On Civil Disobedience, Hannah Arendt

Description

More urgent than ever: as we grapple with how to respond to emerging threats against democracy, Library of America brings together two seminal essays about the duties of citizenship and the imperatives of conscience

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

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.”

Dimensions

152 pages, 4.81 x 0.4 x 7.49 inches, paperback