Summary Of Resistance To Civil Government By Henry Thoreau.
Born David Henry Thoreau, Thoreau chose to legally change his name at the age of twenty, to make it the name that would later become the highly recognized and respected name of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau chose a different path for his life than many other individuals during his time, he rejected the normal ideas of a democratic government and based his life on the ideas of transcendentalism.
Henry David Thoreau may be generally considered as the most distinguished American proponent of civil disobedience. His 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience”, now known as “Resistance to Civil Government” is partly a response to the author’s arrest for failure to pay his poll tax in 1846. Thoreau had stopped paying his tax in 1842 to protest against slavery, but his protest was ignored for.
Civil Government and Higher Law. In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau's basic premise is that a higher law than civil law demands the obedience of the individual.Human law and government are subordinate. In cases where the two are at odds with one another, the individual must follow his conscience and, if necessary, disregard human law.
Section II: Resistance to Civil Government. Summary. In the American tradition, men have a recognized and cherished right of revolution. Still, Thoreau has a dismissive attitude toward some of the grievances that have sparked revolts in the past, such as the 1775 protest against tax on foreign goods.
Thoreau’s idea of civil disobedience to a government that is not of the people has been successful for several generations after Thoreau’s death. He impacted the lives of such great men as Ghandi and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. King used Thoreau’s method and turned a nation around and forced it to recognize the civil rights of all people by Resistance to Civil Government.
Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.
Essay on Civil Disobedience 1 ESSAY ON CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was a citizen of Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived during the middle of the 19th century. He was a good friend of various literary figures of the day, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most eminent of American authors and a popular orator. The incident from which the.