Henry David Thoreau wrote "Resistance to Civil Government", later published as "Civil Disobedience", in 1849, after a night spent in jail for refusing to pay six years of accumulated poll taxes in protest against both slavery and the Mexican-American War, which he considered a war of imperial aggression. The essay was delivered as a lecture in 1848 and published the following year. Thoreau's argument is that when a government requires its citizens to participate in injustice, specifically, when a slave state demands taxes from people who consider slavery wrong, the individual has both the right and the moral obligation to refuse compliance, accepting the legal consequences rather than subordinating conscience to civil law.
The essay is built on a distinction between the law and justice that Thoreau considers absolute: "The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right." He is not arguing for anarchy, he accepts that government has necessary functions, but for the priority of individual moral judgment over institutional demand when the two conflict. The specific target of his protest, slavery, was not abolished by the Mexican War funding he refused, and Thoreau was released from jail after one night when his aunt paid his taxes without his consent. The gap between the essay's argument and the circumstances of its composition is one Thoreau addresses by arguing that he would have been right to resist even if the resistance had been materially ineffective.
The essay directly influenced Tolstoy, Gandhi, and through Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.'s strategy of nonviolent resistance. Gandhi's reading of Thoreau helped him develop satyagraha, truth-force, as a political strategy in South Africa and India. What the essay offers current readers is the most careful articulation in the tradition of the argument that moral obligation to the state is conditional rather than absolute, and that the conditions for legitimate resistance are provided by the state itself when its demands require participation in injustice.
Nietzsche completed Thus Spoke Zarathustra in just 10 days, describing it as something given to him rather than written.
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