Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

The one that is intended in this case is 'relating to citizens and their interrelations with one another or with the state', and so civil disobedience means 'disobedience to the state'. On Civil Disobedience is another common title. For instance, the 1960 New American Library Signet Classics edition of Walden included a version with this title. Today, the essay also appears under the title On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, perhaps to contrast it with William Paley's Of the Duty of Civil Obedience to which Thoreau was in part responding. In 1866, four years after Thoreau's death, the essay was reprinted in a collection of Thoreau's work ( A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers) under the title Civil Disobedience. Resistance also served as part of Thoreau's metaphor comparing the government to a machine: when the machine was producing injustice, it was the duty of conscientious citizens to be 'a counter friction' (i.e., a resistance) 'to stop the machine'. Nonetheless, Thoreau was initially inspired by the Christian anarchist ideals espoused by Ballou and Garrison. The latter title distinguished Thoreau's program from that of ' non-resistants' or Christian anarchists like Adin Ballou and William Lloyd Garrison, as Thoreau argued that their insistence on nonresistance as praxis against the state was grossly ineffectual.

This formed the basis for his essay, which was first published under the title Resistance to Civil Government in an 1849 anthology by Elizabeth Peabody called Æsthetic Papers.

In 1848, Thoreau gave lectures at the Concord Lyceum entitled 'The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government'.

Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau