Socrates and Thoreau: Unjust Law and Breaking the Social Contract

For Plato's Socrates in Crito, citizens make an implicit and just agreement to either obey the law or persuade the State to change it. But what if a law is unjust? Must we wait to persuade the State to change an unjust law?

Socrates does not really consider the possibility that some unjust laws ought to be broken at once, as Henry David Thoreau argues. I have discussed Thoreau's principle that we must resist and disobey the law when it forces us to be direct agents of injustice to others. This strikes me as more just than Socrates' insistence on working within the political system so as to avoid breaking our social contract. Perhaps in his historical and political context, Socrates assumed that citizens can have a very direct and effective influence upon the State for changing the law. Surely, for Socrates in Crito, the good life is directly tied to living in a good and just city, ordered and well-governed (53c-e). The personal conscience of the individual cannot lead him to disassociation from the City, as it could, much later in history, for nineteenth-century American Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau goes so far as to suggest that a conscientious, just citizen, ready to rule him- or herself ethically and politically, can break the social contract, especially in order to resist injustice. In his essay “Walking,” this person becomes “a sort of fourth estate — outside to Church and State and People.” This is part of his ideal anarchism and of his wildness as political act. Each person's moral sense and conscience are above the principles of any such alleged social contract.

In “Resistance to Civil Government,” for example, Thoreau recalls how he refused to pay a sum of money, charged by the State, for supporting a clergyman of the Church his father had attended, since he was not himself a member of the Church. He did not persuade the State to change the law; he refused to pay the tax. Later, he writes,

At the request of the selectmen, I condescended to make some such statement as this in writing: — "Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined." This I gave to the town clerk; and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find a complete list.

This is a direct challenge to the Socratic concept that we have made implicit agreements that bind us necessarily to obedience, even in the face of injustice. For Thoreau, no such presumption can be made, certainly not at the expense of freedom of conscience and moral action. I tend to agree. I have never signed or agreed to any social contract that is superior to my moral sense. And I do not wish to do so.

Note: Text cited from Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates, Trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1975).