Henry David Thoreau's Analysis

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Henry David Thoreau states that “Law never made men a whit more just” saying that law is what was controlling men with a government and the laws that everybody should abide by. Yet Thoreau has not wanted to follow this type of injustice government because in his time government was only doing what the law told everyone, which was to be a racist, own slaves, and lets go to war. The way that Thoreau was seeing this was that if the government who abided by these and many other laws that were unjust then our government must not have a conscience. The definition of a conscience is, “An inner feeling or voice acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one’s behavior” and what Thoreau is specifying is that in order to have a good government …show more content…
The act of having the conscience is just the beginning; the act of making that conscience work in a way that each individual shows his or her good side is the full cycle of how powerful a conscience is. According to the book “Patriotism and other Mistakes” by George Kateb, “when a consciences person obeys the government, one obeys only the right that government happens to do, not the government itself.” Kateb also shows what Thoreau states on how a government is also not a successful institution due to it not having some sort of conscience that would show government official what it is that they are doing wrong. “Thoreau does not acknowledge the legitimacy of any government. Government can’t be legitimate: in itself even a properly constituted political authority can never be worthy of obedience for what it is. No human institution is above individual conscience.” (Kateb 266) Thoreau also shows in Civil disobedience that not all laws are created with the mindset that they are made for the good of the people but for the benefit that the people can have such as slavery, war, and the funds to be used in these categories such as taxes. Thoreau states in Civil Disobedience “a very few heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men serve the state with their conscience, also and so necessarily resist if for the most
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