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    On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: Premium Edition
    On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: Premium Edition
    On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: Premium Edition
    Audiobook1 hour

    On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: Premium Edition

    Written by Henry David Thoreau

    Narrated by Jack Shelly

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1848) is an essay from a speech by Henry David Thoreau, a lifelong abolitionist. The slavery crisis inflamed New England in the 1840s-1850s. The speech dealt with slavery, but at the same time criticized American imperialism, particularly the Mexican–American War. Thoreau asserts that because governments are typically more harmful than helpful, they therefore cannot be justified. Democracy is no cure for this, as majorities simply by virtue of being majorities do not also gain the virtues of wisdom and justice. The judgment of an individual's conscience is not necessarily inferior to the decisions of a political body or majority, and so "[i]t is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right... Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAudioliterature
    Release dateFeb 28, 2019
    On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: Premium Edition
    Author

    Henry David Thoreau

    Henry Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817, and attended Concord Academy and Harvard. After a short time spent as a teacher, he worked as a surveyor and a handyman, sometimes employed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Between 1845 and 1847 Thoreau lived in a house he had made himself on Emerson's property near to Walden Pond. During this period he completed A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and wrote the first draft of Walden, the book that is generally judged to be his masterpiece. He died of tuberculosis in 1862, and much of his writing was published posthumously.

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