Civil disobedience E-Book

Henry David Thoreau

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Henry David Thoreau, American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher, was born on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. One of the great protagonists of the “American Renaissance”, is considered one of the greatest American philosophers of all time. His essay Resistance to Civil Government, also known as Civil Disobedience, first published in 1849, was destined to become one of the most important manifestos against injustice and in favor of humanity’s freedom of thought and action. An essay today more than ever decidedly relevant, in an era in which the most fundamental freedoms and the rights of humanity have been questioned and limited by those power elites who hide behind governments and pursue the plans of a New World Order founded on slavery, control and submission. For Thoreau, conscience comes above law: we should be men first, and subjects afterward: «The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right».

Leseprobe

SYMBOLS & MYTHS

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

«The only obligation which I have a right to assume,

is to do at any time what I think right».

(Henry David Thoreau)

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: Civil disobedience

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Publishing series: Symbols & Myths

ISBN: 979-12-80130-46-4

Cover image: Jean-Marc Nattier: Allegory of Justice punishing Injustice, 1737

(Private Collection)

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

© 2022 Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Via del Fiordaliso 14 - 59100 Prato - Italia

[email protected]

www.auroraboreale-edizioni.com

HENRY DAVID THOREAU AND THE REAL MEANING OF FREEDOM

By Nicola Bizzi

Henry David Thoreau, American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher, was born on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, into the “modest New England family” of John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar. His father was of French Protestant descent, his paternal grandfather had been born on the UK crown dependency island of Jersey, and his maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvard’s 1766 student “Butter Rebellion”, the first recorded student protest in the American colonies. He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia.

He studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837 and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science, becoming a member of the Institute of 1770 (a social club for Harvard students now the Hasty Pudding Club). According to legend, Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee (approximately equivalent to $136 in 2021) for a Harvard diploma. 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”. He commented, «Let every sheep keep its own skin», a reference to the tradition of using sheepskin vellum for diplomas.

The traditional professions open to college graduates – law, the church, business, medicine – did not interest Thoreau, so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught at a school in Canton, Massachusetts, living for two years at an earlier version of today’s Colonial Inn in Concord. His grandfather owned the earliest of the three buildings that were later combined. After he graduated in 1837, Thoreau joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but he resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. He and his brother John then opened the Concord Academy, a grammar school in Concord, in 1838. They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving.

Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend. Emerson, who was fourteen years his senior, took a paternal and at times patron-like interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne, who was a boy at the time.

Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dial, and lobbied the editor, Margaret Fuller, to publish those writings. Thoreau’s first essay published in The Dial was Aulus Persius Flaccus, an essay on the Roman poet and satirist, in July 1840. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson’s suggestion. The first journal entry, on October 22, 1837, reads, «“What are you doing now?” he asked. “Do you keep a journal?”. So I make my first entry to-day».