David Thoreau and the Doctrine of Disobedience Essay

David Thoreau and the Doctrine of Disobedience - Essay ExampleThe paper tells that the questions that emerged from Thoreaus famous night in jail resulted in an essay originally entitled Resistance to complaisant Government, which probably to a greater extent accurately describes his position and the course of action he adopted in reaction to what he considered the depredations of the U.S. government. Thoreau expressly refused to pay taxes to the state of Massachusetts as a form of resistance to the national governments tacit support of slavery and its expansionist war against Mexico. However, it is generally forgotten that Thoreau specifically consented to the powerful of Massachusetts to assess and collect taxes, provided that those monies were to be used for just and moral ends. In his obligate Thoreau A polite Disobedient?, W.A. Herr contends that the term civil disobedience has been used to describe a tolerant range of socio-political activities, ranging from revolutions to hunger strikes, an expansive perspective on what was for Thoreau a simple matter of refusing to comply with wicked government policies. As the concept exists today, civil disobedience evokes images of widespread, organized initiatives aimed at forcing profound political change. Herr notes that thither is no available evidence that Thoreau ever actually used the term civil disobedience, at least not in his writings. In his famous essay, Thoreau ponders a matter of individual scruples he is not a call to arms, nor is it a manifesto, as some have claimed. ... Published in 1849, Civil Disobedience is Thoreaus reaction to an America that he believed had failed to live up to the constitutional promise of equation and justice. The burden of labor in the South was shouldered by enslaved human beings in the North, wealthy industrialists and pulverization owners held exploited workers in a state of thralldom that approximated slavery. America was brutally enforcing the doctrine of manifes t chance in the West while using its military power to wrest vast territories from Mexico. Thoreau wrote that this ran counter to the unfeigned business of government, which is to uphold civil rights, to protect the populace and provide opportunities for people to live the good life. Citizens of conscience should counter the policies of governments, which do more harm than good. His key point is that the individual is every bit as justified to act as a government, that the only true obligation of the citizen is to follow the dictates of his conscience. Thoreau could not stock warrant obeying a government that supported the institution of slavery. As such, the government could have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The evolution of government to a more enlightened version, such as democracy, is profoundly a matter of preserving individual rights, he argues. As such, the citizen is compelled to exert ones rights by refusing to support the betrayal of the natural contract between the individual and government. ofttimes of what one reads in Civil Disobedience sounds quite familiar, particularly to a native American.