It creates a literary context for the essay from Thoreau's earlier writing on politics and resistance Coleridge's The Friend, The Statesman's Manual, and Aids to Reflection the political essays of Orestes Brownson William Paley's The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy and the political essays of Emerson. It gathers the pertinent facts of Thoreau's political activism: his signing off from the church his refusal to pay the poll tax the arrest and jailing as a result of that refusal and the circumstances of the composition of the essay, its delivery as an essay, and its publication in 1849. The present study summarizes and supplements those attempts. Heretofore, studies have connected Thoreau to the idealism of classical Greece to the eighteenth-century rationalists and utilitarians, including William Paley's The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy to the romantic rebels of the eighteenth century, Rousseau and Godwin to the native tradition of anarchism to the frontier to the laissez-faire economics of the nineteenth-century America to Unitarianism to the moral idealism, perfectionism, and utopianism of Thoreau's age to abolitionism and non-resistance and to Ralph Waldo Emerson. While a few studies have attempted to place Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" in a historical and literary context, there is no book-length study of that context.
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