Entry 7

“Civil Disobedience” – Rage against the Machine

Civil Disobedience is an excerpt of a long essay written by one of the best known American transcendentalist – Henry David Thoreau.  

As a transcendentalist and as Emerson, Thoreau was also a naturalist. It is in “Walden”, one of his best known essays, where he expresses his opinion about living a simple life in contact with Nature and where we can become acquainted with his experience.

       I shall focus on his other well-known essay and a highly influential one - “Civil Disobedience”. Here he focuses more on the government while still immerged in his belief in the individual and urges people to react towards an unjust government by means of civil disobedience, not violence. Although Emerson expressed himself against the government, Thoreau was a bit more direct in the way he criticised it. Basically, we can say that while Emerson’s “Self Reliance” encourages people to think and act independently, Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” puts Emerson’s theory into practice.

      Thoreau’s motto is “That government is best which governs least”. This does not mean he defends anarchy as a solution. He believes that people need a government but one that respects the individual and one that does not interfere so much in one’s life. Thoreau promotes the refusal to obey laws that are against our principles as Emerson also believed that “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Thoreau also believed that voting was useless.

     Being more eccentric and strong willed than his mentor, Thoreau took a step further and decided to live the transcendentalist experience and put into practice civil disobedience - he lived in a hut in Walden Pot because he wanted to “live deliberately” and did not pay taxes during a year, which eventually led him to spend one night in prison.

     He encouraged people to act rather than just talk. Talking would not solve anything, neither would obeying the laws nor voting. He believed that for true change to happen, we should not participate in the machine of government, because “If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” As Mahatma Gandhi said, “To believe in something and not to live it, is dishonest.”