Editing Civil disobedience (section)

== Etymology ==
[[File:Benjamin D. Maxham - Henry David Thoreau - Restored - greyscale - straightened.jpg|thumb|[[Henry David Thoreau]]'s classic essay ''[[Civil Disobedience (Thoreau)|Civil Disobedience]]'' inspired [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] and many other [[Activism|activists]].]]

[[Henry David Thoreau]]'s 1849 essay "Resistance to Civil Government" was eventually renamed "Essay on Civil Disobedience". After his landmark lectures were published in 1866, the term began to appear in numerous sermons and lectures relating to slavery and the war in Mexico.<ref>"The Gospel Applied to the Fugitive Slave Law" (1851). a sermon, by Oliver Stearns</ref><ref>"The Higher Law", in Its Application to the Fugitive Slave Bill:&nbsp;... by John Newell and [[John Chase Lord]] (1851)</ref><ref>The Limits of Civil Disobedience: A Sermon&nbsp;..., by [[Nathaniel Hall]] (1851)</ref><ref>The Duty and Limitations of Civil Disobedience: A Discourse, by [[Samuel Colcord Bartlett]] (1853)</ref> Thus, by the time Thoreau's lectures were first published under the title "Civil Disobedience", in 1866, four years after his death, the term had achieved fairly widespread usage.

It has been argued that the term "civil disobedience" has always suffered from ambiguity and in modern times, become utterly debased. Marshall Cohen notes, "It has been used to describe everything from bringing a test-case in the federal courts to [[taking aim at a federal official]]. Indeed, for [[Vice President of the United States|Vice President]] [[Spiro Agnew]] it has become a code-word describing the activities of muggers, arsonists, draft evaders, campaign hecklers, campus militants, anti-war demonstrators, juvenile delinquents and political assassins."<ref>{{citation|title=Civil Disobedience in a Constitutional Democracy|author=Marshall Cohen|publisher=The Massachusetts Review|volume=10|issue=2|date=Spring 1969|pages=211–226}}</ref>

LeGrande writes that
{{Blockquote|the formulation of a single all-encompassing definition of the term is extremely difficult, if not impossible. In reviewing the voluminous literature on the subject, the student of civil disobedience rapidly finds himself surrounded by a maze of [[semantic]]al problems and grammatical niceties. Like [[Alice in Wonderland]], he often finds that specific terminology has no more (or no less) meaning than the individual orator intends it to have.}}
He encourages a distinction between lawful protest demonstration, nonviolent civil disobedience, and violent civil disobedience.<ref>{{citation|publisher=Northwestern University|doi=10.2307/1141639|title=Nonviolent Civil Disobedience and Police Enforcement Policy|author=J. L. LeGrande|volume=58|issue=3|date=Sep 1967|journal=The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science|pages=393–404|jstor=1141639|url=http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5472&context=jclc|access-date=20 April 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180719121703/https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5472&context=jclc|archive-date=19 July 2018|url-status=live}}</ref>

In a letter to P.&nbsp;K. Rao, dated 10 September 1935, Gandhi disputes that his idea of civil disobedience was derived from the writings of Thoreau:<ref>Letter to P.K. Rao, Servants of India Society, 10 September 1935, Letter quoted in Louis Fischer's, ''The Life of Mahatma Gandhi'', Part I, Chapter 11, pp. 87–88.</ref>

<blockquote>The statement that I had derived my idea of Civil Disobedience from the writings of Thoreau is wrong. The resistance to authority in South Africa was well advanced before I got the essay&nbsp;... When I saw the title of Thoreau's great essay, I began to use his phrase to explain our struggle to the English readers. But I found that even "Civil Disobedience" failed to convey the full meaning of the struggle. I therefore adopted the phrase "Civil Resistance."</blockquote>