Political Concepts
Civil Disobedience
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Civil disobedience is the active, public refusal to obey a specific law, demand or command of a government, most often understood to require nonviolence and an open acceptance of the legal penalty that follows. Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay Resistance to Civil Government, later collected as Civil Disobedience after its posthumous 1866 publication, gave the practice its modern name in the United States; Thoreau had refused to pay taxes in protest of slavery and the Mexican American War, arguing that a citizen bears moral responsibility for injustice carried out in his name even when the law compels it. Mahatma Gandhi drew on the same principle across the 1920s in British India, though he later said his own resistance was well advanced before he read Thoreau's essay. Martin Luther King Jr. made the same case a century later, writing that a protester who breaks an unjust law openly and accepts its punishment shows the very highest respect for law itself.
Facts
Origin YearSourced to the subject's own account Founding ContextSourced to the subject's own accountGiven its modern name and philosophical grounding by Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay Resistance to Civil Government, and developed into an organized political method by Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha campaigns in British India across the 1920s and by Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership of the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. 2 Learn More
An Essay Nobody Read Until It Mattered
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Henry David Thoreau delivered the lecture that became Resistance to Civil Government after spending a night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay a poll tax he associated with slavery and the Mexican American War. Published in 1849, the essay made little impression at the time; it did not reach a wide readership until 1866, four years after Thoreau's death, when it was reissued under the title history remembers, Civil Disobedience. Its argument was blunt: a citizen who lets his own conduct be legislated by a majority he believes wrong is not being law-abiding, he is being complicit, and the only honest response to an unjust law is to stop obeying it, openly, and accept whatever the state does in return. Mahatma Gandhi is often credited with drawing the idea of civil disobedience from Thoreau, but Gandhi himself denied it: in a 1935 letter, he wrote that the statement that he had derived his idea of Civil Disobedience from the writings of Thoreau was wrong, and that his resistance campaigns in South Africa were already well advanced before he ever encountered the essay. What Thoreau supplied Gandhi was a name he found useful for explaining an existing struggle to English readers, not the reasoning or the tactic itself.
The Highest Respect for Law
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Civil disobedience carries a paradox at its centre, and Martin Luther King Jr. was the one who said it out loud. A person who breaks a law they consider unjust, does so openly, and then accepts the punishment the law prescribes is not showing contempt for law, King argued; they are showing it the very highest respect, because they are proving by their own willingness to be punished that they are not simply evading a rule that inconveniences them. That distinction, between the outlaw who hides and the resister who stands still and takes the sentence, is what separates civil disobedience from ordinary crime, and it is why the tactic has recurred across movements that otherwise had little in common. Susan B. Anthony used it in the American women's suffrage campaign of the late nineteenth century; Saad Zaghloul led a mass civil disobedience campaign against British rule during Egypt's 1919 revolution. Each case reached for the same wager: that a government forced to punish open, peaceful defiance in public view pays a political cost the original injustice never did.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Advocated By
Associated With
This source names India directly: "principle across the 1920s in British India, though he later said his own resistance was well advanced before he read Thoreau's essay."
This source names United States directly: "the practice its modern name in the United States; Thoreau had refused to pay taxes in protest of slavery and the Mexican American War, arguing that a citizen bears moral responsibility for..."
Influenced By
Thoreau's 1849 essay gave the practice its modern name; see the Civil Disobedience entity's own description and its recorded Gandhi dissent (content.Dissent 22) on the further, disputed claim of direct influence on Gandhi specifically.
Sources
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Description
The description credits Thoreau's 1849 essay with shaping Gandhi's use of civil disobedience, a common framing this atlas's own source repeats. Gandhi disputed a direct causal reading of it himself, saying his resistance activities in South Africa were well advanced before he read the essay; he treated it as confirming and naming a method he had already begun to practice, not as its origin.
A dissenting reading, from Mahatma GandhiCivil Disobedience (Wikipedia), Wikipedia
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