On Civil Disobedience

"Two seminal, opposing essays by Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt on civil disobedience are brought together for the first time in a standalone paperback volume. More than ever, Americans are hungry for understanding of the duties of citizens and the proper limits of civil resistance to government. Introduction by political theorist and Arendtian scholar Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities"--

HENRY DAVID THOREAU was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. He graduated from Harvard in 1837, the same year he began his lifelong Journal. While living at Walden Pond, Thoreau worked on the two books published during his lifetime: Walden (1854) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Several of his other works, including The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and Excursions, were published posthumously. Thoreau died in Concord, at the age of forty-four, in 1862.

HANNAH ARENDT (1906-1975) was one of the foremost political philosophers of the twentieth century, the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution, and the posthumously published The Life of the Mind. Her commentaries on modern American and European politics and on the history of political thought were collected in Essays in Understanding, Thinking Without a Banister, and Responsibility and Judgment.

ROGER BERKOWITZ is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics.