Henry David Thoreau · Philosophy
Thoreau’s argument that a person’s first allegiance is to conscience, not to the law - that when the state commands injustice, the just individual must refuse, even at the cost of prison. Born from his own night in jail for refusing a tax that funded slavery and war.
In July 1846, Thoreau was walking into Concord to pick up a mended shoe when the local constable arrested him for failing to pay his poll tax. Thoreau had not paid it for several years, and his refusal was deliberate: he would not hand money to a government that upheld slavery and was waging what he saw as an aggressive war against Mexico to extend slave territory. He spent one night in jail - released the next morning when someone, to his annoyance, paid the tax for him. The episode was small, almost comic, but from it Thoreau drew a lecture and then an essay, first published in 1849 as ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ and later famous as ‘Civil Disobedience.’ In it he asked the question the arrest had forced on him: when your government commands you to be complicit in injustice, what does conscience require you to do?
Thoreau opens the essay with a motto he heartily endorses and then pushes further than his contemporaries dared. ‘That government is best which governs least’ - and, carried to its logical end, ‘that government is best which governs not at all,’ when men are finally prepared for it. Thoreau was no simple anarchist calling for the immediate abolition of all government; he asked, practically, ‘not at once no government, but at once a better government.’ But his deep suspicion of state power is unmistakable. Government, he thought, is at best an expedient, a tool that people use, and like any tool it is frequently abused - a small group of living men wielding the machinery of the state, often in service of injustice. He wanted citizens to remember that they are the moral authority, and the government merely their instrument, never the other way around.
Thoreau’s method of resistance is deliberately individual and nonviolent, though it is anything but passive. He does not call for revolution or armed revolt; he calls for withdrawal of cooperation. Since an unjust government depends on the compliance of the governed - their taxes, their service, their obedience - the conscientious individual can refuse to supply it. One honest man refusing to pay the tax that funds the injustice, and willing to go to jail for the refusal, becomes a friction in the machine. If enough did so, the machine would grind to a halt; but even one who does so has kept his own hands clean and set an example that others may follow. Thoreau accepts the penalty as part of the act: to disobey openly and take the punishment is what distinguishes principled civil disobedience from mere lawbreaking. The jail cell, he saw, could be a kind of victory - the one place in a slave state where a free man’s honor is intact.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Thoreau argued conscience outranks the law, that ‘that government is best which governs least,’ and that a just person under an unjust government belongs in prison - a case he made after refusing the poll tax over slavery and the Mexican War and spending a night in jail. Explain his argument for putti…
Leads to Mahatma Gandhi.
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