Thoreau – Civil Disobedience

1. Thoreau – Civil Disobedience • 1846 – Henry David Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax – he was arrested and jailed • to his disdain, his relatives paid his tax for him to release him from jail • Thoreau denies the right of any government to automatic and unthinking obedience. Obedience should be earned and it should be withheld from an unjust government.

2. Thoreau – Civil Disobedience • Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

3. Thoreau – Civil Disobedience • Two times when open rebellion is justified: • when the injustice is no longer occasional but a major characteristic • when the machine (government) demands that people cooperate with injustice. • Thoreau declared that, “If the government requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.”

4. Suffrage • 72 year movement for women’s right to vote • Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party • letter-writing, protests, marches, days of silence, hunger strikes, civil disobedience

5. Gandhi • Early work was based off of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience • led movement for Independence of India • took Thoreau’s concept of disregarding unjust laws one step further – to disobeying nonviolently

6. Gandhi – nonviolence • nonviolence is the refusal to respond with violence, regardless of how violently you are treated. • Satyagraha – “struggle for truth” or “truth force” • Gandhi wanted to challenge in-equal social structures without setting off a spiral of violence

7. Later social movements • U.S. Civil Rights Movement • Solidarity • Anti-apartheid movement • Truth and Reconciliation Commission • Post-Soviet independence movements