1058 Thoreau, Henry David
stake, fear change and may actually benefit from the
status quo. In such a situation, Thoreau concludes
that a citizen’s first moral duty is to “wash his hands”
of government so as “not to give it practically his
support.”
As an ethical protest against legalized injustice,
Thoreau had annually refused to pay his state poll
tax, and he had been jailed overnight in 1846. His
experience in jail, narrated as a memorable climax to
the essay, reinforced his conviction that, in relations
with the state, every citizen is “a higher and inde-
pendent power”: Majority rule should never govern
individual conscience.
To Thoreau, ethical action must be grounded in
independent thinking. A persistent image of him
grows out of this essay and his account in Walden
(1854) of life in the woods—that of a principled
loner resisting conformity and seeking the simple,
authentic life. This myth of the alienated outsider
gained momentum in the late 1960s when a U.S.
postage stamp honoring Thoreau depicted him as
a scruffy, melancholy hippy. Certainly one aspect
of Thoreau’s worldview was that of the alienated
outsider and malcontent. In “Resistance to Civil
Government,” he says, first, that no government at
all would be best; ideally, everybody could just be
independent and free. He understands, however,
that government will always exist and will always
be flawed, so a conscientious person must try to
encourage “a better government.” A person’s first
ethical duty is to figure out “what kind of govern-
ment would command his respect,” and doing this
becomes “one step toward obtaining it.”
Though a nonconformist and a loner, Thoreau
partly shared optimistic assumptions with other
Concord transcendentalists: Through self-knowl-
edge, self-trust, and the study of nature, each citizen
has the means for developing a conscience that is
an adequate basis for independent action. A higher
truth than the Bible or the Constitution, Thoreau
says, lies within every human soul.
Roy Neil Graves
IndIvIduaL and SocIety in “Civil
Disobedience”
Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience”
asserts the author’s rather complex views about
how an individual ought to interact with govern-
ment—the social institution that in a democracy
not only manages human affairs and maintains
order but also expresses collective principles that
evolve over time as society changes. The various
forms of the essay title underscore the author’s
views: As a public lecture delivered in 1848 in
Thoreau’s hometown of Concord, Massachusetts,
the piece was titled “The Rights and Duties of
the Individual in Relation to Government.” After
Thoreau’s death, the essay was published in 1866
under the now-familiar title “Civil Disobedience.”
All three headings stress the duty of citizens to find
ways to “resist” or “disobey” what conscience tells
them are unjust laws, expressions of an imperfect
system of government that always needs to be fairer
and more equitable than it is.
The relationship of an individual to soci-
ety that Thoreau advocates is one of radical
but selective nonconformity with a minimum of
social antagonism. Thoreau’s views prioritize the
individual over the group, conscience over law,
nonconformity over convention, and incidental
disruption over civil order. His opening paragraphs
advocate limited governmental intrusion in all
private affairs.
While Thoreau uses logic and social criticism to
make a case for how an individual should interact
with society, much of the essay’s vivid appeal lies in
the aspect of personal narrative and the cantanker-
ous personal paradigm that the author’s own behav-
ior illustrates. The section playfully subtitled “My
Prisons” reveals deep divisions between the author
and the general run of American citizens.
In the 1840s, when the country had yet to resolve
the slavery issue, Thoreau found himself in disagree-
ment with majority attitudes, even in the North. The
country was waging the Mexican War, had treated
native Americans abominably, legally condoned
slavery in the South, and operated under a Consti-
tution that institutionalized race and class separa-
tions. As a form of general protest, Thoreau had
repeatedly refused to pay his state poll tax and been
jailed for one night in 1846. Always unconventional
and solitary, Thoreau found this singular experience
to be like “traveling into a far country.” “Under a
government which imprisons any unjustly,” he says,