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The Service
- Narrated by: Lee Winfield
- Length: 29 mins
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The Service
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Summary
Henry David Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. "The Service" (1840) is an essay that uses war and military discipline as metaphors for human life. Displaying a taste for paradox, "The Service" must have been inspired by the discourses on peace and nonresistance that were popular in New England at the time. The Christian anarchist and pacifist Adin Ballou spoke on the subject at the Concord Lyceum and founded the New England Non-Resistance Society of which the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a leader. Thoreau took a contrarian position, warning that pacifism can be a temptation to passivity. To the question of whether it was ever proper to offer forcible resistance, he argued the affirmative, and praised the “hearty good will and activity of war, rather than the insincerity and sloth of peace”.
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