What three ways did Thoreau say a citizen may serve the state? With which did Thoreau agree?

We find Thoreau’s three categories of service outlined in paragraph 5 of “Civil Disobedience.” He is brutally honest with his opinions of all three.

Military and law enforcement officials, at all levels. “The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus[a body of armed men summoned by a sheriff to enforce the law]....

We find Thoreau’s three categories of service outlined in paragraph 5 of “Civil Disobedience.” He is brutally honest with his opinions of all three.

Military and law enforcement officials, at all levels. “The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus [a body of armed men summoned by a sheriff to enforce the law]. . . Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses or dogs.” In other words, law enforcement officials act as workers who merely follow and enforce orders from others without bothering to question their validity or appropriateness to the situation at hand.

Legislators and civil servants. “Others – as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders – serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.” These employees generally act as interpreters; but at the same time, they have the trajectories of their own careers to consider. Some of their decisions could therefore be seen as more self-serving than committed to the good of the community.

Resisters and radicals. “A very few – as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men – serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.” These individuals act from their hearts and souls, following their own inner “higher law” of morality. These are people Thoreau admires, and he clearly sees himself aligned more closely with them. Here he foreshadows and explains – more than a decade before the fact – his future admiration for John Brown and his radical attempts to end slavery in the late 1850s.