In “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), better known as “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau writes about the night he spent in jail for refusing to pay taxes that he believed supported slavery and a war of expansion in Mexico. Urging us to act likewise on our own deepest convictions, he articulates individual conscience as a revolutionary force in American politics. No writer has made a more persuasive case for obeying a “higher law” when faced with supporting an act or policy that violates it.

Writing more than a century later, in an essay called “Civil Disobedience,” Hannah Arendt offers a very different view. For Arendt, disobedience to unjust laws is never the work of the lone individual conscience but rather arises out of the long tradition of voluntary association in America. Noting that dissent and tacit consent exist in constant tension in a democratic society, she argues that only through public and collective action can meaningful political change be brought about.

These two seminal essays, presented here with an introduction by acclaimed political thinker Roger Berkowitz, take on new resonance when read together. As we grapple with how to respond to threats to democracy at home and abroad, they have never been more essential.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was America’s greatest nature writer and a political thinker of international significance. Best known today for Walden (1854), he wrote more than two dozen probative essays on a range of topics, including “Resistance to Civil Government” in 1849. His collected works are published in a two-volume Library of America edition.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the foremost political philosophers of the twentieth century, the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution, and the posthumously published The Life of the Mind. Her commentaries on modern American and European politics and on the history of political thought were collected in Essays in Understanding, Thinking without a Banister, and Responsibility and Judgment.

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics.

The paperback edition features French flaps and has been printed on acid-free paper.