what is civil disobedience
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Resistance to Civil Government, called Civil Disobedience for short, is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican–American War (1846–1848).
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In 1848, Thoreau gave lectures at the Concord Lyceum entitled "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government".[1] 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.[2] The latter title distinguished Thoreau's program from that of the "non-resistants" (anarcho-pacifists) who were expressing similar views. 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".[3]
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. 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. For instance, the 1960 New American Library Signet Classics edition of Walden included a version with this title. On Civil Disobedience is another common title.
The word civil has several definitions. 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". Sometimes people assume that civil in this case means "observing accepted social forms; polite" which would make civil disobedience something like polite, orderly disobedience. Although this is an acceptable dictionary definition of the word civil, it is not what is intended here. This misinterpretation is one reason the essay is sometimes considered to be an argument for pacifism or for exclusively nonviolent resistance. For instance, Mahatma Gandhi used this interpretation to suggest an equivalence between Thoreau's civil disobedience and his own satyagraha.
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Within this broad conceptualization, civil disobedience can emanate from different motivations and assume a number of forms. Civil disobedience can be active or passive, direct or indirect. An individual can either actively commit a prohibited act or passively refuse to conform to a prescribed action. For example, an anti-war protester may destroy his draft card or, alternatively, he may refuse to register for the draft. Both actions qualify as civil disobedience because the protester intentionally violates the law as an expression of his opposition to the war, knowing the legal consequences of his actions. Thoreau himself engaged in a form of passive civil disobedience when he chose to register his opposition to the institution of slavery by refusing to pay the Massachusetts state poll tax.
Civil disobedients often break laws that are unrelated to the law or policy they are protesting. For example, peace activists who disrupt operations at defense laboratories are not protesting laws against trespassing, but are using civil disobedience to dramatize their opposition to nuclear weapons. Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas objected to the indirect use of civil disobedience on the grounds that it would give licence to people to break any law they wished in the service of a goal that they perceived to be more noble. But few scholars have subscribed to this restriction because, on many issues, there is no feasible direct method to engage in civil disobedience. There may, for example, be no direct method by which activists can use civil disobedience to protest the government's foreign policy or its failure to pass laws addressing issues of inequality and poverty.
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