In David Henry Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience as it is also known, Thoreau argues that “government is best which governs not at all” (Thoreau 1). Thoreau’s main argument is that an individual’s first loyalty is to his or her own nature, and that when the individual is true to himself or herself only then is he or she capable of being true to government.
In section four, we see Thoreau argue that men need to obey a higher power than government, namely their own conscience “Must the citizen ever for a moment or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then?” (Thoreau 2). In other words, even when one is not backed in their thinking by the more powerful majority, they must resist its efforts to tempt them to go against their higher or more transcendental power of conscience.
In section five Thoreau argues that the masses of men sell out their higher, transcendental powers of conscience and moral sense to become nothing more than a mechanized body acting out the will of the powerful state with no consideration of moral right or wrong or common sense versus senselessness. An example of this would be the institution of slavery. Thoreau opposed this curious institution because he felt no one that had a decent conscience could possibly support its brutality and oppression against others. Thus, moral conscience must often resist legally reinforced institutions. However, Thoreau argues we often subvert our higher and transcendental nature and moral conscience through inertia and narrow-thinking which fails to show us we support injustice. For example, we may be totally opposed to a war in a foreign country, but by paying our taxes we help support it. Thus, we need to focus on individual reform as opposed to mass reform because each individual reformed will begin to act from a higher
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