On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Thoreau wrote his famous essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, as a protest
against an unjust but popular war and the immoral but popular institution of
slave-owning. He did more than write-he declined to pay his taxes, and was
hauled off to gaol in consequence. Who can say how much this refusal of his
hastened the end of the war and of slavery ? At the present day, intellectual
detachment from the State, and individual defiance of its behests when these
are opposed to conscience, are more difficult, and apparently more futile, than
in Thoreau's time. The unit seems of less im­portance in the mass. It is all
the more impera­tive, therefore, that the facts that the mass is composed of
units and the conscience of the mass is the aggregate conscience of the units,
and that the individual is still the sole responsible guardian of his own
conscience and the co-guardian of the public conscience, should be fully
recognized.

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail.[5] He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.