On Civil Disobedience

by Hannah Arendt, Roger Berkowitz (editor), Henry David Thoreau

Together for the first time, classic essays on how and when to disobey the government from two of the greatest thinkers in our literature

As we grapple with how to respond to emerging threats against democracy, Library of America brings together for the first time two seminal essays about the duties of citizenship and the imperatives of conscience.

In “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), Henry David Thoreau recounts the story of a night he spent in jail for refusing to pay poll taxes, which he believed supported the Mexican American War and the expansion of slavery. His larger aim was to articulate a view of individual conscience as a force in American politics. No writer has made a more persuasive case for obedience to a “higher law.”  

In “Civil Disobedience” (1970), Hannah Arendt offers a stern rebuttal to Thoreau. For Arendt, Thoreau stands in willful opposition to the public and collective spirit that defines civil disobedience. Only through positive collective action and the promises we make to each other in a civil society can meaningful change occur. 

This deluxe paperback features an introduction by Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College, who reflects on the tradition of civil disobedience and the future of American politics.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Social Justice, Essays

112 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 10, 2024

About the author

Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).

Reviews

[Darcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very poignant expression of similar notions separated by over a hundred years. Two people sharing a country that is worlds apart yet so unchanging. While Thoreau remarks on the individual's responsibility to act as a 'counter friction' when facing detestable acts of one's own government (in his time, slavery and American campaigns into Mexico), Arendt comments on the necessity of governmental reform to protect the American tradition of voluntary association and its role in influencing governmental action (influenced by her perspectives on the Civil Rights movement, protests against the Vietnam War, and likely her personal experience as a German citizen during Hitler's rise to power.) These essays remain indelibly important to the American political consciousness, especially at a time when disillusionment with the government, bureaucracy, and the two party system is once more increasing in the minds and hearts of the American people.

[Andrew Pineda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let every man make known what kind of government would earn his respect.

Dissent implies consent, and it is the hallmark of free government. One who knows that he may dissent knows that he somehow consents when he does not dissent.

Thoreau walked so Arendt could run or something like that. Two fantastic essays that really challenged my perspective of my place in civil and social apparatuses. I've written down more than a dozen quotes just like the ones above that really made me think. I will be recommending this to everyone.

[Sam Jensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given the state of things, it’s important to consider our relationship to the authority we give to our government (not the other way around), and how we will respond when laws force us to choose between injustice and law-breaking.

[Brian Burnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prescient, precise, and leaves no room for moral levity. Hannah Arendt vouches for the resuscitation of civil duty; Henry David Thoreau teaches us an important lesson on personal responsibility.

An apt response to the criminality of our government looks more daunting than ever, but this book offers a reprise on a course of action whose routes can be traced back all the way back to pre-colonial America. It's a path that settles upon the importance of individual values; one that gives prudence to the agent as part of a group and a story - a story emboldened by the Spirit of The Constitution. Hannah Arendt turns the Great American Mythos on its head. The truly Moral American, Arendt says, must return to Monke. We must turn communal deliberation, the sort which could only be found in The Town Squares of 18th Century America. In uncovering our shared goals, we - as We The People - can breath life into the political virtues birthed by Colonial Revolutionaries. Its pretty clear that those virtues are currently being taken out-back and shot in the kneecaps by the current administration.

Arendt co-ops the Revolutionary narrative, and it serves as a persuasive cure to the suffering under an increasingly totalitarian condition. Read this book me thinks.

[Clara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Putting these two essays together in a collection was a genius move. Berkowitz's introduction is arguably the best part of it, but reading Arendt's essay and his analysis of it made me want to read more of her political philosophy.

[Taha Tariq · Rating 4 out of 5]

No other book I’ve read has hit me at the exact moment it needed to the way this one did. I finished it in 2025 while ICE continues to rip through communities, denying people due process, and as Western governments fund and provide cover for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The “social contract” feels like it’s already been torn apart. This book has me thinking about what it really means to obey and when does disobedience become a duty.

Thoreau offers a personal act of resistance. He refuses to pay a poll tax because of his opposition to slavery and the war against Mexico. He gets thrown in jail for one night before his aunt bails him out. Nothing changes at the level of policy, and it’s easy to dismiss the gesture as performative. But it’s symbolic in a way that forces a deeper question. How complicit am I in the actions of my government? If I keep paying taxes, am I enabling what I oppose?

It’s a heavy question to sit with. Right now, I can’t help but think about where my own tax dollars go. A portion of those are sent to arm and support a state actively committing war crimes. Would it be right for me to withhold them? Thoreau’s kind of civil disobedience feels limited. It puts the individual at risk, maybe silences them through punishment, and doesn’t always move the needle.

That’s where Hannah Arendt comes in. She takes Thoreau’s story and stretches it open, asking bigger questions about what actually counts as political action. For Arendt, it’s not enough to follow your conscience in private. She thinks that action has to be public, shared, and done with others. That’s where change happens. She shows this by pointing to movements like the Civil Rights struggle, where people acted together in a way that created space for something new.

I really appreciate her writing and how it’s concise but meaningful. I especially liked her analysis of the social contract and how fragile it actually is. She doesn’t sugarcoat anything, but she makes the complexity of these systems digestible.

Still, I walked away from this book feeling a little stuck. Both Henry and Hannah challenge me to think more seriously about what disobedience looks like, but neither gives much in the way of a plan. I’m left thinking about civil disobedience more than I ever have, but unsure what my next step is.

That said, I’d recommend it. Especially right now. People are angry, frustrated, and tired of waiting for change. This book doesn’t tell you what to do, but it forces you to start asking yourself the harder questions. And maybe that’s where any real action begins.

[Melle · Rating 4 out of 5]

On Civil Disobedience is a book containing 3 items, an introduction and two essays, the first by Thoreau and the second, divided into multiple parts, by Arendt.
Being completely honest, I'd only picked up this book to satisfy a want for non-fiction as I waited for another book to arrive, and I solely picked this because I saw Hannah Arendts name on the cover. With Arendt being the subject to study the next week for university, I figured it'd be worth to read something written by her, not paying attention to what it really was. I feel slightly bad for Thoreau as I didn't even notice his name on the cover at first, and I had no idea what civil disobedience was, nor was I really interested in it.
The lack of knowledge beforehand did make it all the more interesting however, and this small book contains some great information on the subject. It did make me feel slightly dumb at times, as I had to look up a word I didn't know every few pages, but other than that I had a great time making small notations and markings in the book where I found necessary.
It's not some philosophical work that makes you rethink your life when at the end a great veil has been lifted, but it does give some nice nuance and context to the concept of civil disobedience, tendencies of societies, politics and conscience, with a focus on America through time.
Thoreau and Arendt give two separate views on the concept, with Arendts reaction and analysis of Thoreaus ideas recontextualizing civil disobedience and giving it that much more depth, referencing a ton of other authors and thinkers as she does, showcasing the timelessness and intrigue of civil disobedience as we know it today.
While I can say that this is a book that not everyone may like, as it is both non-fiction and on quite a specific topic, I would still like to recommend this to anyone who wants some food for thought. The things that surround civil disobedience go a lot deeper than I'd initially suspected, and there are a lot of small points of interest that you will be able to see reflected in your day to day life that this book illuminates.
A short but very interesting book that has added its share to my worldview; a definitive recommendation.

[Emily Bacon · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I stumbled upon this rendition of Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience” by chance, I am certainly glad I read his work in conjunction with Hannah Arendt’s response. Arendt builds on Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience, classifying its importance in modern day society. She positions that civil disobedience exists based on the prerequisite that mutual association is present, meaning the opinion is cited by a group rather than solely belonging to the conscience of the individual.

It’s quite interesting to see how Thoreau’s assertion aged between the time of his publication versus Arendt’s response. Arendt frequently presents that the largest inhibitor of the success of a governmental framework is change. Yet, change is unavoidable, and we happen to live in a time period when the velocity of change only increases by the day. Pairing these two accounts together allows the reader to examine just that — 100 years of change between words building off the same core principles.

The final sentiment of Thoreau and Arendt’s work is that civil disobedience must exist for a government built on consent to thrive. For only in the presence of dissent can a government’s laws be iteratively corrected in the face of previously existing injustice and forward facing change. This only rings even more true today, as the two-party democratic system threatens to be its own demise. The voices of marginalized, mutually associated groups must be elevated and included in policy discussions to achieve a government that accounts for the wellbeing of all that consent to it.

Last thought — Thoreau’s objection to the “representative” style government struck me. He argued that because the constitution did not specify a place for frequent public political participation by all *individuals*, the representative would become stratified from the people, and the people from the representative. The lack of interest of the people in politics will only contribute to the country’s demise, but could it have been avoided?

[Huck Lanier · Rating 4 out of 5]

We have the obligation to collective response and civil disobedience to any laws we do not consent to and has been evidenced of being oppressive to those within a community's caucus. We must stand COLLECTIVLY IN SOCIAL CONTRACT within acts of civil disobedience or else it runs the risk of enabling a continuation of systemic unjust law enforcement.

The issues among early politically disobedient action (described with American antebellum political consciousness by Thoreau) are addressed, critiqued, and expanded upon by Arendt extensively. Both are old white philosophers discussing matters of systemic oppression to both the Black communities, Latine communities, and Asian/Middle eastern nations (Vietnam), so the language does feel a bit westernized at times, however all the arguments and stances (taken especially by Arendt) are towards the work of developing a cultural consciousness with respect to race/ethnicity within the political discussions of the Civil Rights Movement.

[Chris Steude · Rating 4 out of 5]

A prescient read in a time where one branch of the government is both saying it disregards extant laws and claiming that it has authority to unilaterally interpret its laws- there’s really something to the assertion that authority only really is earned through feasible enforceability. The line to not obey in advance aligns directly with civil disobedience in not allowing that the unlawful or unacceptable orders have any actual authority.

Arendt is obviously writing from the perspective of the Vietnam war’s unconstitutionality. It seems almost quaint given we’ve had like 4 or 5 other unlawful wars in my lifetime.

[Hudson Lazzara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve heard a take that Thoreau is kind of naive and full of himself, this essay doesn’t dispel that notion. I mean he spent one night in jail and someone else paid the tax to get him out. Arendt’s essay was much more technical and I would say insightful. Funnily enough, I think the introduction was actually the most digestible part and included most of the major insights of both, like the fourteenth amendment point.

Another interesting observation was that they both used the male third person (and terms like “man”) generically. You could see it as just a convention for Arendt, but Thoreau deeefinitely meant it as guys.

[Jake Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

not really a book and i read this essay in a 30 minute sitting at a bookstore but quite good. my first time reading a full Arendt essay, made some interesting points on consent/dissent and American exceptionalism(?)

[Andre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super enjoyable to read the depth of thought in Arendt's writing. Thoreau sets the stage and then Arendt delivers!
Thanks for this treasure, Anna!

[Julian Adler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting to compare ways on proper protest and what it means to stand up for what an individual thinks is right

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seemed topical for some reason 🤷‍♂️

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every person living in America should read this. (Has the fascist rollout banned these authors yet?)

[Charlotte M]

dated, possibly

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

5/5 thoreau
2/5 ardent

[libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

important. but fairly dense academic writing which sometimes irritates me.

[C. Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

She’s excellent at explaining semi-complex topics with clarity. For example, her laying out the three kinds of “social contract” governments of the 17th century - biblical covenant, Hobbesian, and Locke (most similar to US).

I do question the crime statistics she outlines of 1/100 crimes being properly dealt with judiciously.

There was also the ubiquitous misunderstanding of America’s race issues by European writers. (Another example is Sartre’s well-intentioned but poorly-executed play about a southern black man and a white hooker and rape claims and a mob and mayoral corruption and lynchings [a very trope-y tale at that point ] Sartre & Arendt & others may have had an academic understanding but their execution always comes off hollow & myopically voyeuristic. As Montaigne often complained - everyone wants to talk about things they have a layman’s knowledge of, and never their expertise.)

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The essay by Thoreau is one of my all time favorites.