¶ … Thoreau and Locke acknowledge the right of the people to renounce their allegiance to their government, what is the difference between their understandings of this right and what different conditions would warrant such an act?
When do citizens have the right to throw off the yoke of a sovereign and adopt a new form of governance that is more in keeping with the wishes and their needs of the majority of the populace? During the age of the Enlightenment in Great Britain, the philosopher John Locke wrote in his "Second Treatise of Governance," that all governments of the world must protect the life, liberty, and property rights of the common citizens. Locke wrote that if a government fails to honor this function, then its citizens had the right to revolt against the government, as the social contract between the governed and the government was not being honored. For example, if a king raised taxes merely to enrich his coffers and throw lavish parties, bankrupting the ruled for the king's own delight and to the detriment of the majority of his people, that king should be overthrown. However, a king that waged a war designed to protect the majority should not, in Locke's view, be overthrown.
In Locke's version of the social contract between citizen and sovereign, the citizens had agreed to sacrifice their liberty for protection of their rights, in exchange for loyalty to the reigning government, but if their rights were not being protected, their loyalty was forfeit. In America, many years later during the Mexican-American War, the New England Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau similarly advocated...
Civil Disobedience Thoreau's Disobedience Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience not only gives a startlingly strong argument against paying one's taxes (which is in itself a difficult task), it also gives a subtle but clear image of Thoreau himself. In this essay, the reader discovers a writer who is at once romantic and cynical, idealistically self-sacrificing and fiercely self-centered, areligious and mystical. It would be tempting to portray Thoreau as inconsistent or somehow
Civil Disobedience The Trial of Socrates The Athenians suffered a crushing defeat in 404 B.C.E. with the end of the Peloponnesian War. A Spartan occupation force controlled the city, and instituted the rule of the Thirty Tyrants to replace Athenian democracy. While a form of democracy was reinstated it lacked the acceptance of ideas and freedom of speech that had been such an integral part of Athenian society (Rogers). In Athens at this
John Locke's social theory not only permits disobedience but also a revolution if the State violates its side of the contract. Martin Luther King, Jr. says that civil disobedience derives from the natural law tradition in that an unjust law is not a law but a perversion of it. He, therefore, sees consenting to obey laws as not extending or including unjust laws. At present, a new and different form
Civil Disobedience: Thoreau's research on civil disobedience puts it as the refusal by the citizens to obey laws or even pay taxes in a country. The end result of the disobedience is normally war, especially when the citizens want to take laws into their hands. The decision by citizens to take the law into their hands forces the government to act forcefully, which results in the war. However, when proper procedures
Pharisaical practices are as popular today as they may be supposed to have been in the time of Christ -- and one of the biggest hypocrisies of our time is what Roosevelt called "the great arsenal of democracy," the shield-phrase with which the U.S. would pursue its policy of "manifest destiny" all over the globe (and an ideology it had been pursuing since the end of the 19th century when
Regardless, to condemn Brown to death in Thoreau's view demoted the far greater human destruction of life via the institution of enslavement Brown attempted to end. This does not seem so much to be a contradiction or a defense of violence but a tempering of the anger that Brown created in the hearts of many Americans, and an attempt to put the violent acts of Brown in the context
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