Civil Disobedience Rhetorical Analysis

Thoreau's Civil Disobedience Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience advocates the need to prioritize one's conscience over the dictates of laws. It criticizes American social institutions and policies, most prominently slavery and the Mexican American War. In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau introduces the idea of civil disobedience that was used later by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King. In fact, many consider Thoreau as the greatest exponent of passive resistance of the 19th century. The usual title given this essay is Civil Disobedience but despite Gandhi's attribution of this term to Thoreau, Thoreau himself never uses the term anywhere in any of his works. When given as a lecture at the Concord Lyceum on January 26, 1848, the essay
George Kateb identifies Thoreau as an embodiment of the ideals of modern representative democracy (Kateb,1992 ) but Hannah Arendt dismisses Thoreau's actions as inherently unpolitical, since they are private actions taken merely to free himself from evil. (Arendt, 1969). So who is right? In an attempt to clarify the paradoxes in Civil Disobedience, Lawrence Rosenwald examines the complex relationship between the text and Thoreau's own actions. Rosenwald contends that Civil Disobedience was forged amid the growing pressures of the preceding decade and culminated with Thoreau's first tax refusal and the first publication of his essay under the significant title "Resistance to Civil Government." (Rosenwald, 2000). In A Historical Guide to henry David Thoreau, he further contends that Thoreau's history-making poll tax refusal is based on "a
Civil Disobedience inspired the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War protest and the student unrest of the sixties. Yale University chaplain and anti-war activist William Sloane Coffin Jr. championed during a 1972 debate the question:"Civil Disobedience: Aid or Hindrance to Justice?" Thoreau, Gandhi and King are "heroes to us today because they represent those individual consciences of the world which, as opposed to the mass mind, best represent the universal conscience of mankind" (Carton,