CARL L. BANKSTON III is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Tulane University. He is author or editor of sixteen books, the most recent of which is Public Education— American’s Civil Religion: A Social History (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009).
Henry David Thoreau’s long essay, first
published under the title Resistance to
Civil Government, now usually known as
Civil Disobedience, is frequently described
as one of the founding documents of modern
political activism. Thoreau’s appeal to
the right and obligation of individual conscience
to resist political authority certainly
influenced many of the nonviolent activists
who followed him, including Mahatma
Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. But
the essay itself was not a call for political
or social action. It did not call for creating
the governmental means of solving social
problems. It was a call for the autonomy
of the individual and the disengagement of
the individual from civic entanglements.
Thoreau’s “inactivism,” as we might call
it, was for him a necessary condition of
personal conscience.
Civil Disobedience begins by subjecting
government to the individual conscience,
outside of guidance by any external authority.
The famous opening sentence is a general
statement of Thoreau’s attitude toward
the State: “I heartily accept the motto,
‘that government is best which governs
least’: and I should like to see it acted up
to more rapidly and systematically.” The
author extends the criticisms of standing
armies, which since the time of the Revolution
had been seen by many Americans
as instruments of tyranny, to government
itself. He argues that government is often
a means of abusing the people. Nevertheless,
while he would like to see government
governing less, he does not carry
this to the end of abolishing government.
Although Thoreau may be a philosophical
anarchist, he specifically states that having
no government at all will be practicable
only when the people are prepared for such
a situation, and he implies that they are not
prepared in his own day. Nevertheless,
he maintains that government is only an
instrument through which people act and
that it should leave people alone as much
as possible.
Thoreau maintains that because law is
an instrument, the laws passed by government
are no better than the people they
regulate. For this reason, he expresses no
regard for law simply because it expresses
the will or acceptance of a majority. If
any one person may be right or wrong,
then any number of people may be right
or wrong. Laws and government may be
improved when they come from conscience.
To put conscience at the service
of law, however, is to deny conscience and
therefore ultimately to vitiate the law and
the government behind it.
Following his own conscience, Thoreau
asserts that the American government of
his time does not merit his support because
it is unjust in two respects. It is making war
on Mexico, and it accepts the existence
of slavery in the South. Given Thoreau’s
view of government, he does not believe
that these injustices can be righted by the
democratic means of voting, since voting
simply expresses the acceptance of the
will of a majority, not a dedication to the
dictates of one’s own conscience. Casting
a ballot commits the voter to the political
order that makes war and recognizes
bondage; it reduces the full and free person
to a mere citizen, a kind of soldier in the
army of civil organization.
How then does Thoreau propose to create
a better society if he rejects the tool of
government? He makes no such proposal.
In an important but rarely cited passage
of Civil Disobedience, Thoreau observes, “I
came into this world, not chiefly to make
this a good place to live but to live in it, be
it good or bad.” His refusal to pay the poll
tax does not come from any moral compulsion
to right the wrongs of the world,
but from the ethical desire to avoid doing
wrong himself. Unlike many of those who
have drawn selective inspiration from his
essay, Thoreau does not argue for disobedience
as a strategy of political engagement,
but as an act of moral disengagement
from politics.
The disengagement is not escapism or a
denial of the world and its problems. Thoreau
rejects political action, but he seeks
to replace it with personal action. When
the conscientious person meets the agent
of the state, in the form of the tax collector,
that person can refuse to be a party to
wrong-doing by refusing to pay taxes. Further,
the objector should recommend that
the tax collector resign his official position
and also refuse allegiance to the state. If the
government imprisons the objector or confiscates his property as a response, then that
government, which is engaged in immoral
actions, simply reaffirms the moral position
of the objector outside the state. In
fact, according to Thoreau, since money
itself is issued by the state, a truly virtuous
person will be likely to have little money
or property and therefore will show little
concern over its confiscation. Each act of
refusal undermines governmental power,
since this power only exists in obedience.
If Thoreau’s refusal to commit himself
to any project of building a better society
may seem at odds with some of his contemporary
“left-wing” admirers, his views
on money-making might appear equally
discomfiting to economically conservative
advocates of the free market as the path
to individual and collective well-being.
“Absolutely speaking,” he writes, “the
more money, the less virtue; for money
comes between a man and his objects,
and obtains for him; and it was certainly
no great virtue to obtain it.” Committing
oneself to the market is no better
than committing oneself to politics since
both are ways of subordinating one’s own
judgment to the imperatives of external
authorities.
He moves from the theoretical discussion
of his views on the relationship
between the individual and the state to the
events behind his own act of civil disobedience.
He tells first how he had previously
refused to pay taxes to support his family’s
church, which he himself did not attend,
again striking the note of refusal to belong
or to participate. That was the first time
he was threatened for an act of tax resis
tance. Thoreau tells us that he afterward
resolved the problem of whether he should
support the clergyman employed by the
church by giving local officials a written
statement that he was not a church member
and that he did not want to support any
organization that he had not voluntarily
joined. Although Thoreau is no admirer
of the market, he does clearly accept the
libertarian principle that individuals can
only be obligated by their voluntary agreements
of exchange. “I did not see why the
schoolmaster [Thoreau] should be taxed
to support the priest, and not the priest
the schoolmaster: for I was not the State’s
schoolmaster, but I supported myself by
voluntary subscription.” This story of
individualistic voluntarism immediately
precedes the more commonly remembered
tale of the tax protest against the Mexican
War and slavery. The only way properly
to understand Thoreau’s motivation in the
second refusal is to place it in the context
of the first. “If I had known how to name
them,” he says of the statement he gave to
his local selectmen, “I should have signed
off in detail from all the societies which
I never signed on to; but I did not know
where to find a complete list.” This is not
the attitude of a man burning to join a
social reform movement.
In the best-known part of the work,
Thoreau tells us that he has paid no poll
tax for six years. He explains that his
refusal to pay upon meeting the tax collector
landed him in jail for a night. Thoreau’s
willingness to accept incarceration is not
a consequence of his willingness to accept
the authority of the state, but a result of his
casual recognition of its sheer power and a
means of removing himself from a political
order of which he disapproves.
In his mind, the walls between himself
and his fellow townsmen simply made him
freer than the others, since he was acting
in accord with his own moral directions.
There is a good deal of the classical Stoic
in his idea of freedom, but Thoreau’s subordination
of the authority of the state to
the conscience of the individual is contrary
to the civic-mindedness of the Stoicism of
Seneca or Marcus Aurelius. It is also hard
to see Stoic endurance of hardship in his
account of his incarceration. In fact, his
time behind bars comes across as more
of a vacation than a punishment. “The
rooms [of the jail] were whitewashed once
a month; and this one, at least, was the
whitest, most simply furnished, and probably
the neatest apartment in town.” He
describes arriving at the jail and finding
the prisoners chatting in the doorway until
the jailer announced that it was lock-up
time. His cell-mate was accused of burning
a barn, but Thoreau says that the man
had probably just fallen asleep in the barn
while drunk and accidentally set fire to it
with his pipe.
Thoreau compares being in jail to traveling
to a far country, both because it was
a new place to him and because it gave him
a new perspective on his own town. From
the windows of the jail, he says that Concord
seemed as strange as a medieval land.
When he left the jail, he saw his neighbors
as foreigners, guided by odd prejudices
rather than reason. The jail stay itself, in
other words, is a withdrawal from civic
connections, albeit less voluntary than the
tax refusal. By separating Thoreau from
his neighbors, the incarceration has given
him one more opportunity to step back
from his associations and the ways of seeing
things implicit in those associations.
The essay ends by returning to its beginning
and then by projecting the political
philosophy introduced with the first sentence
into the future. The refusal to pay
the tax, Thoreau explains, was a refusal
of allegiance to the government. In this
way, he quietly declares his own secession.
The refusal also suggests what Thoreau
believes should be the proper relationship
between individual and government in the
future. The progress from absolute to limited
monarchy and from limited monarchy
to democracy can be carried further by
moving toward the individual as an independent
source from which all power and
authority are derived.
What can this literary relic of a bygone
era say to us today? If we approach it as
political and social commentary, and not
as sacred text, we have to admit that in
practical terms Thoreau appears to have
been wrong in many respects. Slavery
did not end because conscientious individuals
seceded from their morally compromised
political order. It was ended by
a war carried on by many “file[s] of soldiers,
colonel[s], captain[s], corporal[s],
privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching
in admirable order over hill and dale
. . . [often] against their wills, . . . [frequently]
against their common sense and
consciences.” Those who fought for slavery
were on the side of secession, albeit for
states rather than individuals, and those
who fought against it were primarily interested
in the preservation of political union.
Ironically, many of the military leaders on
both sides had obtained their early training
and experience in the Mexican War.
Slavery ended through war and by the
pursuit of political union, not by acts of
individual conscientious objection. The
nation produced by war also differed dramatically
from the localized, small-scale,
face-to-face society of the antebellum era.
Political consolidation had been stimulated
by the expansion of federal authority
required for warfare, as well as by the fact
that the war had been fought by the victors
in the name of the Union.
The political consolidation of the
United States was accompanied by economic
consolidation, stimulated by war
spending that promoted the development
of railroads, the steel industry, and Wall
Street. The decades following the publication
of Civil Disobedience saw the United
States change from a mainly agricultural
nation to a major industrial producer. The
total output of coal in the U.S. grew from
8.4 million short tons in 1850 to 40 million
in 1870. In the single decade of the
1850s, railroad tracks increased from 9,021
miles to 30,626 miles. In 1869, the Transcontinental
Railroad connecting the East
Coast to the West Coast was finally completed,
helping to bind the nation into a
single market. By 1890 the U.S. had outstripped
the leading industrial nations of
Europe to become the world’s foremost
producer of manufactured goods. If we
accept Thoreau’s apparent view of the relationship
between money and virtue, then
the rise of American prosperity was a long
slide into corruption.
That view of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century as a slide into corruption
was one that many of that epoch
would have accepted, and they would have
pointed to the large-scale institutions that
replaced individual action as the source of
national vice. Henry Adams, for example,
displayed a consistent sense of loss of the
older, smaller, and more personal society
in his great autobiographical work, and
he bitterly portrayed the corrupt collusion
of business and government in his 1880
novel, Democracy. Historian Richard Hofstadter
famously argued that turn-of-thecentury
progressivism was a reaction of
the old professional middle classes against
the new corporate wealth, and efforts at
anti-monopoly legislation can easily be
seen as attempts to preserve something
of the ethos of earlier times. The highly
nationalistic strain in progressivism suggests,
though, that the progressives were,
however nostalgic, ultimately committed
to action through institutions, especially
highly centralized institutions, rather than
through the moral decisions of autonomous
individuals. Is it anachronistic to
wonder what Thoreau would have made
of Francis Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance?
The corporate nation, the dominance
of Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government
came to characterize the United
States more and more over the course of
the twentieth century. According to the
1930 U.S. Census, from 1914 to 1927, wage
earners employed in factories producing
products valued at $5,000 or more grew
in number from 6,895,000 to 8,350,000,
and the value added by manufacture nearly
tripled from $9,708,000 to $27,585,000.
By 1937, the 1940 Census reported, nearly
14 percent of all wage earners in manufacturing
were working in establishments
that employed over 2,500 workers, and
three-quarters of American manufacturing
wage-earners were employed by businesses
with over one hundred workers.
During the Second World War, government
and business grew even larger
and drew closer together. In the war years,
as the national government poured investment
into the military and war industries,
productivity climbed sharply. By the early
1950s, the United States was responsible
for 45 percent of world industrial manufactures
and for 18 percent of all the world’s
exports. The elaborate organizational settings
of the core firms that churned out
this abundance created a new demand for
white collar workers, so that the year 1950
began a steep increase in the proportion of
the nation’s workers employed in managerial,
professional, and technical occupations.
Government, far from governing
less, took on new responsibilities for subsidizing
prosperity, insuring mortgages,
building the interstate system and other
highways, and providing funding for education
at all levels
In many ways, then, the United States
did not move toward the independent
individual after Thoreau’s time, but away
from this ideal. When we lament our current
economic difficulties, we look back
to years of recent government-directed
growth, not to pre-Civil War rural and
small town life, and we generally call for
more effective government economic policies.
Much of what we began to describe,
a century after Thoreau’s time, as “the
American dream” is utterly incompatible
with his dream of the future. While modern
activists have pulled Civil Disobedience
into our times by offering selective and
distorted interpretations of the essay as a
manifesto for movement politics, a careful
re-reading of it may leave us perplexed
by the distance between ourselves and
that night in the Concord jail. It is hard
to imagine Thoreau in Central Lockup
today, even in Concord.
This distance between our highly centralized,
interconnected society and that
of the early nineteenth century creates the
dilemma of how we should bring Thoreau’s
call for rejection of individual participation
in the politics of his time into
our own. One approach might be that of
intellectual history, understanding Civil
Disobedience as one expression of early
nineteenth-century individualism. From
this perspective, we would read the essay
as we read, say, Dante’s De Monarchia, for
insight into ideas current in the past and
for an understanding of how an influential
author related to his own era, or we might
look at Thoreau’s account as one example
of cultural lag in the American mentality,
describing our tendency to withdraw from
the active struggle with social problems
into the solipsism of our suburban homes
as an inheritance from the old mythology
of self-reliance.
I would not reject either the intellectual
history or the cultural inheritance
approach to this work. However, I also
think that it can still speak to us as a living
document and not just as a literary fossil.
The starting point for accepting Civil Disobedience
as a contribution to contemporary
ideas on civic life is to take Thoreau’s
libertarianism seriously. He has at least as
much in common with Albert Jay Nock
or Robert Nozick (look at the similarities
between the ending of the essay and the
last chapter of Anarchy, State and Utopia) as
he has with Martin Luther King Jr.
For Thoreau, disengagement is a way
the individual can serve the polity conscientiously,
but it is also a manifestation of
the individual’s independent value apart
from the polity. Individuals are prior to
any particular form of civil society and
have the right to exist for themselves. This
right to live for oneself and for one’s own
purposes is not a repudiation of responsibility
toward others, but the foundation of
this responsibility. To the extent that people
live for the sake of their governments
or communities, they give up the power
to think independently and to make moral
decisions. The fully engaged person’s
moral decisions do not come from conscience,
but from the external directives
of community standards, laws, or business
policies. The individual’s detachment from
the web of commitment is precisely what
makes conscientious reasoning possible.
For my own part, I would not endorse
Thoreau’s political quietism without qualification. As a member of a family and a
participant in a political order, my own
conscience necessarily responds to the
demands of my social position. Still, I
think Thoreau makes a case for the moral
disengagement of the individual that raises
important questions for us today, especially
for those of us surrounded by the
intellectually conformist, politically correct
culture of modern academia. If the
private, apolitical realm of life dissolves in
the public realm, as implied by the modern
shibboleth “the private is political,” then
in losing the right to live for ourselves, we
lose the right to think for ourselves.
Absorption in civic involvement, from
the point of view Thoreau gives us, diminishes
the independent self and therefore
diminishes the ability to think for oneself,
which is necessary for the use of the full
range of moral judgment. Moral judgment,
in turn, is essential for true service
to civil society. Paradoxically, only those
who resist the state serve it with their consciences,
and only those who hold themselves
apart from civic cooperation can
improve the political order. Thoreau’s case
for political disengagement foretells the distinction
that David Riesman would make
in the middle of the twentieth century
between “inner-directed” and “otherdirected”
types of social personalities,
probably because Riesman unconsciously
drew on that same tradition of American
individualism, which has not been a mere
cultural lag but a voice in the ongoing dialogue
of American political thought. The
ideas and decisions of the “other-directed”
type come from social expectations and
demands, while principled introspection
guides the “inner-directed.”
While Thoreau was opposed to slavery
and to the Mexican War, he does not
provide us with a blueprint for the peaceful
and free society that he wanted to see
conscience bring into existence. This lack
of vision for the future follows from the
inner-directed character of his thinking.
Because the consciences of people differ,
the coordination of people in collective
action through formal government or
informal community pressures will necessarily
violate the principles of some. Thoreau’s
rule of conscience, then, requires
not only minimal government but minimal
social compulsion from any source.
The ideal of a just social order is therefore
entirely alien to Thoreau’s rule of doing
what one thinks is right. The author of
Civil Disobedience has little in common
with the modern social justice advocates
who claim him as an intellectual ancestor.
If Thoreau’s rule of conscience does
not derive from any plan of an ideal social
order in the future, then what is its source?
This is a troublesome question and one
that haunts individualist libertarianism in
general. Thoreau has, after all, rejected the
church of his father as well as the social
order of his neighbors. His introspection
finds no guidance in institutions or traditions.
Although he does not make his
moral philosophy explicit, his views are
consistent with the natural-law perspective,
the view that right and wrong inhere
in an objective cosmic order that leaves its
directives in each soul.
We should be cautious about accepting
the implied natural-law argument without
reservations. It is dangerous to assume
that all individuals, left alone, will simply
find the commands of natural law written
on their hearts. The late Philip Rieff
argued that a living moral order must be
founded on externally established metaphysical
truth and that subjectivism leads
to a deadly relativism. There is, indeed,
substantial empirical evidence that social
order requires stable institutions that shape
behaviors and consciences. The decline
of the family, for example, can be clearly
linked to a wide range of behavioral problems
rooted in inadequate moral training.
Arguably, Thoreau would find jail a much
less pleasant experience today because he
would be locked up with the products of
decaying modern families and communities.
As one re-reads Civil Disobedience
carefully and critically, one needs to ask
where the personal conscience that orients
the individual finds its compass.
Looking at Civil Disobedience as an
expression of our political traditions, we
can see disengagement of Thoreau’s variety
as the opposite pole of the American
fondness for voluntary association, identified by Alexis de Tocqueville as a foundation
of this nation’s democracy. The
Tocquevillean perspective has enjoyed
a revival in recent years in social capital
theory, particularly in the works of political
scientist Robert D. Putnam. Being a
nation of joiners, according to the voluntary
association point of view, has accustomed
Americans to public action and
given them connections to each other that
help to prevent political and social polarization.
Here, Thoreau’s experience with
the demand that he support his father’s
church might lead us to wonder just how
voluntary the web of associations really
were in early nineteenth-century New
England. But his irascible response to the
demands of association can also remind us
that political freedom does not hinge on
involvement alone, but on voluntarism.
If conscientious involvement comes from
choice, then this type of involvement can
only exist if there is the possibility of the
refusal to be involved.
Part of the contemporary significance
of this work, then, is that it can provide
an informative way of looking at debates
about civic engagement, such as the social
capital argument. We can read Civil Disobedience
to complement our thinking on
civic connections. If a society is to be
based on moral decisions, then the degree
of involvement of its citizens in public
associations is not the only question that
should concern us. We should also ask why
they are involved and consider the commitments
and motivations that lie behind
associations.
While Thoreau’s essay can lead us
to look critically at the foundations of
Tocquevillean associations, we can also
observe that the author is too dismissive
of association in general. He reminds us
of the importance of freely following conscience
within a social order, but fails to
consider how a social order may be maintained.
Thoreau’s libertarianism suggests
that conscience lies outside of the social
and political membership and provides
the true source for that membership. Still,
Thoreau never tells us what he sees as the
source of conscience. If it is natural law, as
I suggest, then how do individuals achieve
access to the principles of that law?
Civil Disobedience, then, is not a call to
activism or a program for some version of
social justice, contrary to most modern
readings of the essay. It is a manifesto of
political and social libertarianism that displays
both the strengths and weaknesses of
that trend in American thought. The essay
reminds us that we are not here to build
the perfect world, but to live according to
conscience. It points out that conscience
is the basis of choice and association. At
the same time, Thoreau is not only wrong
in his predictions about the movement
of the nation toward greater individual
autonomy; he fails to ask some essential
questions about where conscience finds its
guidance and about how conscience can
serve a social order that is stable as well as
free. Reading this old essay as a living document
requires us to look at what it really
says and, above all, to argue with it.
