Civil disobedience and theory of anarchy

References and Further Reading 1. Although his family was of comfortable means, his youth was twice marked by tragedy. In two successive years, his two younger brothers contracted an infectious disease from him—diphtheria in one case and pneumonia in the other—and died.

His paternal grandfather had been born on the UK crown dependency island of Jersey. He began to call himself Henry David after he finished college; he never petitioned to make a legal name change. The house has been restored by the Thoreau Farm Trust, [22] a nonprofit organization, and is now open to the public.

He studied at Harvard College between and He lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoricclassics, philosophy, mathematics, and science.

In fact, the master's degree he declined to purchase had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to graduates "who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college.

Return to Concord, —[ edit ] The traditional professions open to college graduates—law, the church, business, medicine—did not interest Thoreau, [26]: After he graduated inhe joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but he resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment.

The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in after cutting himself while shaving. Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dialand lobbied the editor, Margaret Fuller, to publish those writings.

The first journal entry, on October 22,reads, "'What are you doing now? In his early years he followed Transcendentalisma loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott.

They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the "radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts", as Emerson wrote in Nature For a few months inhe moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island[34] and tutored the family's sons while seeking contacts among literary men and journalists in the city who might help publish his writings, including his future literary representative Horace Greeley.

He rediscovered the process of making good pencils with inferior graphite by using clay as the binder. The company's other source of graphite had been Tantiusquesa mine operated by Native Americans in Sturbridge, Massachusetts.

Later, Thoreau converted the pencil factory to produce plumbago, a name for graphite at the time, which was used in the electrotyping process. In April he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed acres 1.

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.

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Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican—American War and slaveryand he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. The next day Thoreau was freed when someone, likely to have been his aunt, paid the tax, against his wishes. In January and Februaryhe delivered lectures on "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government", [43] explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum.

Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, writing in his journal on January Heard Thoreau's lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State—an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience.

His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar 's expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr.

Hoar's payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau's.

Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley 's principle in the political poem " The Mask of Anarchy "which begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.

Thoreau did not find a publisher for the book and instead printed 1, copies at his own expense; fewer than were sold.

Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of the four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.

Inhe and his family moved into a house at Main Streetwhere he lived until his death. These would be Thoreau's only travels outside the United States.

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He jested that all he got from this adventure "was a cold. Whereas his own country had had its revolution, in Canada history had failed to turn. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated.

The point of this task was to "anticipate" the seasons of nature, in his word.

Agorism - Wikipedia

He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source of his late writings on natural history, such as "Autumnal Tints""The Succession of Trees"and "Wild Apples"an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous wild apple species.CIVIL WAR. In "Democracy after Civil War: A Kantian Paradox," New York University, November 16, , Leonard Wantchekon presents a theory of "post-civil war democratization" which draws upon the model of political order among rational demons as well as sources from "classical political theory, contemporary democratic theory, and .

Agorism is a libertarian social philosophy that advocates creating a society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges by means of counter-economics, thus engaging with aspects of peaceful benjaminpohle.com was first proposed by libertarian philosopher Samuel Edward Konkin III at two conferences, CounterCon I in October and CounterCon II in May , both conferences.

John Rawls (—) John Rawls was arguably the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. He wrote a series of highly influential articles in the s and ’60s that helped refocus Anglo-American moral and political philosophy on substantive problems about what we ought to do.

John Rawls (—) John Rawls was arguably the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century.

He wrote a series of highly influential articles in the s and ’60s that helped refocus Anglo-American moral and political philosophy on substantive problems about what we ought to do.

Coming to a Location Near You: Civil Unrest by The Survival Mom. It’s not my imagination. Angry groups of people are gathering together more and more often, protesting perceived injustice, failure of leadership, the financial malpractice by our government and banks, and just about any unpopular decision made by a governing .

I've heard from hundreds of people that they're prepared to defy the law, and that number will be magnified by the thousands, by the tens .