On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
25 October 2025

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

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The text https://www.gutenberg.org/files/71/71-h/71-h.htm


Some consider this text a founding document of Anarchism in the United States.


Civil Disobedience is an essay by Henry David Thoreau. Published in 1849 under the title Resistance to Civil Government, it expressed Thoreau’s belief that people should not allow governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty both to avoid doing injustice directly and to avoid allowing their acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War.