Civil Disobedience Rhetorical Analysis

Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau was little known outside his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, where he was much admired for his passionate stance on social issues, his deep knowledge of natural history, and the originality of his lectures, essays, and books. He was also maligned as a crank and malingerer who never held a steady job and whose philosophy was but a pale imitation of Ralph Waldo Emerson 's. Thoreau was a man of ideas who struggled all his life to create a path that would refuse compromise. “All his activities--teaching, pencil-making, surveying, and, above all, writing--were grounded in his faith in a higher moral law that could be discovered and practiced through the unremitting discipline
His art, as it matured, became a way both to keep his own perceptions alert to all the potential of the present and to incite his readers to discover their own mode of attentiveness to life beyond the "mud and slush of opinion." “In the century after his death, the admiration of his few followers snowballed, and he is now recognized as one of the greatest writers in the United States” (Walls 1). After presentation at the Concord Lyceum on January 26, 1848, Thoreau's essay "Resistance to Civil Government" was published the following spring in Aesthetic Papers, edited by Elizabeth Peabody. “The title "Civil Disobedience" was first attached to a reprint of essay after Thoreau's death, and although it is the more widely known title, it does not reflect the author's intention” (crf-usa.org). That Thoreau's text is an explicit refutation of William Paley's essay on "The Duty of Submission to Civil Government" is emphasized not only by the original title but by the author's citation of Paley in
The Bible, of course, is an inspiration for this New England heir of the puritans. There is also a suggestion that Thoreau developed the idea of a higher law with superior claims on conscience from his reading of Sophocles' play Antigone, in which the heroine resists the law of the land and obeys the command of the gods to bury her traitorous brother in opposition to the authority of the state (Jaskoski 1). Thoreau also quotes Confucius in his essay and, like fellow transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, was influenced by the spirituality of Eastern thought. A series of important writers and activists have been influenced by "Resistance to Civil Government," applying its principles to similar situations. Notable among these are Gandhi, who first read the essay while a young man in South Africa and who published an analysis of it early in his career, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who drew on both Thoreau and Gandhi in developing principles of nonviolent resistance to unjust laws. In the century that has passed since the publication of "Civil Disobedience," conditions of life have vastly changed. Especially has government been transformed, or rather the relation of government to its citizens. “Democracy at the start meant deliverance from the undue intrusion of society upon the individual” (Cain 11). This was freedom! Thoreau dramatized