Essay: Civil Disobedience

Context and Thesis
Thoreau’s essay advances the claim that the moral authority of conscience outranks the legal authority of the state. He opens by endorsing the maxim that the best government governs least, pushing further to imagine a people prepared to do without a coercive state altogether. The immediate provocations are slavery and the Mexican-American War, which he regards as injustices perpetrated in his name through taxation and passive consent. Government, as he describes it, is an expedient that frequently obstructs the very purposes it is meant to serve, and it lacks legitimacy when it compels individuals to abet wrongs.

Conscience over Law
The central distinction is between respecting the right and respecting the law. Law derives its validity from justice, not the other way around; when the two conflict, a person is bound to follow conscience. Thoreau argues that most people serve the state mechanically, without reflection, becoming instruments of injustice. Moral agency requires refusing to be made an agent of harm, even if such refusal clashes with statutes or public opinion.

Majority Rule, Voting, and Citizenship
Thoreau challenges majority rule as a test of right, calling it a method of settling questions of expedience rather than principle. Voting, in his view, is a weak expression of preference that leaves truth to chance; justice should be enacted, not merely wished for at the ballot box. A just citizen does not wait for the slow conversion of the many but lives by principle now. The responsibility of the individual precedes and limits the authority of assemblies, courts, and executives.

Resistance, Taxes, and the State’s Machinery
Because the state works through the everyday compliance of citizens, its injustices can be halted by withholding cooperation. Thoreau offers the figure of the machine whose injustice must be answered with “counter-friction,” meaning active noncooperation rather than mere protest. His own refusal to pay the poll tax exemplifies this stance: he will not finance slavery and war. He criticizes those who condemn wrong yet continue to fund it, arguing that wealth, commerce, and even churches often align with the status quo, cloaking complicity in respectability.

Jail, Freedom, and Perspective
Thoreau’s night in jail becomes a test case for the limits of state power. Confinement touches the body, he notes, but not the mind or conscience; the state is clumsy when it tries to command inward allegiance. From the cell he perceives town life differently, as if viewing customs and institutions from the outside and seeing their triviality and inertia. The experience clarifies that the penalty for doing right may be discomfort or disgrace, but the penalty for doing wrong is the loss of one’s integrity.

Toward a Just Government
Thoreau does not reject government in every form; he calls for a better one, fit for free and moral beings. Such a polity would respect the individual as the source of authority, protect the minority by grounding law in justice, and refrain from coercing citizens into wrongdoing. Progress begins not with grand revolutions but with persons who stand aside from evil, narrowing the gap between what is right and what is practiced. When enough individuals withdraw their support for injustice, institutions must either reform or wither, and government can finally serve rather than subdue the human conscience.