Civil Disobedience

“Civil Disobedience” is one of the most impactful essays of all time. When it was written, the two great political controversies engulfing the United States were the Mexican-American War (which had ended by the time the lecture was published) and the debate over slavery. Henry David Thoreau opposed both the war (and indeed practically all war, but especially the war with Mexico, which he believed was being fought to expand slavery in the United States) and the institution of slavery, as is made clear in the text. Given this context, Thoreau’s essay is both a practical call to action for his neighbors and a theoretical analysis of morality, justice, and virtue.

On the hand, Thoreau advocates the direct actions of not paying taxes and of not assisting the State’s actions, since the State uses tax dollars to fund injustice. More broadly ,the essay also discusses the role conscience ought to play in determining an individual’s relationship with the State. The essay’s theoretical framework is what has caused it to endure to this day, but it also makes Thoreau’s argument more potent in its time too. By making a universal argument about the virtues of citizenship, Thoreau effectively points out the hypocrisy of being against slavery or war yet supporting the institutions that enforce or create them.

Much of the essay concerns a person’s role in society. Thoreau paradoxically argues that the State and government derive their very essence from the people, but that the people do not actually make up the State. The government the people made has become perverted and is now a machine that administers injustice and punishes those who disavow the machine. The government, then, lords over its citizens, who are manipulated into supporting the system through fear of losing the protections of the State. Citizens have been led to believe they can change laws by voting, but the State has also manipulated elections by allowing political party elites to choose the candidates the majority of the party supports. Thus, change cannot be effected through the electoral process because elections do not reflect the will of the people. Change can only come from direct action. If the people stopped supporting the machine, the system would die and injustice would no longer reign. The reason the system does not collapse is because people show too much obeisance to the law as a concept and are afraid of the consequences of not following it.

Thoreau’s essay builds on centuries of social contract theory. Philosophers including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had articulated variations of the same concept: that humans give up certain freedoms to cooperate with a government for other benefits. Where they have disagreed has usually been over how many or which freedoms are given up and how much power the government has. Thoreau seems to argue that the social contract has been broken by the US government, which has enacted laws that are inherently unjust and that require citizens to harm each other. He calls the Constitution evil because it upholds slavery and allows the government to create war; he adds that even the best legislators are supporting injustice by defending the Constitution. Thus, since the government has broken its contract with citizens, the citizens have a responsibility to reject their contract with the government. A citizen can choose to fight injustice or not, but they have an obligation to renounce the injustices perpetrated by the government. If enough people refuse to pay taxes, for instance, the government will be forced to change its laws and undo the injustice. A new social contract could then be formed, one that is fairer and creates a State that does not inflict harm on other people.

That new social contract could lead to a utopian world, which for Thoreau is a world with practically no government or where a citizen may be allowed to not participate in the government. For Thoreau, being a good citizen and following the law does not trump being a good human being and opposing an unjust law. He believes people have the right to defy those laws and should be able to do so without the government punishing them. The State should allow a person to live free of its clutches if they so choose.

Thoreau’s argument, thus, rests most firmly on a debate between individualism and universalism. The US government’s injustice has left its citizens with three choices: ignore the injustice, try to change it while following it in the meantime, or break it. None of these are fair to an individual, he argues, even though the purpose of government should be to protect individual liberty and freedom. Thoreau advocates for everyone living their truth and doing what their conscience demands of them. This may be impractical for creating a society, but he notes only enough people need to do the right thing to effect change. And besides, as an individualist, he is careful to note that he practices what he preaches and tries his best to live up to his own standards. That is, he encourages everyone to not pursue wealth, and he does not pursue it himself. He encourages passive resistance to injustice, and he follows that too, but he also notes that everyone should be able to live the way they see fit. By extension, he may argue that a person could actively choose to support the government if that person did not have a moral qualm with it. He does not address this, of course, since his point is that the government is corrupt, but logically that would be the case. One wonders, however, if Thoreau would make such a statement to someone who thought that supporting the government was just, in addition to supporting slavery and the war with Mexico. Regardless, he is clear that he is not advocating positions that he himself does not practice, and he is not disingenuous about the consequences of what he preaches. He even faces punishment for his actions, spending one night in jail for not paying taxes.

His night in jail is a transformative one, offering a liminal or transformative space for him to reflect upon society and his role in it. He is interested in how society has shaped the institution of the jail to punish those who have transgressed it. Among other things, he’s amazed that the cells have open windows (beyond the metal grating) that allow him to hear sounds of the town that he would not hear otherwise. He’s similarly impressed that the cells have perfectly sized holes for putting in trays of food. To him this suggests that the machine of government has spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to administer injustice rather than correcting it. As a result, he feels free in jail, for in jail he is on the other side of the State—the side of the transgressor. He is no longer a person who actively has to decide whether to support the State’s injustice but rather is the subject of it.

The experience of being in jail offers something like a moment of anagnorisis, a moment of clarity, as it proves to Thoreau that his convictions are right. Upon leaving jail, he feels more disconnected from the townspeople who do not understand the institution of the jail or their role as cogs in the machine of injustice. Paradoxically, he felt closer to the town than he ever had while he was in jail, but outside the jail, he feels distant. He also feels more spiritually enlightened, having recognized that the State can control a body but not a mind (or at least his body and his mind; as an individualist, he would probably not extrapolate too much on that point and suggest that a slave’s only lost a body, for instance).

Such spirituality resounds throughout “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau mentions the higher powers that determine his beliefs many times, and he makes biblical allusions and often direct quotations. The laws of the State are not one with the higher laws of the cosmos. Thoreau was a Transcendentalist, a member of a philosophical group popular in the United States in the antebellum period. Transcendentalists believed that nature is divine, that humans are innately good, that society has corrupted that inherent goodness, and that a person’s spiritual state transcends the physical world. They valued feeling over experience and felt that humans were capable of creating original insights devoid of the objective realities of the world. Like Thoreau, they felt humans were at their best when they were completely self-reliant.

“Civil Disobedience” is first and foremost a political text, but so many Transcendental themes run through it that it is partially a religious text as well. In the jail, Thoreau seems to have a transcendental awakening and chooses to leave society as a result of the jailing. In real life, Thoreau returned to Walden Pond after his night in jail, and there he wrote his most famous work, “Walden,” about the pleasures of simple living and the spiritual connection to nature. Thus, it seems Thoreau’s displeasure with the government led to a spiritual awakening as well. One message of “Civil Disobedience” then is that the political is always personal and that to be free one most divest themselves of the machinery of government unless the government can eliminate injustice and return to its original, natural form. If nothing else, one’s spiritual needs trump the need to be an obedient citizen.