Mill And Thoreaus Analysis
The existentialist doctrine of committed action, Martin Buber's concept of "encounter," and of course Gandhi's practice of civil disobedience, were all clearly anticipated by the retiring Concord surveyor. Like the young men of Concord in the s, we find it natural to ask regarding this or that question of the Mill And Thoreaus Analysis, What does Henry Thoreau think?
Still more is he an oracle for those who, in choosing a life-work, turn aside from some "good thing" to launch out by dead reckoning on a wild course impossible to justify to friends and relatives.
The Great Gatsby Figurative Language Analysis
And for those drawn to direct confrontation with the Slave Powers and Mexican Wars of our own times, Thoreau's spare sentences, driven like nails into the heart of the matter, are Gospel and Baedeker for these forbidding regions. Emerson, in his Mill And Thoreaus Analysis "The Transcendentalist," called "admirable radicals" those "intelligent and religious persons [who] withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living.
Their thought and emotion comes in like a flood, [they] lose no time, but take the right road at first. In the retrospect of the century since his death, he seems a strong spirit who, without wasting his strength on denial, chose the right road at first. Society as he found it, with its anxious competition and soul-exhausting materialism, repelled him. Institutionalized reform, full of talk without action, repelled him no less.
He said "no" to both the Establishment and its organized opponents, Mill And Thoreaus Analysis found his own way through to say "yes" before his God. I Yet the nature of Thoreau's dissent remains unclear. He is usually regarded as both a pacifist and an anarchist. In fact he was neither. Thoreau is commonly considered a pacifist because Gandhi acknowledged the impact of "Civil Disobedience" on the shaping of satyagraha. Thoreau's actual position, however, was the one he imputed to John Brown: a resolve that "he would never have anything to do with any war, unless it were a war for liberty.
Are you a first-time homebuyer?
I agree with him. I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave when I say, that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates Mill And Thoreaus Analysis. All of us, Thoreau continued, are protected by violence every day in the form of the jail, the gallows, the handcuffs and billy of the policeman. What Gandhi took from Thoreau was not pacifism this influence came rather from Tolstoybut the concept of civil disobedience.
Thoreau was not an anarchist, either. He wrote in "Civil Disobedience": "to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask, not at once no government, but at once a better government.
He felt contempt for the politician's tendency to avoid fundamental questions: "The available candidate," Thoreau observed, "is invariably the Devil. Petitioning might be well, but "the State has provided no way; its very Constitution is the evil. As Thoreau himself made clear, this was not anarchism Scarlet Letter revolution. These were the days when Congress required every citizen of the North to assist in capturing fugitive slaves, on pain Mill And Thoreaus Analysis imprisonment; when the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, ruled that a Negro could not be a United States citizen; when pro-Southern Presidents openly connived in extending the area of slavery.
Thoreau was only one of many who, under these circumstances, resolved to transfer allegiance from the United States Constitution to a still "higher law" Mill And Thoreaus Analysis universal morality. Sumner, Seward or Wendell Phillips could have said, as Thoreau did: I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep body and soul together, if it do not keep you and humanity together [then break the law]. In rejecting the government of the hour, Thoreau appealed, in the classical manner of revolutionaries, to the people at large.]
I apologise, but, in my opinion, you commit an error. I can defend the position.
I do not trust you
Excuse, that I can not participate now in discussion - it is very occupied. I will return - I will necessarily express the opinion on this question.