Civil Disobedience

Thoreau uses very carefully chosen words that often have more than one connotation. For example, he uses “friction” in his machine metaphor. “Friction” has a mechanical meaning and is defined by Google as “the resistance an object encounters when moving over another.” For a machine, friction is often necessary for it to function. However, “friction” also has another meaning: “conflict or animosity caused by a clash of opinions.” Thus, friction can both power the machine of government or be its undoing as people turn against it through disobedience.

Thoreau also uses clever turns of phrase that draw the reader in. For instance, he writes of “the standing army” being “only an arm of the standing government” (3). This pun emphasizes the temporality of the government while also foreshadowing the metaphor of soldiers being tools of the State.

Finally, he uses several rhetorical questions, questions that are asked but that he does not expect to be answered, as part of his essay. He asks of the aforementioned soldiers, “Now, what are they? Men at all? or small moveable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?” (5). The question answers itself, of course, but it makes the reader feel like they have answered it and not Thoreau, which leads them further into the argument with the sense that Thoreau’s opinion is identical to theirs.

Thoreau makes his argument like a skilled debater or lawyer. He builds an argument logically by explaining first what a good government is (one that “governs least”) and then proving that such a government does not exist in the United States (3). He then establishes that humans who are moral have a duty to not support governments that promote injustice, and since the United States promotes injustice by creating war and allowing slavery, Americans have a duty to not support that government. He anticipates a reader’s reaction to that argument by spending much of the essay arguing that the State’s preferred punishment—prison—isn’t really punishment for a morally just person, and with that, he closes his argument that moral people have a duty to resist the unjust government and change it. The methodology of arguing a general principle and then proving that the specific example of the United States fits that principle takes a theoretical argument and makes it feel both more urgent and more absolute.