(DOWNLOAD) "Thoreau's Case for Political Disengagement (Henry David Thoreau) (Critical Essay)" by Modern Age # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Thoreau's Case for Political Disengagement (Henry David Thoreau) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 188 KB
Description
Henry David Thoreau's long essay, first published under the title Resistance to Civil Government, now usually known as Civil Disobedience, is frequently described as one of the founding documents of modern political activism. Thoreau's appeal to the right and obligation of individual conscience to resist political authority certainly influenced many of the nonviolent activists who followed him, including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. But the essay itself was not a call for political or social action. It did not call for creating the governmental means of solving social problems. It was a call for the autonomy of the individual and the disengagement of the individual from civic entanglements. Thoreau's "inactivism," as we might call it, was for him a necessary condition of personal conscience. Civil Disobedience begins by subjecting government to the individual conscience, outside of guidance by any external authority. The famous opening sentence is a general statement of Thoreau's, attitude toward the State: "I heartily accept the motto, 'that government is best which governs least': and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically." The author extends the criticisms of standing armies, which since the time of the Revolution had been seen by many Americans as instruments of tyranny, to government itself. He argues that government is often a means of abusing the people. Nevertheless, while he would like to see government governing less, he does not carry this to the end of abolishing government. Although Thoreau may be a philosophical anarchist, he specifically states that having no government at all will be practicable only when the people are prepared for such a situation, and he implies that they are not prepared in his own day. Nevertheless, he maintains that government is only an instrument through which people act and that it should leave people alone as much as possible.
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