More urgent than ever: as we grapple with how to respond to emerging threats against democracy, Library of America brings together two seminal essays about the duties of citizenship and the imperatives of conscience
Together for the first time, classic essays on how and when to disobey the government from two of the greatest thinkers in our literature.
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.”
Books
The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition
An activist and thinker whose work resists simple categorization, Arendt writes with a stunning lucidity that resonates with intellectuals and the reading public alike. Her writing continues to delight and inspire, even as she asks us to confront the most haunting questions of our time.
All Books
The Gift of Science
In The Gift of Science, a bold, revisionist account of 300 years of jurisprudence, Roger Berkowitz looks beyond these headlines to explore the historical and philosophical roots of our current legal and ethical crisis.
Thinking In Dark Times: Hannah Arendt On Ethics And Politics
The interest of these materials, most shown here for the first time, adds to the accessibility and incisive immediacy of the essays.The volume will offer provocations and insights to Arendt scholars, students discovering Arendt's work, and general readers attracted to Arendt's vision of the importance of thinking in our own dark times.
Artifacts of Thinking:Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch
Hannah Arendt’s intellectual diary, her Denktagebuch, is a unique record of an intellectual life and one of the most fascinating and compelling archives of twentieth-century literature, political thought, and philosophy.
The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis
Including articles, interviews, and commentary from leading scholars and business executives, this volume offers views that are as diverse as they are timely. By reaching beyond "how" the crisis happened to "why" the crisis happened, the authors re-imagine the recent financial crisis and thus provide fresh thinking about how to respond.