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Civil Disobedience Rhetorical Analysis

Decent Essays

Civil Disobedience
In Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, Thoreau discusses his feelings on the proposal that people need to openly resist the government. Thoreau explains that a government shouldn’t intrude into men’s lives, that the government is only an expedient, meaning it’s merely a means to an end. He describes the need for a government thata leaves the people of the United States alone, that “…government is best which governs least”.
Thoreau supports his ideas stated in Civil Disobedience by criticizing the current (current during the time) faults in the United States government. One of the more important criticisms Thoreau brought up was the institution of slavery in the South. Thoreau stated, “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also". He wanted the reader to know that the act of owning and working slaves in the United States was the single most hypocritical things that had ever occurred in the history of the country, bearing in mind one of the main points in the Declaration of Independence was that “all men are created equal”. Thoreau encourages that, …show more content…

Just to name a few of the “greats” of history that have been moved by Thoreau’s writing in Civil Disobedience: Gandhi, who’s entire rebellion was shaped by Civil Disobedience, as he set out to organize farmers, peasants, and laborers of all kind to pretest against excessive land-tax and discrimination from the British in the early 1900s, and Martin Luther King Jr., who used civil disobedience to protest the discrimination in the United States against African Americans during the 1960s. If that isn’t enough evidence of an effective essay, American people such as Emma Goldman used Thoreau’s tactics to rebel against the World War I draft and again by World War II

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