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Article: The Price of Privilege.("Civil Disobedience" at 150 )
- Article from:
- American Scholar
- Article date:
- September 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Phi Beta Kappa Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"Civil Disobedience" at 150
One hundred and fifty years ago, in a revolutionary season, Henry David Thoreau lectured at the Concord Lyceum on "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government." The philosopher and reformer Bronson Alcott, who came out on that January evening to hear his friend, reported that the mixed crowd of local working people and Boston intellectuals gave Thoreau "an attentive audience." Some months later, Thoreau's lecture was published under the title "Resistance to Civil Government," but we--like its earlier twentieth-century readers, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.--have come to know it as "Civil Disobedience." ...