Thorau's Consequences Of Civil Disobedience By Henry Thoreau

Thoreau Essay
There are several ways that Henry Thoreau's argument was effective. In my opinion his argument was effective and it had a very big impact on what he did. He stood up for what he believed in and faced the consequences that he knew he was going to face.
The first paragraph expresses Thoreau's seemingly libertarian political sentiments the idea that the most ideal form of government is one which exercises the least power and control over its citizens. He envisions a society in which government is eliminated altogether because men have the capacity to be self-regulating and independent. Which he also has a theoretical endpoint of the way societies develop and evolve. There's a tension between Thoreau's desire to limit the power

The logic behind the story could be applied more generally to any number of grievances against government. Thoreau seeks to define in which cases it is justified to resist government, and in which cases the injustice is "part of the necessary friction of the machine of government." Most importantly, Thoreau rejects the criterion of expediency used by Paley to judge the necessity of rebellion at a given moment in history. He asserts the primacy of individual conscience over collective pragmatism. The means of resistance advocated and practiced by Thoreau are nonviolent. Moral objection to a particular law does not authorize nonobservance of all laws. At several points, Thoreau uses mechanical metaphors to describe the functioning of government. The metaphors are also part of a larger dichotomy in Thoreau's thinking between nature and artificial social constructs, such as government, corporations or the church. He refers to a "higher law" derived from nature, and uses a metaphor borrowed from the natural world to justify civil

During his time in jail, the passage captures the spontaneity of his imagination and feelings in contrast to the more logical, philosophical mode of writing practiced elsewhere in the story. The passage serves to inoculate Thoreau against the accusation of self-righteousness or moral grandstanding, which he refutes in subsequent paragraphs. It attests to the fact that he has already put his words into action. The first-person narration allows Thoreau to frame a complex and abstract political issue in a voice that personally bears witness to the human effects and consequences of government oppression. It exposes the reader to Thoreau's own ambivalence and to the ongoing process of self-examination that he encourages his fellow men to undertake in their own conscience. While confident in his conviction that slavery is morally wrong, Thoreau generally avoids dogmatic, authoritative statements I favor of a more tentative, moderate firs-person voice. Thoreau personifies the State "as a lone woman with her silver spoons." He casts government not as a mechanical agent of injustice but as a feminized object of pity. His confrontation with the State proves to him that physical violence is less powerful that individual conscience. He realizes that, far from being a formidable brute force, government is in fact weak and morally