History of Ideas: Thoreau
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Thoreau and the Machine Politics of the Civil War
Thoreau said this is what has to happen this thing will require violence he wasn't a gandian passive resistor in that sense Thoreau was quite happy to accept that the ultimate grit in the machinery of the state will be another form of violent machinery. The emancipation proclamation was part of a sequence of events that only makes sense in terms of the sequence it's very hard to understand it by abstracting it simply in terms of principles and many of the people who study it Struggle with this Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln is partly about how machine politics ended slavery.
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