Civil disobedience encompasses the active refusal to obey certain laws, demands and commands of a government or of an occupying power without resorting to physical violence. Civil disobedience has been used in nonviolent resistance movements in India in the fight against British colonialism, South Africa in the fight against apartheid and in the civil rights movement of the USA and Europe as well as in the Scandinavian resistance against Nazi occupation. (Suber, pp.110-113)
Richard Lenat has complied the work of The American author Henry David Thoreau pioneered the modern theory behind this practice in his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government". The driving idea behind the essay was that of self-reliance, and how one is in morally good standing as long as they "get off another man's back"; so you don't have to physically fight the government, but you must not support it or have it support you (if you are against it). (Thoreau, p. 15)
I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections, which have been brought against, a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. (Emerson, p. 43)
The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode, which the people have chosen.......
