Civil Disobedience (Thoreau)

"On Civil Disobedience against the state " is a 1849 first abgedruckter essay by Henry David Thoreau. The original title was first The Resistance to Civil Government, in the first edition of works was from Civil Disobedience and later On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.

Prehistory

Since 1834 Thoreau lectured at the folk high school of his native town of Concord. The manuscript of this essay he had read on January 26, 1848 there. The lecture was published the following year in the first and only edition of a magazine called "Aesthetic Papers". The specific cause for this text was Thoreau's arrest, which came about because he refused to pay his poll tax payable in four years. He could pay, but refused and was imprisoned. The next day, someone had paid out of the relationship blame the prison guards for him and Thoreau was released.

Content

Written in the time of the American conquest and slave policy calls on Thoreau's essay, the positive law of the state only to bow when it coincides with the personal moral evaluation. He advocated a law of moral conscience against injustice in a democracy with statements like: " But if the law is such that it necessarily makes you from the arm of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Carry your life to a counterweight to stop the machine. Anyway, I have to watch that I do not hergebe me to the wrong which I condemn " ( in: About the duty to disobey the state, 1849). . He also accuses the officials, who surrender to the State faithful, without listening to his own heart.

Another criticism Thoreau is the principle of majority rule in democracies, " [ a] s an unqualified majority may decide unjust rights and a majority vote of no case mean that the best decision was made ." It calls for an individual conscience rights, instead of uncritically follow majority decisions.

This calls for civil disobedience against the state of conscience inspired the ideas for non-violent resistance of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The French Resistance in World War II was inspired by this reading.

Filming

2012 appeared the award-winning Portuguese Western Estrada de Palha (English Festival Title: Hay Road). The written by director Rodrigo Areias script is based on Thoreau's essay.