Civil Disobedience

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1849

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Symbols & Motifs

Machinery

Thoreau uses the extended metaphor of government-as-machine throughout “Civil Disobedience.” He initially describes government as necessary “machinery” for the people’s voices to be heard (3). However, he argues that the machinery of the American government is cruel, as it works to create war and enslave thousands, and makes other citizens complicit in those injustices. The citizens become mechanized themselves. Soldiers, especially, turn into “small moveable forts and magazines” even though soldiers and citizens as a whole do not support the cause of war (5). But even regular citizens, by showing too much respect for law, become soldiers themselves, serving the State “not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies” (5).

The machine metaphor works on a few levels. First, it makes the complicated function of government easier to understand. The actual way the bureaucracy of government functions is confusing to most. Second, the metaphor implies that citizens lose their humanity by participating in the government. They become cogs of the machine instead of clogging the machine as Thoreau wishes they would do. If the reader agrees with Thoreau that individualism is important, then certainly they would not want to lose humanity and join with the machinery. Third, the metaphor implies a rigidity to change and inflexibility to correction that highlights Thoreau’s anti-government message. After all, it’s easier to replace a broken machine than to repair it.

Prison

Thoreau makes several references to prison in “Civil Disobedience.” He distinguishes that the State largely has two punishments for refusing its laws: it can take your property or imprison you. As Thoreau is not concerned with material things and argues that materialistic people do not have strong moral footing and are unlikely to act against injustice, he focuses his argument on the State’s ability to imprison someone. However, he argues prison is not that bad of a punishment, since in prison one can get better acquainted with injustice (as the victim of it) and is removed from the State. Prisoners have a community that shares verse with each other, and they can experience the town in a way that citizens cannot. He also feels that the institution of the prison is unique because it is designed with the belief that a prisoner wants to be part of the world and not part of the prison. Since Thoreau argues that being part of society makes one complicit in injustice, and as such, morally corrupt, being in prison can actually be beneficial. Indeed, Thoreau’s own stay in prison is described as a “trip to a far country,” and it seems the prison is a liminal space for him (20). He is transformed spiritually and grows more distant from his neighbors in town, as he recognizes that the State can imprison one’s body but not one’s mind.

The threat of prison, then, is not really a threat. And with the State’s threat of punishment removed, you have no excuse for continuing to support its injustices. The focus on prison allows Thoreau to make a logical defense of his position that some laws can be ignored while advancing his larger theoretical aim of suggesting that people ought to free themselves of the shackles of society and truly become free. The prison symbol is also powerful as it works as a paradox: It is something we have all been taught to avoid because it constricts freedom, but it is actually a source of enhanced freedom.

Slavery

Thoreau advocates abolition throughout “Civil Disobedience,” as one of the injustices he most complains about is slavery. He argues that the Constitution is “evil” because it codifies slavery into the foundational law of the United States, which makes the entire government evil by extension (13). Thoreau’s belief in abolition is the impetus for his main act of civil disobedience, then, and the work would literally not exist without it. His government cannot also be the slave’s government, he explains (6).

However, abolition also serves symbolically in the text, with Thoreau arguing that blind obeisance to the government is essentially enslavement. The government encourages conformity and insists that its citizens all fall into line, even at the cost of their humanity. Paradoxically, Thoreau argues that even if many vote with the masses against slavery (only after the majority allows it because few slaves are left to be freed or because the State no longer benefits from slavery), then those voters “would be the only slaves” (9). To find freedom, one must define their own moral truth and live a life that supports it, though the government discourages dissent. Only by refusing to participate in the government by not paying taxes can one find the freedom necessary to live a virtuous life and not be enslaved to the state.