Civil Disobedience

An essay first given as a lecture in Concord in 1848 and published in 1849 as 'Resistance to Civil Government'; the title 'Civil Disobedience' was used in a collection that appeared after Thoreau's death. It grew out of a night he spent in jail in July 1846 for refusing to pay his poll tax, in protest against slavery and the Mexican–American War. Thoreau begins by accepting the motto that the best government governs least, and pushes it further. He argues that a person's conscience, not the majority, should decide what is right, and that law alone never made anyone just. Petitions and voting are not enough when a government supports injustice; one should withdraw support and, if necessary, break the law and accept the penalty. Under a government that imprisons any unjustly, he writes, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The essay ends by imagining a state that treats the individual as a higher and independent power.

It is the classic case for principled law-breaking, read by Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and it asks what a citizen owes a government that does wrong.