On Civil Disobedience

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Together for the first time, classic essays on how and when to disobey the government from two of the greatest thinkers in our literature

As we grapple with how to respond to emerging threats against democracy, Library of America brings together for the first time two seminal essays about the duties of citizenship and the imperatives of conscience.

In “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), Henry David Thoreau recounts the story of a night he spent in jail for refusing to pay poll taxes, which he believed supported the Mexican American War and the expansion of slavery. His larger aim was to articulate a view of individual conscience as a force in American politics. No writer has made a more persuasive case for obedience to a “higher law.”  

In “Civil Disobedience” (1970), Hannah Arendt offers a stern rebuttal to Thoreau. For Arendt, Thoreau stands in willful opposition to the public and collective spirit that defines civil disobedience. Only through positive collective action and the promises we make to each other in a civil society can meaningful change occur. 

This deluxe paperback features an introduction by Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College, who reflects on the tradition of civil disobedience and the future of American politics.HENRY DAVID THOREAU was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. He graduated from Harvard in 1837, the same year he began his lifelong Journal. While living at Walden Pond, Thoreau worked on the two books published during his lifetime: Walden (1854) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Several of his other works, including The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and Excursions, were published posthumously. Thoreau died in Concord, at the age of forty-four, in 1862.

HANNAH ARENDT (1906–1975) was one of the foremost political philosophers of the twentieth century, the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution, and the posthumously published The Life of the Mind. Her commentaries on modern American and European politics and on the history of political thought were collected in Essays in Understanding, Thinking Without a Banister, and Responsibility and Judgment.

ROGER BERKOWITZ is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics.US

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