Resistance to Civil Government: Thoreau Essay - 1096 Words.
Henry David Thoreau was also well known for his essay, Civil Disobedience, where he calls for individual resistance to a government when the individual is in moral opposition to said governments.
In 1849, Henry David Thoreau established the idea of “civil disobedience. ” In his paper “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau encourages the reader to recognize when the government is doing something unjust and wrongful to the people. He then declares that the people should non-violently protest these actions of the government by not following the laws that intrude on the people’s freedom.
First published in 1849, Resistance to Civil Government or Civil Disobedience argues the right of conscience for individuals facing corrupt governments. Originally given as lectures on the Lyceum.
In Thoreau’s view, the ethical responsibility of a government to a minority population is to protect them. The government administration should be effective and valuable. It had to respond to the necessities of the majority population. Henry David Thoreau wrote the essay “Resistance to Civil Government (Civil Disobedience) in 1849. The.
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After spending a night in jail, for failing to pay his taxes, Thoreau wrote his famous essay “Resistance to Civil Government” which he later named “Civil Disobedience,” coining the term that is used today. In his essay Thoreau argued that not all laws are just, but as human beings it is more important to obey natural law over civil law. Natural law is a set of laws that are not written.
Henry David Thoreau’s purpose in writing “resistance to civil government” was to explain the need to prioritize one's conscience over the dictates of laws. In his essay, Thoreau explains that governments are typically more harmful than helpful and therefore cannot be justified. According to him, this defect could not be fixed with democracy because being a majority does not imply having.