On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
Glossary
"
- "That Government Is Best Which Governs Least"
- The essay's opening motto, which Thoreau immediately pushes further — toward "that government is best which governs not at all" — as the logical endpoint of the principle, before turning to the practical question of what a person should do under the government that actually exists rather than the one he'd prefer.
- Related: No-Government Men, A Counter Friction to Stop the Machine
- "The Bible and the Constitution"
- Thoreau's closing image for two sources of authority most people accept unquestioningly, drinking "with reverence and humanity" at what they take to be truth's source — contrasted with those willing to trace the stream of truth further back, past scripture and founding documents, to its actual origin in individual conscience.
- Related: Civil Government by Conscience
- "Wash His Hands of It"
- Thoreau's minimum standard of moral responsibility for injustice one does not actively fight: it is not every person's duty to devote themselves to eradicating every wrong, but it is everyone's duty, at the least, to withdraw personal support and complicity from it — to "wash his hands" of practical participation in the evil, even while otherwise occupied.
- Related: A Majority of One, Civil Government by Conscience
A
- A Counter Friction to Stop the Machine
- Thoreau's image for principled noncooperation: when a law requires you to be "the agent of injustice to another," the answer is to break that law and let your life become friction against the machine of government rather than quietly objecting while continuing to keep the machine running.
- Related: The State as Machine (the Standing Army), Civil Government by Conscience
- A Majority of One
- Thoreau's argument that one person acting rightly outweighs an unjust majority: he urges abolitionists to "withdraw their support... from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them," adding that "any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already."
- Related: Civil Government by Conscience
C
- Civil Government by Conscience
- Thoreau's central claim: a person's first obligation is to conscience, not to law or majority vote. He states it directly: "It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right," arguing that legality and justice are frequently not the same thing.
- Related: A Majority of One, A Counter Friction to Stop the Machine
N
- No-Government Men
- Thoreau's term for outright anarchists, from whom he explicitly distinguishes himself: "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government." His argument is a case for principled individual noncooperation with unjust laws, not for abolishing government as such.
- Related: "That Government Is Best Which Governs Least"
P
- Paley's "Duty of Submission to Civil Government"
- The moral philosopher William Paley, whom Thoreau names as "a common authority with many on moral questions," and whose argument — that civil obligation reduces entirely to expediency, obedience owed only "so long as the interest of the whole society requires it" — Thoreau rejects as failing to reckon with cases where expediency and justice diverge sharply.
- Related: Civil Government by Conscience
- Peaceable Revolution
- Thoreau's definition, offered near the essay's climax: when enough individuals withdraw their allegiance and refuse to pay taxes that would enable the state to commit violence, that mass, nonviolent withdrawal of cooperation is itself "the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible."
- Related: A Counter Friction to Stop the Machine, A Majority of One
S
- Slavery and the Mexican-American War
- The essay's two concrete occasions, both of which Thoreau treats as reasons a conscientious person cannot cooperate with the state even passively: the ongoing extension of slavery, and a war he calls an invasion of a country "not our own" — "ours is the invading army."
- Related: The Poll Tax, The State as Machine (the Standing Army)
T
- The Baltimore Convention
- A political party's presidential nominating convention Thoreau mentions dismissively — "made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession" — as an example of the electoral machinery he considers largely irrelevant to "any independent, intelligent, and respectable man" concerned with actual justice rather than party maneuvering.
- Related: Civil Government by Conscience
- The Night in Jail
- Thoreau's 1846 arrest for refusing to pay the poll tax; he spent one night in the Concord jail before someone (his aunt, by most accounts) paid the tax against his wishes. Thoreau describes the experience with combative, occasionally self-mocking detail — the stone walls, the iron grating, the strange novelty of hearing the town clock from inside.
- Related: The Poll Tax, Civil Government by Conscience
- The Poll Tax
- The Massachusetts tax Thoreau refused to pay for six years in protest of slavery and the Mexican-American War, resulting in his one night in the Concord jail in 1846 — the concrete act of civil disobedience the essay's whole argument builds toward and illustrates.
- Related: The Night in Jail, Slavery and the Mexican-American War
- The State as Machine (the Standing Army)
- Thoreau's recurring image for the state acting through unreflective mass compliance: "The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies," forming a kind of standing army that carries out policy — like the Mexican-American War — without the individual moral judgment Thoreau demands.
- Related: A Counter Friction to Stop the Machine, The Mexican-American War
W
- Webster
- Daniel Webster, cited by Thoreau as an example of a statesman who "never goes behind government" — offering practical wisdom to legislators content with the existing system, but no real authority to "thinkers, and those who legislate for all time" willing to question government's legitimacy at its root.
- Related: Civil Government by Conscience