Civil Disobedience

“Civil Disobedience” discusses the need for each individual to decide their own moral code and live up to it. Throughout the essay Thoreau argues that the best form of government is one that allows the most individualism and requires the least from its citizens. He asserts that an individual has a responsibility to ignore laws that go against the higher laws of their conscience or faith. He writes that his only “obligation” is “to do at any time” that which he thinks is right (5). The alternative is to live as part of the machine of government, furthering injustice by doing not what is right but what the law requires. In doing so, men become “servants” to the State or, worse, “machines” (5). They lose their sense of humanity and their freedom. Indeed, as they become more entwined with society, they lose more of their humanity and moral footing each day. Living in society, thus, is a slow death.

Indeed, Thoreau feels most free when he is inside the jail and totally away from the shackles of society, as in jail he is a person the State has punished for exercising his individualism. There he learns to pity the State, which does not understand that he does not want to be “on the other side of that stone wall” because in jail he can simply exist as an individual (18). He learns to appreciate the other prisoners too, especially his cellmate, who is “contented” because he pays no board yet is still treated fairly well (20). In prison there are also verses that the prisoners write and share only among themselves. These are purely individualistic acts, and they inspire Thoreau, who recognizes as part of his prison experience that the State can only confront one’s body, not “a man’s sense, intellectual or moral” (19). The government will always try to overwhelm a person with force, but Thoreau can assert his humanity by announcing that he was “not born to be forced” and that life is meant to be lived by his own code (19). As he puts it, “if a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man” (19). Loss of one’s beliefs and moral code would lead to death, then, while pursuing life as an individual will always lead to more freedom and a richer inner life.

Thoreau is so focused on individuals that he never actually argues people should live like him or that people must make the world a better place. He argues that it is not “man’s duty” to “devote himself to the eradication” of any societal ill, as that takes too long (10). But he does say everyone must at least free themselves of the clutches of the State by not actively supporting its ability to perpetrate injustices. The purpose of life is merely to live it, Thoreau states, so that’s all he asks of anyone. However, he does say that one who calls himself an abolitionist must withdraw support from the government lest they be hypocrites. Thus, Thoreau’s individualism does not tell anyone how to live if they do not care about injustice, but it does preach of the need for specific actions from those who do. If nothing else, Thoreau thinks all humans have an obligation to at least not make the world worse.

Finally, Thoreau argues that government is only as powerful as those who are governed make it, writing, “It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it” (27). Thus, the individual, the “majority of one,” is practically a government in itself, and the best form of government is the one that values and supports individualism above all else (13).