation and discrimination in the United States. 3. Rosa Parks: Parks is widely known for her pivotal role in the civil rights movement. By refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, she sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a significant event in the fight against racial segregation. 4. Nelson Mandela: Mandela, an anti-apartheid activist and former president of South Africa, fought against racial oppression through civil disobedience. He spent 27 years in prison for his activism before becoming a symbol of resistance and reconciliation.

1. Nonviolent Protests: Nonviolent protests involve gathering in public spaces to express dissent peacefully. This can include sit-ins, marches, rallies, or public demonstrations that aim to raise awareness, disrupt systems, and challenge the status quo. 2. Civil Disobedience Campaigns: Civil disobedience campaigns involve planned actions where participants deliberately and openly violate specific laws or regulations to highlight their unjust nature. This could include acts such as public acts of defiance, refusal to pay taxes, or intentional acts of civil disobedience. 3. Boycotts: Boycotts involve the organized refusal to engage with or purchase goods or services from institutions or businesses that support or perpetuate unjust practices. Economic pressure is used as a means to bring attention to the cause and prompt change. 4. Civil Resistance: Civil resistance encompasses a range of nonviolent actions aimed at disrupting or obstructing unjust systems. This can include acts of noncooperation, such as strikes, walkouts, or work slowdowns, to challenge oppressive policies or practices. 5. Symbolic Actions: Symbolic actions are often employed in civil disobedience to convey a message or draw attention to an issue. This can include public gestures, artistic expressions, or symbolic acts that resonate with the cause and create a visual impact.

1. Nonviolent Resistance: Civil disobedience is rooted in the principle of nonviolence. It rejects the use of physical force and instead relies on peaceful means to challenge unjust laws or policies. By refusing to resort to violence, civil disobedience aims to demonstrate moral integrity and inspire change through empathy and compassion. 2. Conscious Lawbreaking: Civil disobedience involves a deliberate and conscious violation of specific laws or regulations that are deemed unjust or oppressive. Participants willingly accept the legal consequences of their actions, viewing their acts of defiance as a way to expose and challenge unjust systems. 3. Moral and Ethical Grounding: Civil disobedience is driven by a strong moral and ethical conviction. Participants believe that their actions are morally justified and that they have a responsibility to stand up against injustice. It often emerges from a deep commitment to core principles such as equality, human rights, and social justice. 4. Public and Symbolic Nature: Civil disobedience typically takes place in public spaces to maximize visibility and impact. By engaging in acts of protest openly, participants seek to raise awareness, spark dialogue, and encourage others to question the legitimacy of unjust laws or policies. Symbolic gestures and actions are often employed to convey a powerful message and evoke empathy or solidarity. 5. Pursuit of Change and Reconciliation: Civil disobedience is not merely an act of rebellion; it is a call for change and reconciliation. It aims to prompt dialogue, create pressure for reform, and ultimately lead to a more just and equitable society. By highlighting the flaws in existing systems, civil disobedience seeks to initiate constructive discussions and foster positive transformation.

1. Literature: One notable literary representation of civil disobedience is Henry David Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience." Thoreau's work inspired future activists, including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and has become a foundational text in understanding the philosophy and practice of civil disobedience. 2. Film: The movie "Selma" (2014) directed by Ava DuVernay portrays the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The film depicts the nonviolent civil disobedience strategies employed by activists to combat racial discrimination and secure voting rights. 3. Music: The song "We Shall Overcome" has become an anthem for civil rights movements around the world. It originated as a gospel hymn and was later adapted as a protest song during the civil rights movement in the United States. Its powerful lyrics and melody capture the spirit of solidarity and resilience in the face of oppression.

1. One significant example of civil disobedience is Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. This act of defiance sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted for over a year and played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement. 2. Mahatma Gandhi's Salt March in 1930 is another notable act of civil disobedience. In protest against British colonial salt laws, Gandhi and his followers marched over 240 miles to the Arabian Sea to make their own salt. This event garnered international attention and highlighted the power of nonviolent resistance in the fight for Indian independence. 3. In recent years, the climate change movement has witnessed acts of civil disobedience on a global scale. One prominent example is the formation of Extinction Rebellion, a socio-political movement that employs nonviolent civil disobedience to demand urgent action on climate change. Their protests and disruptive actions have gained attention worldwide, raising awareness about the need for immediate and transformative environmental policies.

Civil disobedience is an important and captivating topic to explore in an essay due to its profound impact on society, history, and the pursuit of justice. It provides a lens through which to examine the power of individuals and communities in challenging unjust laws and oppressive systems. By examining the history and philosophy of civil disobedience, an essay can shed light on the transformative role it has played in various movements, from the civil rights movement to environmental activism. It invites reflection on the ethical and moral dimensions of dissent and resistance in the face of injustice. Furthermore, exploring civil disobedience allows for an examination of the tension between law and morality, and the role of dissent in shaping a more equitable society. It prompts critical analysis of the relationship between citizens and their governments, highlighting the importance of civil liberties and the exercise of individual agency.

1. Arendt, H. (1972). Crises of the Republic. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 2. Brownlee, K. (2012). Civil disobedience. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/civil-disobedience/ 3. Gandhi, M. K. (1907). Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Navajivan Publishing House. 4. King, M. L. (1963). Letter from Birmingham Jail. In J. M. Washington (Ed.), A testament of hope: The essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (pp. 289-302). HarperOne. 5. Martin, B. (2007). Defining civil disobedience. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 35(1), 3-26. 6. Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press. 7. Rawls, J. (1999). The justification of civil disobedience. In Collected papers (pp. 525-546). Harvard University Press. 8. Raz, J. (1979). The rule of law and its virtue. In The authority of law: Essays on law and morality (pp. 210-241). Oxford University Press. 9. Simmons, J. (2009). Civil disobedience and the duty to obey the law. Cambridge University Press. 10. Thoreau, H. D. (1849). Civil Disobedience. In Resistance to Civil Government. Cosimo Classics.

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Regulating Civil Disobedience on Campus

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With the academic year over or nearly over at campuses around the country, college and university administrators would be wise to use the summer months to review and revise their policies for addressing protests so as to avoid the sorts of clashes and crackdowns we witnessed over the last couple of months. In a column on this site last month, I identified a key question that the law has not yet fully resolved: to what extent, if any, does the obligation under federal Title VI to avoid creating a hostile environment for students who feel targeted by protests require colleges and universities to restrict expression by the protesters?

In this column, I turn from the constraints that the law imposes on colleges and universities to the disciplinary policies they ought to adopt for students who violate campus rules governing protests. In discussing discipline, I take for granted that a college or university—like any institution that values free speech, including the government—can adopt and enforce reasonable content-neutral restrictions on expressive activities. The question is how they should enforce such rules.

As I explain below, that question is difficult because transgression is often part of the protest itself. Is it possible to recognize a distinction between rule-violating civil disobedience and simple rule breaking?

Does Rule Breaking by Campus Protesters Fit Within the Civil Disobedience Tradition?

Civil disobedience generally refers to acts in violation of the law in recognition of a higher duty. It has ancient roots. For example, the title character of the Sophocles play Antigone defied King Creon by burying her brother Polynices.

In the nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau went to jail for his refusal to pay a tax that supported the Mexican-American War. As the story has been told , Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him and asked “Why are you here?” to which Thoreau answered, “Why are you not here?” Thoreau thereby implied that in some circumstances civil disobedience is not merely morally permissible but obligatory.

A person engaged in civil disobedience typically violates a law that is itself regarded as unjust. Mahatma Gandhi was jailed as a result of the Salt March, which violated a law that restricted local harvesting of salt to benefit Britain’s global commercial interests at the expense of India. He violated the prohibition on harvesting sea salt, which was the very law he was protesting.

By contrast, students in the recent campus encampments may well have been protesting injustice or complicity with Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, but when they occupied campus space without a permit or used amplified sound in places, times, or at levels forbidden by reasonable content-neutral regulations, they were not violating unjust rules. They were protesting injustice but violating rules that are not themselves unjust.

Yet we cannot always sharply distinguish between violating an unjust law itself and violating a restriction on expression in order to protest a different law or policy. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail after he was arrested for protesting against segregation, but the technical reason for his jailing was his violation of an Alabama law forbidding mass demonstrations. For King and other demonstrators, the law he violated was enmeshed in and enforced as part of the state’s system of apartheid. In violating otherwise reasonable campus speech regulations, protesters can likewise be understood to be saying that those regulations are part of a single oppressive system.

To be clear, I am not agreeing with the campus protesters that it is impossible to separate how a university invests its endowment from how it regulates campus expressive activities. I am saying, however, that the civil disobedience tradition is broad enough to encompass some violations of laws or rules that are not themselves the source of a perceived injustice.

Consequences

The fact that someone might think they are justified in violating some law or rule as an act of civil disobedience does not necessarily bear on the consequences they should face for doing so. Indeed, some people argue that anyone who engages in civil disobedience must be prepared to accept the prescribed consequence—including jailing and even criminal conviction in the case of law breaking.

However, while people who engage in civil disobedience knowingly risk the legal consequences, it does not follow that police, prosecutors, and judges must treat their motivation as irrelevant. The same is true for campus authorities. They could and in some circumstances should apply disciplinary measures with leniency when it is clear that students violated campus rules partly to make a point.

Of course, such leniency would not extend to protesters who are violent or otherwise cause very substantial harm. Such actions cannot be fairly characterized as civil disobedience. But a generally peaceful protest that entails mere technical rule violations should not be lumped together with riots.

Admittedly, one difficulty with a policy of leniency is that any under-enforcement of rules governing the time, place, and manner of speech risks appearing or even becoming content-based if it is not extended even-handedly. But leniency is typically a matter of discretion, rather than the kind of strict following of rules that content-neutrality seems to require. In essence, then, what is needed are clear rules about how and when not to fully enforce the clear rules about what is and is not allowed. That is not a conceptual impossibility, but it requires careful attention—in advance—to the sorts of cases that could arise.

That leads to the question of who should be paying careful attention to the various values at stake in any policy governing the content and enforcement of campus rules. In the last couple of months, college and university administrators have frequently acted on their own, without consulting, and sometimes in defiance of, the opinion of other vital constituencies—including students, faculty, and staff. To be effective in serving and balancing the vital interests of free expression, safety, and inclusivity, reform processes must themselves be more inclusive.

That is a tall order because an inclusive process is more cumbersome than unilateral executive decision making. I am not speaking in generalities here. I currently serve as one of nineteen members of a committee of Cornell undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff, and administrators tasked with recommending changes to the university’s existing policies regarding campus expressive activities. Even scheduling a meeting for such a large group poses challenges. Nonetheless, only a credible process can produce a credible policy. (Needless to say, the opinions I express in my Verdict columns and on my blog speak only for me, not the committee.)

Process also matters in another way. An institution should adopt optimal rules governing both conduct and consequences via an inclusive process, but such rules are only as good as the means of carrying them out.

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to due process issues in Title IX disciplinary proceedings at colleges and universities, with Department of Education policies changing from the Obama to Trump administrations and then changing back during the Biden administration. Some of the back-and-forth simply tracks culture-war polarization, with conservatives complaining that the Obama/Biden policy is a kind of feminist overkill and progressives complaining that the Trump policy was built on rape-myth denialism.

However, it should be clear that whether a disciplinary proceeding arises out of alleged sexual harassment under Title IX, antisemitic, Islamophobic, or other racial harassment under Title VI, or an alleged violation of campus code time, place, and manner restrictions on expression, everyone should have a right to due process. Even relatively mild forms of discipline should be imposed only after a hearing before an impartial adjudicator.

Civil disobedience is hardly new. Neither is uncivil disobedience. It is time—long past time—that our institutions appreciated the difference and responded proportionately and fairly.

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by Laurence H. Tribe and Michael C. Dorf

by Michael C. Dorf

by Michael C. Dorf with Trevor W. Morrison

by Jesse Choper, Richard Fallon Jr., Yale Kamisar, Steven Shiffrin, Michael Dorf, Frederick Schauer

Comparing Civil Disobedience and Letter From Birmingham Jail

Introduction.

Laws exist to protect individuals’ safety and ensure the citizen’s rights against abuse by others, organizations, or the law system itself. As such, unjust laws and moral laws exist whereby an unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law, while the moral law is a conduct derived from the objective right or wrong (Foroughi et al. 133). Respecting just laws is both morally and legally required. On the other hand, it is morally right to defy unfair laws. Any law that strengthens the character of people is correct. Any law that discredits the human psyche is unfair. This paper compares the aspect of civil disobedience and the letter from Birmingham Jail. It also vases these two writings’ logos, ethos, and pathos and concludes with a personal argument on the topic.

Logos, Ethos, and Pathos

To persuade the reader to follow his perspectives on unjust and moral laws, Thoreau uses three rhetorical approaches: Pathos, Ethos, and Logos. Thoreau uses logos to start and pathos to finish his essay “Civil Disobedience,” providing personal instances of why men should follow their consciences rather than rules that contradict their moral convictions (Atilgan 168). Throughout the entire work, Thoreau frequently uses ethos. He tries to convey to the readers that they have a responsibility and the right to stand up for their beliefs.

Moreover, Thoreau’s use of pathos is prevalent throughout the essay as an attempt to persuade the readers to make a logical and ethical choice (Atilgan 177). He uses these terms interchangeably to anger the reader into acting on what Thoreau’s essay perceives as an unjust law system. An example is when he refers to “the mass of men” as people serving the country, the soldiers, as being the “same worth only as horse and dogs” and of serving “the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines. This is a provocative statement that Thoreau uses to make the makers mad and take a stand on unjust laws or immoral acts.

On the other hand, the  Letter from Birmingham Jail h eavily uses pathos, ethos, and logos. In his writing, Martin Luther King addresses several clergy members who criticized his actions during the protests. In this letter, he used ethos when referring to his readers as fellow men (Marks n.p). Using the phrase “My dear Fellow Clergymen,” King looks to his readers as equals. However, people do not see it that way. He uses logos in his arguments, especially when he tells the clergymen that he came to Birmingham to fulfill his duty as a civil rights advocate. Using logic, he responds to those referring to him as an outsider that any injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere. Hence, anyone residing in the States can never be an outsider.

Furthermore, Luther goes the extra mile by using pathos all over his writing by using emotions in his language. An example is when he talks about his immediate family members in his work and narrates how his children have always asked him tough questions about race (Marks n.p). The idea that Funtown used to be restricted to white children only anchored depressing clouds of inferiority to colored children. This distorted their personality by allowing colored children, including his own, to develop bitterness towards whites.

Compare and Contrast

David Thoreau and Martin Luther King have written exemplary persuasive essays depicting social injustice and civil disobedience. King’s  Letter from a Birmingham Jail  addresses a specific audience (Whites and Blacks) by discussing why he feels they should work together to end racial segregation (King n.p). On the other hand, Thoreau, in his article  Civil Disobedience , speaks to a broader audience that needs to be addressed. In his letter, Thoreau expresses his emotions towards the unjust law system and how individuals have strived to keep up with it (Thoreau 29). However, despite their audience differences, both essays focus on the issue of morality and justice and use these topics to inform and motivate their audience.

The two essays are similar as they both talk about morality and justice under governmental authority, which are related subjects. Thoreau and King describe how and why individuals should respond to unjust laws nonviolently to educate and inspire others. (Bass n.p). We are taught the value of upholding morality and pursuing justice through the authors’ insightful analogies and vivid examples. Most significantly, Thoreau and King support civil disobedience to protect people’s God-given rights and individuality for future generations and serve as inspiration for a struggle for liberation from the government.

Moreover, although the two essays address the issue of morality and justice, they are different. The essays vary in writing styles, tomes, and the overall goals of the speakers. Martin Luther King addresses his readers on the issue of injustice that African Americans faced at the hands of White Americans (King n.p). King uses emotional appeal and optimism for freedom to anchor his message home. This writing differs from Thoreau’s piece, which largely focuses on the unfair Government (Thoreau 35). Unlike King, he’s writings speak to his readers in a distressed and aggravated tone as he wants them to abide by unjust laws. King’s essay differs from Thoreau’s as he represents one goal while Thoreau addresses multiple goals. He describes the government’s unfair laws but also enlightens his readers on how and why to denounce such laws.

King and Thoreau’s pieces are similar as they persuade people to fight for what is morally right and never be complacent in the face of injustice. Thoreau asserts that a society where the majority gets to dictate the laws governing them is said to operate on unjust laws (Thoreau 37). As such, he claims that issues of morality should be decided by the individual and not by the laws set by the government. However, since this has always been the system, he pushes people to fight for their rights. Similarly, King’s letter contends that the minority’s right is granted when fought for, and the system is challenged (King n.p). He asserts that the oppressor never gives freedom voluntarily; hence, people need to fight to reclaim their rights.

Personal Argument

The two essays have adequately presented the concept of unjust laws and moral laws. By sharing a unified form of social justice and civil disobedience, these two articles have been used to bring light to society on minimizing the oppression of people with low incomes. In reality, people have protested unfair and unjust laws imposed on them in a civil way. While in high school, I was part of the revolt against a decision that led to the automatic disqualification of a whole class after a rumor of exam irregularity erupted. I protested against this rule as it was unjust and morally wrong for those students who did their exams without cheating.

Additionally, these two essays challenge the government’s rule, including the institutions embedded in it. As such, these essays are said to present similar plans purposed for revolution. They attempt to convince their audience that what they are fighting for is right; however, their approach to these arguments significantly differ. Another example in my life is my involvement in the protests for racial equality following the death of George Floyd in 2020. I believe that this case was unjustly handled and should have been considered voluntary manslaughter.

Civil disobedience is explored in essays by Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King. Although their messages are similar, their tones are very different. King deliberately keeps his tone more respectful because he is a black guy living in an oppressive environment. From this comparison, people learn that even though Thoreau is a white man and is not personally impacted by the injustices the government upholds, he nonetheless criticizes them (Bass n.p). Additionally, this comparison enlightens us that despite being 100 years apart, both men have extremely distinct perspectives but present related points of view. Both exhort people to follow their moral convictions and to resist ceding control of their social standing to the majority. As such, these two essays are essential as they enlighten the general public about the importance of fighting for their rights.

Works Cited

Atilgan, Hatice. “Reframing civil disobedience as a communicative action: Toward a critical deliberative theory of civil disobedience.”  International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy  40.1/2 (2020): 169-183.

Bass, S. Jonathan.  Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Eight White Religious Leaders, and the” Letter from Birmingham Jail” and “Civil disobedience.”  LSU Press, 2021.

Foroughi, Pouyan, et al. “Peer effects in corporate governance practices: Evidence from universal demand laws.”  The Review of Financial Studies  35.1 (2022): 132-167.

King, Luther Martin. “Letter from Birmingham Jail”  Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics ,  3 (1) (1963).

Marks, Robert. “King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail: Its Merit Through Dramatism.” (2021).

Thoreau, Henry David. “Civil disobedience.”  Civil Disobedience in Focus . Routledge, 2002. 28-48.

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Friday essay: crimes against humankind – Rai Gaita on Israel’s war on Gaza and the student protests

Honourary professorial fellow, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne

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I dedicated Justice and Hope: Essays Lectures and Other Writings , published last year, to my grandchildren, but I intended this dedication, implicitly, to be to all young people. This is what I wrote.

More and more, I fear, knowledge of affliction and cruelty will test their understanding of what it means to share a common humanity with all the peoples of the earth, and to a degree almost too awful to imagine, their faith that the world is a good world despite the suffering and the evil in it. What can sustain that faith? I believe there are few questions more urgently in need of sober realism in their formulation and in the answers offered to them.

Subjected as they have been to corrosive disillusionment about political institutions, I feared then that hope had deserted young people. The student protests in response to Israel’s war on Gaza and its people have changed my mind about that. At times, the protests appear to express a joyful affirmation that this kind of political action can, indirectly, change the world. I welcome that, though with qualifications I sometimes fear will reduce the voice of hope in me to a whisper.

Generally, I’m not keen on a declaration of interest in these circumstances, but sometimes it matters. The understanding and discussion of ethical matters is always personal, though this should not compromise a robust attempt to to see things as they are.

My wife is Jewish, and I have Jewish stepchildren and step-grandchildren. Hardly a day passes when I am not at some level aware that in the lifetime of my parents, most of the nations of Europe were glad to see Jews exterminated like vermin unfit to live on this earth.

For many people of my age (I’m 78), the Holocaust taught two important lessons. First, irrespective of what they have done and what they are like, no human being should be treated as vermin, outside the boundaries of a sense of a common humanity. That is perhaps why so many postwar preambles to international law speak of the Dignity (capital intended) of humanity: of the inalienable dignity of peoples of all ethnic, religious and national kinds.

The second is that because of their allegiance to nation or religion, which often forms an essential element of their identity, good people will sometimes do, support or condone morally terrible deeds. To believe therefore they could not be good people is to be blind to the tragic ethical complexity of the human condition.

My wife is also Israeli. We are shocked and deeply pained by what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank, but do not believe what Israel has become was inevitable from at least 1948, when Israel became a state. (The Palestinians call this the Nakba.) Between then and now, many possibilities were squandered, not realised, or not even noticed.

Millions of people throughout the world have marched in the streets of their cities, towns and villages to express their revulsion at Israel’s war against Gaza.

They do not need the results of investigations to know what they see every night on their television screens is also a war against Gaza’s people, if not because it is motivated by genocidal intent, then because it is driven by a fierce desire for revenge that has shown contempt for its victims.

They are outraged because nothing Hamas did on October 7, or could realistically threaten to do, justifies what Israel has done in response. It is not only the number of dead and wounded, estimated at 35,709 dead and 79,990 wounded at the time of writing , that motivates them. It is the destruction in Gaza of a human way of living.

When one reflects on how often people have spoken of the way a sense of place has shaped them and coloured their orientation to the world, their sense of being at home in it, then one can see what a heinous crime the physical destruction of a city can be. The claim that it is disproportionate – even overwhelmingly disproportionate – is in the wrong ethical space to capture the moral and human awfulness of it. Summoning every ethical resonance of the phrase, it is a crime against humankind.

Israel has destroyed this kind of “at homeness in the world” for the people of Gaza. Palestinians are fighting to achieve it in their struggle for national self-determination. To defend or fight for the conditions of this sense of belonging in the world, states will do things that are against morality and law.

That is why Israel claims, falsely, that its war against Hamas is a fight for its existence and, even more absurdly, for Western civilisation.

Intergenerational trauma

It seems that most Israelis and a significant portion of the Jewish diaspora support the war. One reason is that they have not been able to overcome the trauma caused by October 7. It was not the terrorist killing of civilians, including children and babies, that caused it. Nor was it the brutal sexual violence, or the fact more Jews were killed in a single day than at any time since the Holocaust, though of course these were fundamental.

What made the trauma intergenerational throughout the Jewish diaspora, I think, is that those terrible deeds were committed with exultant Jew hatred. The trauma was compounded by equivocation over the moral and political significance of October 7 by a surprising number of intellectuals on the left and sometimes, even the denial of their sympathy.

When the UN Secretary General António Guterres said , in a tone of frustration many Jews took to be directed at them, that October 7 did “not occur in a vacuum”, they took him to mean they should understand the crimes of that day in their historical context. Many believed that was equivalent to a justification of these crimes. Guterres angrily denied the latter.

He was obviously right, but it was foolish of him to say it. His statement encompassed the ethical particularity of October 7 and Palestinian terrorist attacks more generally. This was echoed by many others, who described the deeds of October 7 as the actions of freedom or resistance fighters.

Obviously, one action can fall under several descriptions, not all of them morally salient. Some terrorists are resistance fighters; some resistance fighters are terrorists. And, it is important to note, some who might have been resistance fighters forfeited the right to that expression, with its heroic resonance, because of how they acted.

At least some of the Hamas fighters forfeited it with their actions on October 7, even if they might rightly have been described as resistance fighters when they broke through the Israel-Gaza border fence .

They did not forfeit it because they killed civilians, or because they raped (and perpetrated crimes worse than rapes) – nor even because they killed children. They forfeited it because of the obscene glee they took in those deeds as an expression of their hatred of Jews.

If one wants to understand how they could do it, as of course one should, one needs more than knowledge of the occupation and daily suffering and humiliations of the Palestinians . One needs a political psychology of the kind writer Adam Shatz offered in a fine article in London Review of Books titled Vengeful Pathologies . That is not what most people had in mind when they talked of the need to place October 7 – politically and morally – in its historical context.

There is another important thing to note. Sometimes, confronted with morally terrible deeds, we are incredulous, bewildered, and we ask of their agents, “How was it possible that they did it?”.

That is not a question that invites an answer – which is, perhaps, to say it is not really a question. We are not in need of facts, or expert knowledge. We may know the motives, which fully explain why they did it. Often they will be ordinary, banal motives: perhaps they were frightened, vengeful, or sadists, or were obeying orders.

It’s a fact of human life that we sometimes respond this way to morally terrible deeds. But that’s not why I’ve drawn attention to this phenomenon. Rather, I want to suggest that the fact we do, the generality of that fact in human life, is intrinsic to (because it partly constitutes) our concept of the morally terrible. People who are blank to this kind of response in themselves or in others, have an impoverished understanding of the morally terrible, or, if you are at ease with this word, of “evil”.

An analogy might help. Many are bewildered by the disappearance of a human personality in death. That’s not because they hanker for supernatural beliefs of any kind. They know the facts of science. This kind of bewilderment is partly what constitutes our idea that human beings are unique and irreplaceable: not just to those who love and mourn them, but period.

The aggressive calls to see the atrocities of October 7 within the context of clear explanations felt to some like an uncomprehending assault on the way people – not only Jewish people – responded to them.

However, I believe it is a moral tragedy for the Jewish diaspora that it has not allowed its trauma to transform into an urgent obligation to criticise what Israel has done in its name. I would say the same about the citizens of Israel. The response of both communities – but especially of the diaspora – is, as it has been for many years, “Israel has enough haters in world. Why should we join them?”

But just as nothing Hamas or other terrorists have done was comparable to October 7, nothing Israel has done, not even in 1948 , is comparable to what it has done and continues to do since October 7.

When one listens to statements by Israel’s political leaders, it is easy to believe they are out of touch with reality. But it is also necessary to understand the brutal realpolitik that has long been part of Israeli international politics. It is based on the belief that if one can sit out the world’s condemnation, there will come a time when the world will no longer care – or not enough for it to matter.

That may be true of older leaders in the West, but it is unlikely to be true of younger people in the Global South. Of them, Pankaj Mishra wrote in March in The London Review of Books:

At the same time, Gaza has become for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the 21st century – just as the first world war was for a generation in the West.

It will be different for younger people in the Global North, but the alienation from Israel now evident in many of them is likely to continue to affect their attitude to it profoundly in the future, even as it diminishes.

The concept of a university

The student protests began some six months after the marches in streets, towns and villages throughout the world. They were inspired by the same revulsion at the crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, but focused on what the students believed to be the varying forms of complicity of their institutions in those crimes.

Journalists and some students have likened the current protests to those of the 1960s and early 1970s . The reason is obvious, but there is a fundamental difference: in the 60s and 70s, institutions called universities regarded themselves as answerable to an historically deep conception of a university . This governed ideas about what was possible or not. Included, of course, was discussion of what could or could not be done at a university in the name of free speech and protest.

It was taken for granted universities would host faculties (or schools) of humanities – and that their students and academic staff would therefore form political and moral beliefs that would sometimes be radically contrary to those of their fellow citizens. Expressed in actions – or sometimes even just expressed – these beliefs would also be against the law.

Recall the arguments about pornography and abortion in the 1960s, and about torture after September 11. Not to mention arguments about the justifiability of infanticide in certain circumstances , which started in the late 1970s and are ongoing.

Regarding deeds rather than arguments, Monash University students openly collected money for non-military aid to Vietnam’s pro-unification National Liberation Front (NLF) in the late 1960s, when it was killing their fellow citizens fighting in Vietnam. They chanted “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win”, though “Uncle Ho” was at the time believed to have murdered at least 30,000 peasants in a program of “land reforms”.

When the institutions now called universities deliberate about which disciplines (or even faculties) they will support, no serious concept of a university even remotely enters their minds. Some universities have axed philosophy, classics, physics – or even the entire faculty of humanities. Clearly, they would not be moved by the argument that institutions lacking these things do not deserve to be called universities.

If anyone old enough to have been a student in the 1960s were to offer such an argument, they would betray they had been asleep for at least 40 years. It would never occur to younger people to do so: that concept of the university died before many of them were born.

Admittedly, even in the 1960s, the argument didn’t have much life in it. Less than 20 years later, at a meeting convened to protect philosophy departments in the UK, philosophers repeatedly told a minister of education , who had come to hear what they had to say, that an institution without a philosophy department – and most certainly one that closed its philosophy department – could not be called a university. He listened patiently for almost an hour and then responded with evident irritation, “In that case, we will call it something else”. The philosophers didn’t know what to say. There was nothing to say. Only a lament was truthfully on offer.

The concept of a university the philosophers appealed to relied on other notions, whose place in living speech was equally unconvincing. Vocation, collegiality, a community of scholars, love of truth – even truth itself.

When scepticism about truth, and hostility to the intensity that went with talk of love of it, became pervasive in many humanities disciplines, the die was cast: as the UK philosophers discovered. Speaking truth to a seductively cool corporate urbanity that found intensity distasteful proved as least as difficult as speaking it to power.

Serious discussion

If they cannot appeal to a serious concept of a university, what can students and staff appeal to when they ask what should be permitted on campus? I don’t know exactly, but here is a rough answer: students and staff should be permitted to say in political forums on campus what they have come to believe in serious discussion in the classroom.

They should therefore be prepared to say with Machiavelli that political leaders should not desire to be good, and that they should love their country more than their soul. To say with Frantz Fanon that the oppressed can justifiably use political violence, including terror, against their oppressors. To say with Marx that we should aim for revolution.

And to say with many contemporary writers, including Israelis, that Israel is irredeemably a racist colonial settler state that should cease to exist as a Jewish state – or with the Israeli historian Benny Morris that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs should have been completed in 1948.

They should be prepared to say, with some right-wing Israeli nationalists, that Jordan should become the home for a Palestinian nation . And to say, with many critical legal theorists, that international law as it stands is Eurocentric in ways that have favoured colonial exploitation of peoples in the Global South – and therefore lacks the authority to claim jurisdiction over them. And to say more.

Recently, university leaders asked the federal government for advice on what counts as unlawful conduct on their campuses. This implies they would act against students who behaved unlawfully. Perhaps that is why a student at ANU was suspended for expressing unconditional support for Hamas. I assume the student was not suspended for her foolish, effectively amoral idea one might give unconditional support to a political entity. It seems more likely the university suspended her because Hamas is listed by the government as a terrorist organisation .

Students who study the Cold War, and intellectuals’ arguments about it at the time, are likely to read famous writers and philosophers who refused to condemn mass murder in the Soviet Union – especially if that condemnation was demanded by those who refused to condemn the murder of communists or left-wing leaders and political activists in South America and Asia.

Reading and discussing these thinkers in class, some students might agree with them. They may, for similar reasons, refuse to condemn Hamas – especially when the condemnation is demanded by those who refuse to condemn what Israel is doing in Gaza and on the West Bank, but instead support it.

I find it hard to appreciate the moral difference between refusing to condemn Hamas and refusing to condemn Israel’s terrorism in Gaza and the terrorism by settlers on the West Bank (who are often supported by Israel’s defence forces and government ministers). There are, to be sure, important moral differences between the horrors of October 7 and the current war, but someone who believes they can weigh them to determine definitively which is worse must be using scales made in hell.

One can also argue over whether the thousands of dead civilians in Gaza were intentionally killed, or whether they were killed due to reckless, often opportunist disregard of their lives. (Because of Israel’s ferocious need of revenge and its determination it would not often, or not seriously, risk the lives of its soldiers merely to protect the lives of Gazans, whose humanity is not visible to them.)

The difference will matter to the International Court of Justice when it considers whether Israel is guilty of genocide. Morally, though, it will be weighed only by connoisseurs of evil.

Legitimate and illegitimate persuasion

An institution worthy of the title of university would see that the suspended ANU student could have reached the belief that made her refuse to condemn Hamas by reading prescribed texts and discussing them in her courses. Such a university would protect her.

Not only would it protect her to say what she believes in tutorials, but to express it in the form of protests on campus, ranging from discussion and argument in public lecture theatres to chanting and displaying posters. That is, provided those actions observe a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate persuasion.

That distinction is as old as Socrates. Legitimate persuasion requires people to renounce their power to make others believe something only because they have lied, successfully exploited that person’s ignorance, hidden relevant information, intimidated them, or exploited their vulnerability to sentimental kitsch – or more generally, their bad ear for what rings false.

All such forms of persuasion must be renounced in genuine conversation, as a condition of the participants’ respect for one another – and for their human need of truth as a need of the soul, as Simone Weil put it. If persuasion compels, it will do so in the way logic compels. To someone who says in response to what they take to be a valid argument, “I see that I must accept the conclusion”, one would not say, “Don’t be such a wimp. Try. Show a free spirit.”

This is also true when the discussion involves persuasion directed to the head and heart, inseparably combined. This distinctive form of understanding is partly defined by its resistance to sentimentality, pathos, kitsch and so on.

The university, as I have been describing it, was a community of scholars in conversation. Of course, a conversational argument can be fierce: while being respectful of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of persuasion. For some, that can be intimidating.

But I think one must distinguish feeling intimidated from being intimidated – by someone who intends to intimidate, consciously or unconsciously.

Protest camps on university lawns are not seminar rooms and chanting is not a form of conversation, but they can be invitations to conversations. In this respect, they share a quality with non-violent forms of civil disobedience.

I think of civil disobedience as an act of civic friendship. The idea that the concept of friendship can mark a distinctive form of political respect in a democratic society is as old as Aristotle. At difficult moments in their friendship, friends must call on each other to attend to what is endangering their friendship.

“It’s time to talk, seriously and truthfully,” one might say to the other. In a similar way, citizens may sometimes feel compelled to call on their fellow citizens to acknowledge what threatens to undermine the conditions of a just and truthful political community. “Hey! It’s time to talk. We can no longer evade it.”

Of course, it takes time for that to be heard. And once it is? It doesn’t need to be taken up. That’s in the nature of an invitation – just as it is in the nature of a conversation that we don’t know where it will go.

Would a conversation like this be possible between those with relatives murdered on October 7 and those with relatives murdered in Gaza? Those who would deny this, or who believe the suggestion (almost grotesquely) lacks political seriousness, they should be told to take their protests to the streets.

A university in which such conversations were possible, and such actions permitted, would, of course, have to acknowledge that as a citizen, a lawbreaker protected on campus would be liable to arrest off campus – probably justifiably.

When the concept of a university had life in it, no one suggested the values of a university should be the values of the general community, or that what should count as freedom of speech and political activity on a campus should apply in wider society.

Uncannily haunting

Though defunct, the memory of the university as it existed in the 1960s remains uncannily haunting. That’s evident when people appeal to academic freedom in its name.

The current resistance to police presence on campuses is motivated by this concept – which was used in similar situations over 50 years before. Students have protested not only as morally concerned citizens, but as members of a community who believed they could appeal to the distinctive obligations that fall on universities, as universities , to avoid being complicit in grave injustices.

Description of the conceptual features of a university – its conceptual skeleton really – is possible, just as it is possible to describe the conceptual features of chivalry or chastity. That is why the concept of a university can still have effects, like a ghost rattling its chains, in a world that mocks it as having never described anything real – only the elitist nostalgia of a handful of academics who dreamed of a golden age that never existed. But it cannot speak to us in a way that would enable creative engagement with it. As things stand, our life with language can give it no voice.

The requirement to allow certain forms of speech and action derives not from the idea of a university, but from considerations about what it is to seriously teach. It would obviously be absurd for a teacher in the corporate teaching institutions called universities to teach set texts of Marx, Fanon and Sartre and say to students, “Read them, then we’ll discuss them, but don’t believe them.”

Nothing, however, that is essential to the identity of such institutions prevents them from forbidding students from expressing beliefs they formed in class discussion in political forums on campus, or from axing the courses, the disciplines to which they belong, or faculties, if they create problems with donors or the government (though it might prove embarrassing for a time).

The embarrassment would be caused by the faint memory of a defunct concept. Therefore, it could be an occasion for universities to face the reality of what they have become – and without a trace of guilt, to purge their institutional memories of uncanny resonances.

At the beginning of this essay, I said I have serious qualifications about the hope the students’ protests inspired in me. Aspects of the protests bewilder and alarm me. I do not understand the aggressive contempt (it appears) with which so many participants speak of Zionism and, worse, Zionists. I find it hard not to hear the voice of Hamas in their tone and therefore in how I should understand their meaning when they chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”. Presumably they mean free of Zionists.

Do they not know there are many ways of being a Zionist – from the vile ways of some of the right-wing members of the Israeli government to the profoundly humane ways of anti-state Zionists like Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber ?

Do they not know that in Israel, Zionists like the director of Breaking the Silence , an organisation recording testimonies of Israeli soldiers about crimes they and others have committed against Palestinians, receive death threats?

Do they believe because they are Zionists, such people deserve their contempt?

Such Zionists believe Jews have a need of and a right to institutions of political and cultural self-determination in the land “between the river and the sea”, provided it is consistent with the realisation of the Palestinians’ same need and right. If one can be a Zionist without being a Jew, then I am that kind of Zionist.

Many protesters believe Israel could be compelled to cease to exist in any Zionist form. That belief is dangerously out of touch with reality. Israel will never be compelled to give up what it believes to be its responsibility to realise the need of the Jewish people for self-determination. Not militarily – it has nuclear weapons – and not under the pressure of boycotts, divestments and international hostility. For anything like the foreseeable future, Israel will continue to exist as a Jewish state.

Political realism requires one to acknowledge that the Palestinians will receive justice only if Israel is persuaded, albeit under considerable pressure, to give it. It will do so only if it is consistent with some form of Jewish self-determination.

The hope that a radically anti-Zionist project can be achieved is a fantasy. As such, it expresses the kind of thoughtlessness Hannah Arendt argued could produce great evil . The kind of thoughtlessness she had in mind is a failure of judgement that erodes genuinely critical thinking.

It is a conceit on the part of the institutions now called universities to believe they can teach students to be seriously critical thinkers. This was often so, even when the concept of a university meant something.

They can teach students facts, how to weigh them in support of conclusions, how to argue, in the sense in which philosophy departments teach them to be good at argument. They can even teach judgement about how to weigh facts as evidence to support certain propositions. But they cannot, in anything like the same way, teach them to possess the courage or humility necessary if one is to care more for truth than the opinion of one’s peers or fame.

The need for such virtues could be appreciated in what we now call the “culture” of institutions where the academic form of the life of the mind was partly constituted by the distinction between vocations and careers: and by hardheaded talk of the love of truth. Or as Simone Weil put it , the spirit of truth in love – in love with the wondrous treasures available to students and staff in their common effort to understand the world and themselves. Institutions now called universities put obstacles in the way of developing those virtues, enacting them and even understanding the need for them.

Nor can universities teach – in the same way they can teach judgement about factual matters or how to argue – the kind of sensibility necessary to understand the meanings of things in our lives. A sensibility in which feeling and thought are inseparable. A sensibility that informs efforts to try to see things as they are, in the domain of reflection.

That domain includes, of course, ethical questions about the nature of love, virtue, what counts as sobriety in political action and what is needed to become resistant to the enchantment of rhetoric and spin.

Albert Camus said he distinguished between two kinds of intelligence : intelligent intelligence and stupid intelligence.

Stupid intelligence is like what Arendt called thoughtlessness. It can be high-flying and can pass for being critical because it takes a self-regarding pleasure in debunking. But it seldom stops to question the assumptions that inform the debunking.

Stupid intelligence can be formidable, intimidating and quick on its feet. It can take you, deservedly, to the highest reaches of academic life and to international fame. But it is not thoughtful.

It cannot, of itself, take you to wisdom or make you truly answerable to someone who calls on you to be serious. It cannot take you to the virtues necessary for thought that constantly reflects critically on its assumptions.

How do we restore intelligent intelligence, the conditions that generate and nourish thoughtfulness in our institutions of education? That is our challenge, if hope is not to decline into fantasy.

This essay is based on the annual Jim Carlton Integrity Lecture delivered recently at the Melbourne Law School.

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The Impact of the 26th Amendment on American Democracy

This essay about the 26th Amendment explores its significant impact on American democracy by lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. It discusses the origins of the amendment, its immediate effects on the electoral landscape, the increase in youth political activism, and its broader implications for civil rights and inclusivity. The essay also examines challenges in youth voter turnout and the amendment’s lasting influence on policy-making and societal perceptions of young people.

How it works

The ratification of the 26th Amendment to the United States Constitution on July 1, 1971, signified a transformative moment in the trajectory of American democracy. This amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, fundamentally altered the nation’s political dynamics. Its implications for American democracy are extensive, affecting electoral processes, civic engagement, and the broader conversation on civil rights and inclusivity.

The origins of the 26th Amendment are rooted in the turbulent socio-political climate of the 1960s and early 1970s. This era was marked by vigorous civil rights movements, widespread anti-war demonstrations, and a burgeoning call for youth involvement in the political sphere.

A persuasive argument for lowering the voting age emerged in the phrase, “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote.” This highlighted the paradox of 18-year-olds being eligible for military draft during the Vietnam War without the corresponding right to vote. Energized by this cause, student activists, civil rights advocates, and supportive politicians rallied together, leading to the rapid adoption of the amendment.

The immediate consequence of the 26th Amendment was the enfranchisement of millions of young Americans, significantly impacting the electoral landscape. Politicians and political parties had to adjust their approaches to engage this new voter base, which brought fresh perspectives and priorities into the political sphere. The inclusion of younger voters broadened the scope of public discourse to include issues such as education, environmental sustainability, and social justice, which had previously been underrepresented.

Additionally, the 26th Amendment ignited a surge of political activism among the youth. The new voting rights empowered young people to influence policy decisions and hold their representatives accountable. This empowerment fostered a more participatory democratic culture and encouraged the creation of youth-centric political organizations and advocacy groups, which played a crucial role in mobilizing and maintaining youth engagement in politics.

The amendment also significantly impacted the broader civil rights movement, underscoring the idea that age, like race and gender, should not impede full democratic participation. This extension of voting rights was part of a broader trend towards greater inclusivity and equality, reinforcing the concept that democracy is strengthened by the active involvement of all citizens. By lowering the voting age, the 26th Amendment contributed to the reduction of discriminatory practices and set a precedent for future efforts to expand democratic participation.

However, the impact of the 26th Amendment has been mixed. While it enfranchised millions of young voters, their turnout rates have historically been lower than those of older age groups. This discrepancy raises concerns about the amendment’s effectiveness in realizing its full potential. Various factors contribute to this low turnout, including political disillusionment, lack of awareness about the voting process, and obstacles like stringent voter ID laws and complex registration requirements.

Overcoming these challenges necessitates a dedicated effort to educate and engage young voters. Comprehensive civic education programs that emphasize the importance of voting and provide practical information about the electoral process are essential. Additionally, reforms aimed at making voting more accessible, such as same-day registration and expanded early voting, can help increase youth turnout. Encouragingly, recent elections have seen a resurgence in youth participation, driven by social media campaigns and grassroots organizing.

A crucial aspect of the 26th Amendment’s impact is its influence on policy-making. The inclusion of younger voters has compelled politicians to address issues particularly relevant to this demographic. For instance, policies related to higher education funding, student loan debt, climate change, and digital privacy have gained prominence in political discussions. This shift ensures that the concerns of young people are reflected in legislative agendas, leading to more comprehensive and representative governance.

Furthermore, the 26th Amendment has had a lasting effect on societal perceptions of young people. By acknowledging their right to vote, it affirmed their status as full citizens with a stake in the country’s future. This recognition has fostered a greater sense of responsibility and civic duty among young people, encouraging them to contribute to their communities in various ways beyond voting. From volunteering and community organizing to running for public office, young Americans have increasingly embraced their role as active participants in the democratic process.

In conclusion, the 26th Amendment has had a profound and enduring impact on American democracy. By lowering the voting age to 18, it expanded the electorate, invigorated political engagement, and reinforced the principles of equality and inclusivity. While challenges remain in ensuring high turnout among young voters, the amendment has undeniably reshaped the political landscape, bringing new issues to the forefront and fostering a more participatory democratic culture. As the United States continues to evolve, the legacy of the 26th Amendment stands as a testament to the power of inclusive voting rights and the importance of empowering all citizens to shape their nation’s future.

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On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

By henry david thoreau, 1849, original title: resistance to civil government.

I heartily accept the motto,—“That government is best which governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—“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. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.

This American government,—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves; and, if ever they should use it in earnest as a real one against each other, it will surely split. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow; yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient, by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, aye, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniment, though it may be

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,     As his corpse to the ramparts we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot     O’er the grave where our hero we buried.”

The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus , &c. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw, or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men , serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be “clay,” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,” but leave that office to his dust at least:

“I am too high-born to be propertied, To be a secondary at control, Or useful serving-man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.”

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of ’75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them: all machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact, that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the “Duty of Submission to Civil Government,” resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say, “that so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconveniency, it is the will of God that the established government be obeyed, and no longer.”—“This principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.” Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.

In their practice, nations agree with Paley; but does anyone think that Massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present crisis?

“A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut, To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.”

Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may . I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless. We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many. It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man; but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to, shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reasons to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought. Oh for a man who is a man , and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in the country? Hardly one. Does not America offer any inducement for men to settle here? The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow,—one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance; whose first and chief concern, on coming into the world, is to see that the alms-houses are in good repair; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to collect a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be; who, in short, ventures to live only by the aid of the Mutual Insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently.

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico,—see if I would go;” and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the State were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. After the first blush of sin, comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, un moral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves,—the union between themselves and the State,—and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do not they stand in same relation to the State, that the State does to the Union? And have not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting the Union, which have prevented them from resisting the State?

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again. Action from principle,—the perception and the performance of right,—changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divided states and churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual , separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offence never contemplated by government; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate penalty? If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who placed him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth,—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. 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.

As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not every thing to do, but something; and because he cannot do every thing , it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. It is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and, if they should not hear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the State has provided no way: its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconcilliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. So is all change for the better, like birth and death which convulse the body.

I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year, no more, in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly, Recognize me; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then. My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with,—for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel,—and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action? I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name,—if ten honest men only,—aye, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves , were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done for ever. But we love better to talk about it: that we say is our mission. Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man. If my esteemed neighbor, the State’s ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question of human rights in the Council Chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts, that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister,—though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with her,—the Legislature would not wholly waive the subject of the following winter.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her but against her,—the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do any thing, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.

I have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender, rather than the seizure of his goods,—though both will serve the same purpose,—because they who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property. To such the State renders comparatively small service, and a slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if they are obliged to earn it by special labor with their hands. If there were one who lived wholly without the use of money, the State itself would hesitate to demand it of him. But the rich man—not to make any invidious comparison—is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the “means” are increased. The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. Christ answered the Herodians according to their condition. “Show me the tribute-money,” said he;—and one took a penny out of his pocket;—if you use money which has the image of Cæsar on it, and which he has made current and valuable, that is, if you are men of the State , and gladly enjoy the advantages of Cæsar’s government, then pay him back some of his own when he demands it; “Render therefore to Cæsar that which is Cæsar’s and to God those things which are God’s,”—leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which; for they did not wish to know.

When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the question, and their regard for the public tranquillity, the long and the short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the consequences of disobedience to it to their property and families. For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly and at the same time comfortably in outward respects. It will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself, always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs. A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish government. Confucius said,—“If a State is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a State is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame.” No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State, than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.

Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never I myself. “Pay it,” it said, “or be locked up in the jail.” I declined to pay. But, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster; for I was not the State’s schoolmaster, but I supported myself by voluntary subscription. I did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the State to back its demand, as well as the church. However, at the request of the selectmen, I condescended to make some such statement as this in writing:—“Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.” This I gave to the town-clerk; and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find such a complete list.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did nor for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.

Thus the state never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. The prisoners in their shirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the door-way, when I entered. But the jailer said, “Come, boys, it is time to lock up;” and so they dispersed, and I heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow apartments. My room-mate was introduced to me by the jailer as “a first-rate fellow and a clever man.” When the door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat, and how he managed matters there. The rooms were whitewashed once a month; and this one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment in town. He naturally wanted to know where I came from, and what brought me there; and, when I had told him, I asked him in my turn how he came there, presuming him to be an honest man, of course; and, as the world goes, I believe he was. “Why,” said he, “they accuse me of burning a barn; but I never did it.” As near as I could discover, he had probably gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there; and so a barn was burnt. He had the reputation of being a clever man, had been there some three months waiting for his trial to come on, and would have to wait as much longer; but he was quite domesticated and contented, since he got his board for nothing, and thought that he was well treated.

He occupied one window, and I the other; and I saw, that, if one stayed there long, his principal business would be to look out the window. I had soon read all the tracts that were left there, and examined where former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate had been sawed off, and heard the history of the various occupants of that room; for I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.

I pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear I should never see him again; but at length he showed me which was my bed, and left me to blow out the lamp.

It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed to me that I never had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. It was to see my native village in the light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn—a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.

In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and holding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron spoon. When they called for the vessels again, I was green enough to return what bread I had left; but my comrade seized it, and said that I should lay that up for lunch or dinner. Soon after, he was let out to work at haying in a neighboring field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon; so he bade me good-day, saying that he doubted if he should see me again.

When I came out of prison,—for some one interfered, and paid the tax,—I did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a youth, and emerged a gray-headed man; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene,—the town, and State, and country,—greater than any that mere time could effect. I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly purpose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions, as the Chinamen and Malays are; that, in their sacrifices to humanity they ran no risks, not even to their property; that, after all, they were not so noble but they treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by a certain outward observance and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls. This may be to judge my neighbors harshly; for I believe that most of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in their village.

It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating of a jail window, “How do ye do?” My neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour,—for the horse was soon tackled,—was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off; and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

This is the whole history of “My Prisons.”

I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject; and, as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. It is for no particular item in the tax-bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man, or a musket to shoot one with,—the dollar is innocent,—but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. In fact, I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make use and get what advantages of her I can, as is usual in such cases.

If others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sympathy with the State, they do but what they have already done in their own case, or rather they abet injustice to a greater extent than the State requires. If they pay the tax from a mistaken interest in the individual taxed, to save his property or prevent his going to jail, it is because they have not considered wisely how far they let their private feelings interfere with the public good.

This, then, is my position at present. But one cannot be too much on his guard in such a case, lest his actions be biassed by obstinacy, or an undue regard for the opinions of men. Let him see that he does only what belongs to himself and to the hour.

I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well; they are only ignorant; they would do better if they knew how: why give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to? But I think, again, this is no reason why I should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind. Again, I sometimes say to myself, When many millions of men, without heat, without ill-will, without personal feeling of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their constitution, of retracting or altering their present demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other millions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force? You do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. You do not put your head into the fire. But just in proportion as I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that I have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. But, if I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the Maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame. If I could convince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what they and I ought to be, then, like a good Mussulman and fatalist, I should endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the will of God. And, above all, there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that I can resist this with some effect; but I cannot expect, like Orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts.

I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wish to split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbors. I seek rather, I may say, even an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land. I am but too ready to conform to them. Indeed I have reason to suspect myself on this head; and each year, as the tax-gatherer comes round, I find myself disposed to review the acts and position of the general and state governments, and the spirit of the people to discover a pretext for conformity.

“We must affect our country as our parents, And if at any time we alienate Out love of industry from doing it honor, We must respect effects and teach the soul Matter of conscience and religion, And not desire of rule or benefit.”

I believe that the State will soon be able to take all my work of this sort out of my hands, and then I shall be no better patriot than my fellow-countrymen. Seen from a lower point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very respectable; even this State and this American government are, in many respects, very admirable, and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?

However, the government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world. If a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.

I know that most men think differently from myself; but those whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of these or kindred subjects content me as little as any. Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it. They may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency. Webster never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority about it. His words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no essential reform in the existing government; but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all time, he never once glances at the subject. I know of those whose serene and wise speculations on this theme would soon reveal the limits of his mind’s range and hospitality. Yet, compared with the cheap professions of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the only sensible and valuable words, and we thank Heaven for him. Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical. Still his quality is not wisdom, but prudence. The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. He well deserves to be called, as he has been called, the Defender of the Constitution. There are really no blows to be given by him but defensive ones. He is not a leader, but a follower. His leaders are the men of ’87. “I have never made an effort,” he says, “and never propose to make an effort; I have never countenanced an effort, and never mean to countenance an effort, to disturb the arrangement as originally made, by which the various States came into the Union.” Still thinking of the sanction which the Constitution gives to slavery, he says, “Because it was part of the original compact,—let it stand.” Notwithstanding his special acuteness and ability, he is unable to take a fact out of its merely political relations, and behold it as it lies absolutely to be disposed of by the intellect,—what, for instance, it behoves a man to do here in America today with regard to slavery, but ventures, or is driven, to make some such desperate answer as the following, while professing to speak absolutely, and as a private man,—from which what new and singular code of social duties might be inferred?—“The manner,” says he, “in which the governments of those States where slavery exists are to regulate it, is for their own consideration, under the responsibility to their constituents, to the general laws of propriety, humanity, and justice, and to God. Associations formed elsewhere, springing from a feeling of humanity, or any other cause, have nothing whatever to do with it. They have never received any encouragement from me and they never will.” [These extracts have been inserted since the Lecture was read —HDT]

They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humanity; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head.

No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius or talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufactures and agriculture. If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations. For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation.

The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to,—for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well,—is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

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AES Statement on Campus Protests and Civil Disobedience

As a department that traces its origins to campus protests, the Department of American Ethnic Studies stands firmly and unequivocally in support of students’ rights to protest. We affirm their right to engage in civil disobedience and vigorously express their views without fear of violence or reprisal. We call on the University and all of its members and representatives to uphold these values and to guard and support our students and engage with them in good faith as they call attention to injustices and call into question the University’s involvement and implication in them.  We assert our solidarity with students, faculty, staff, and community members around the country and around the world who have been unjustly and often violently targeted for protesting the war in Gaza.

The student and community protests, sit-ins, and occupations that ultimately gave rise to our Department and to the interdisciplinary academic fields of ethnic studies were highly controversial in their time, condemned in ways that echo the current moral panic over campus protests. Yet the tangible results produced by those earlier protests are now embraced and celebrated by the University and local and state government, and former student organizers have gone on to become respected community leaders, proudly claimed and honored as UW alumni.

We call on our University to support and honor the passionate ethical commitment of our student organizers now, when it is most needed, rather than waiting twenty or forty or fifty years to do so.

We further insist on our students’ unquestionable right to safety from violence, threats of violence, harassment, and retaliation. Even as student protesters have taken on significant personal risk, protests nationwide have been overwhelmingly peaceful, and the greatest threat to campus safety has come from the use of police. We look with horror at assaults on student protesters, student journalists, and faculty who attempted to de-escalate and defend their students. This violence is a concerted effort to suppress public protest, delegitimize independent journalism, and undermine the role of students and faculty in shaping university decisions. We acknowledge that this violence is connected to the incalculably greater violence that has fallen on schools, scholars, teachers, journalists, and students in Gaza.

With deep concern for student protesters at UW and across the world, we call on our University and community to keep our campus safe from violence, and commit not to use police force to quell student protest.

Anjélica Hernández-Cordero

Lauro Flores

Lorna Hamill

La TaSha Levy

Linh Thủy Nguyễn

Carolyn Pinedo-Turnovsky

Sonnet Retman

Oliver Rollins

Vince Schleitwiler

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What would Lisa Simpson do? NYU student protesters asked to ponder ethical issues

N EW YORK (AP) — Would Lisa Simpson set up a tent at New York University to protest the war in Gaza? How would Principal Skinner respond if she did?

Hard to say, but some NYU students facing discipline for their actions during this spring's pro-Palestinian protests have been assigned a 49-page workbook that includes a “Simpsons”-based module on ethical decision-making. Some have been asked to write an apologetic “reflection paper” and submit it “in 12-point Times New Roman or similar font.”

Like colleges across the U.S., NYU was the scene of protests over Israel's response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack during the last weeks of the spring semester.

More than 100 NYU students were arrested when police cleared an encampment at the university's Manhattan campus on April 22, and about a dozen more were arrested at a smaller encampment on May 3.

NYU's school year has ended, but the university is requiring some student protesters to go through a disciplinary process that includes answering questions like “What are your values? Did the decision you made align with your personal values?” in a double-spaced reflection paper.

Others must complete a 49-page “Ethos Integrity Series” that asks students to rank their values from 1 to 42 and complete assignments like “write about how your values affect your daily life and the decisions you make.”

One section is based on an episode of “The Simpsons” in which Lisa uncharacteristically cheats on a test and is wracked by guilt. Principal Skinner, meanwhile, wants to keep the cheating under wraps so the school can get a grant. Questions in the ethics workbook include “What, if anything, could Lisa have done or thought about to make better decisions?” and “What are the potential and actual consequences of Principal Skinner’s decisions?”

An NYU group called Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine criticized the assignments in a news release.

Sara Pursley, an associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, noted that students completing the reflection paper are told they must not try to justify their actions or “challenge a conduct regulation.”

“Since they can’t write anything justifying their action, students seem to be banned from writing about personal values that might be relevant here, such as a belief in freedom of expression, the responsibility to oppose genocide, or the duty of nonviolent civil disobedience under certain circumstances," Pursley said. "This seems rather ironic in an essay on integrity.”

NYU spokesperson John Beckman said the disciplinary process is meant to be educational.

“The point of these essays is to reflect upon how a student’s way of expressing their values might be having an impact on other members of the NYU community,” Beckman said. “We think that’s a worthwhile goal.”

He added, “Which is not to say that the specific assignments couldn’t be improved."

Faculty members and staff from NYU's Office of Student Conduct will meet in the fall, Beckman said, to consider “what might be done to improve the quality of the prompts for the reflection papers as well as the other educational assignments."