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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Concepts
- Sprache: Englisch
What is civil disobedience? Although Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King helped to bring the idea to prominence, even today it remains unclear how we should best understand civil disobedience. Why have so many different activists and intellectuals embraced it, and to what ends? Is civil disobedience still politically relevant in today's hyper-connected world? Does it make sense, for example, to describe Edward Snowden's actions, or those of recent global movements like Occupy, as falling under this rubric? If so, how must it adapt to respond to the challenges of digitalization and globalization and the rise of populist authoritarianism in the West? In this elegantly written introductory text, William E. Scheuerman systematically analyzes the most important interpretations of civil disobedience. Drawing out the striking differences separating religious, liberal, radical democratic, and anarchist views, he nonetheless shows that core commonalities remain. Against those who water down the idea of civil disobedience or view it as obsolescent, Scheuerman successfully salvages its central elements. The concept of civil disobedience, he argues, remains a pivotal tool for anyone hoping to bring about political and social change.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Table of Contents
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Why civil disobedience?
Which civil disobedience?
Whither civil disobedience?
Notes
1: Divine Witness
Civil disobedience and
satyagraha
Principled lawbreaking
Gandhi goes to America
Getting right with God – or your fellow citizens?
Notes
2: Liberalism and its Limits
Civil disobedience vs. conscientious objection
Recasting the die
Disobedience and the rule of law
Beyond liberalism?
Notes
3: Deepening Democracy
Zinn's challenge
Civil disobedience, law, and the revolutionary spirit
Civil disobedience: between legality and democratic legitimacy
Beyond the state?
Notes
4: Anarchist Uprising
Political anarchism and direct action
Philosophical anarchism: Back to Locke and Thoreau?
Surviving anarchism
Notes
5: Postnationalization and Privatization
Revisiting Rawls
Postnationalization and privatization
Novel threats to Rawlsian civil disobedience
What remains? Rawlsian civil disobedience today
Notes
6: Digitalization
Digital disobedience, surveillance, and the rule of law
Digital lawbreaking as civil disobedience?
Beyond civil disobedience?
Notes
7: Tilting at Windmills?
The ghost of John Rawls
Anti-legalism
Practical ramifications
Notes
Conclusion
Civil disobedience now
Civil disobedience for authoritarians and racists?
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Copyright page
Copyright © William E. Scheuerman 2018
The right of William E. Scheuerman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1862-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1863-0(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Scheuerman, William E., 1965- author.
Title: Civil disobedience / William E. Scheuerman.
Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017021115 (print) | LCCN 2017023718 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509518654 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509518661 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509518623 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509518630 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Civil disobedience–Juvenile literature.
Classification: LCC JC328.3 (ebook) | LCC JC328.3 .S254 2018 (print) | DDC 303.6/1–dc23
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Dedication
For my parents
Acknowledgments
The initial inspiration for writing this volume came from Edward Snowden, whose 2013 whistleblowing jolted me out of my scholastic slumbers and forced me to think hard about politically motivated lawbreaking and how to make sense of it. Donald Trump's ascendancy later provided a frightening reminder of why it remains vital that we understand civil disobedience.
Robin Celikates and Maeve Cooke accompanied the journey, generously supporting my efforts and commenting on components of the manuscript, as have two colleagues, Russell Hanson and Jeffrey Isaac. I have learned a great deal from all of them.
I presented earlier versions of the ideas developed here at my home institution, Indiana University, and Amsterdam University, Copenhagen Business School, Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften (Bad Homburg), Goethe University (Frankfurt), Hamburg University, Humboldt University (Berlin), Notre Dame University (Indiana), Seoul National University, University College Dublin, University of Memphis, University of Pennsylvania, University of Toronto, and the University of York (UK). As always, the annual Prague critical theory conference on philosophy and social sciences, for which I have been fortunate to serve as co-director, provided ample opportunities to garner critical feedback. Lively audiences there and elsewhere forced me to think more clearly about what I was trying to say. Special thanks to Kimberley Brownlee, Simone Chambers, Gabriella Coleman, Aurelian Craiutu, Verena Erlenbusch, Alessandro Ferrara, Rainer Forst, Jeffrey Green, Joohyung Kim, Poul Kjaer, Mihaela Mihai, Brian Milstein, Darrel Moellendorf, Peter Niesen, Niklas Olsen, Danielle Petherbridge, Maria Pia Lara, Martin Sauter, Sandra Shapshay, Jon Simons, Jiewuh Song, Ernesto Verdeja, Susan Williams, and Theresa Züger.
During the summer and fall of 2016, the idyllic Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg, Germany, hosted my family. I thank Rainer Forst for making the visit possible, and Beate Sutterlüty, Iris Koban, and Andreas Reichhardt for their patience and support. Without their efforts, I would never have completed the volume. The Humboldt Stiftung, the German-American Fulbright Commission, and Indiana University helped finance the research stay. Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser generously endorsed my fellowship applications.
Some sections of articles from Journal of International Political Theory, Journal of Political Philosophy, New Political Science, and Philosophy and Social Criticism have been reworked into this text. Thanks to a host of anonymous reviewers, and Jocelyn Borycka, Bob Goodin, Patrick Hayden, and David Rasmussen, for providing sound editorial advice at earlier stages. At Polity, Louise Knight and Nekane Tanaka Galdos were a pleasure to work with.
My debts to Julia, Zoe, and Lily transcend my limited literary and stylistic talents.
Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents, Bill and Louise, with the hope that we will enjoy another great half century together. Thank you.
Introduction
Why civil disobedience?
A loose collection of activists targeting police racism and brutality, Black Lives Matter (BLM) got its name from Alicia Garza, who first used the term in a July 2013 Facebook post criticizing the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who had shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a black teen. The 2014 police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, followed by other widely publicized incidents of police violence, rapidly ignited protests organized by younger black activists. Beyond the usual mix of demonstrations, marches, and vigils, BLM soon embraced more controversial tactics, including some deemed illegal by public authorities and, not surprisingly, culminating in arrests. Protestors occupied police stations and police union offices, blockaded major highways and mass transit systems, interrupted political speakers (including Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders), and disrupted shoppers in large malls and downtown shopping districts. Though its activities have generally been nonviolent, some have resulted in the destruction of property and scuffles with police (Lowery 2016).
BLM has generated sympathy among political progressives, some of whom view it as a rightful heir to the 1960s US civil rights movements and Martin Luther King's vision of nonviolent civil disobedience. On the political right, in sharp contrast, prominent figures – including President Donald Trump – accuse the group of instigating violence against police officers, describing its actions as reckless and incongruent with the “rule of law,” an idea conservatives tend to conflate with “law and order.”1 Right-wing pundits often draw clear lines between a saintly King and what they deplore as BLM's propensity for violence and white-bashing.
A third – and more sophisticated – response comes from an older generation of African-American activists, some of whom marched with King yet worry the movement has abandoned his ideas. They accuse its proponents of lacking the requisite spiritual orientation and failing to appreciate why conscientious lawbreaking demands public displays of dignity, decorum, and self-discipline. BLM, on their view, has not done enough to delineate its actions from those of street thugs and looters. It needs to think harder about how to mobilize majority support for its grievances. Recent activists have given lucid expression to legitimate black frustration, but not enough thought as to how best to funnel it in morally sound and politically productive ways (Kennedy 2015; Reynolds 2015).
While also claiming inspiration from King, BLM has responded by distancing itself from his patriarchal and occasionally conservative religious views. The group rejects the “respectability politics ethos” of older civil rights activism, touting its own preference for less hierarchical, centralized organizational forms. In contrast to the electoral reformism of the present-day black political elite (and its close ties to the Democratic Party), the activists doubt that “the American system is salvageable, because it is so deeply rooted in ideas of racial caste.”2 Accordingly, the movement has spurned efforts by elected leaders and other political figures to embrace its cause, seeing in them a real danger of cooptation. Its defenders have also pushed back against sanitized readings of King's tactics, pointing out that he and his followers were also frequently accused of fomenting unrest and violence (Sebastian 2015).
What should we make of these competing interpretations? BLM has in fact broken the law and engaged in behavior that has sometimes rattled even sympathizers. Should we highlight the movement's apparent disdain for legality? Does it make sense to view its endeavors as essentially lawless and criminal? Though the movement's participants have by no means always categorized their activities as civil disobedience, the term appears frequently in discussions of them. One reason is that the concept “civil disobedience” possesses a moral and political cachet that alternatives – most obviously, “crime” or “illegality” – lack. With this moral and political capital also come some modest legal gains: when politically motivated lawbreakers convince a judge or jury that their actions constitute civil disobedience, in some jurisdictions they can count on less severe treatment than those who fail to do so.3 Protestors may get off with a reduced sentence, or some realistic expectation of clemency in the not-too-distant future. They can also successfully claim the mantle of iconic practitioners of civil disobedience such as King and Mahatma Gandhi, in the process garnering a valuable measure of public recognition for their actions.
Our answers to these questions, in short, are politically consequential, and the stakes for real-life activists high. BLM's case, to be sure, is of special interest to US citizens (and, of course, people everywhere repulsed by racism).4 Yet parallel questions emerge in many other contexts. We are witnessing a proliferation of politically motivated illegalities, some familiar and some less so, with activists, their supporters, and critics regularly debating whether the illegalities in question deserve to be described as civil disobedience.
A similar controversy, for example, has broken out about whether mass migrations of peoples across state borders, like those that have recently brought millions to Germany, Greece, Turkey, and smaller countries such as Austria and Sweden, might be sensibly characterized as civil disobedience. Those illegally crossing borders in search of a decent job, for example, apparently view legal entry requirements as unjust, and when violating laws prohibiting their free movement do so nonviolently. Even when crossing borders covertly, they may subsequently take on occupations making them visible to a broader public. Their actions also generate public debate about immigration and refugee policies, spurring calls for legal changes. On one interpretation, illegal migrants are implicitly appealing to some nascent idea of global or cosmopolitan justice that favors human rights over national prerogatives (Cabrera 2010: 131–53). Since their acts seem to meet some of the usual tests of legitimate civil disobedience, why not describe them as such?
This and related queries seem increasingly inescapable. Given substantial popular dissatisfaction with the normal workings even of longstanding liberal democracies, large numbers of people are now willing to pursue unconventional and legally suspect protest. In well-functioning liberal democracies, political decisions should be made via normal lawmaking channels; those seeking legal and policy changes should not be driven to break the law in personally risky ways. Unfortunately, it is no longer clear that many liberal democracies are in fact sufficiently well-functioning. The present crisis of democracy, as manifest in burgeoning mass apathy, populist rage against political elites, and the decline of mainstream political parties, likely portends a growing prominence for politically motivated lawbreaking. Alarming authoritarian trends also probably mean that incidents of grassroots or oppositional lawbreaking will increase, as citizens push back against top-down attacks on civil liberties and democracy.
We need to understand civil disobedience, its key components, what they entail, and how and why it involves a special type of lawbreaking, one that in principle may be deserving of our respect even when we find the political cause or activists behind it disagreeable. Why does it matter? Since Gandhi and King, the concept of civil disobedience has appealed especially to those hoping to bring about positive social change. Responsible political action today – as in the past – presupposes conceptual and terminological clarity. We want a notion of civil disobedience that potentially allows us to situate it coherently within a broader field of related political terms, even if messy social realities unavoidably get in the way of airtight conceptual distinctions. For both political and theoretical reasons, to be examined below, one tendency in recent years has been a certain blurring of the lines between notions of civil disobedience, on the one hand, and other politically motivated illegalities, on the other. Both normative and empirical literatures now speak broadly of political resistance, nonviolent or otherwise.5 In contemporary political discourse as well, resistance functions as a diffuse catch-all concept, masking a diversity of competing political tactics and ideological perspectives. Unfortunately, this trend sometimes comes with a hidden price tag: we risk losing a sufficiently precise understanding of civil disobedience and its distinctive traits.6
Unlike those that jettison the term “civil disobedience” for generic and potentially less precise conceptual alternatives, this book tries to hold on to it. To do so successfully, we need to explore the concept's nuances as well as possible ambiguities and frailties.
Which civil disobedience?
One way to proceed would be offer another full-fledged political philosophy of civil disobedience. To their credit, some contemporary authors are pursuing this approach. One of their project's more striking oversights, however, suggests the virtues of a more modest starting point.
Civil disobedience has long been the subject of wide-ranging controversy. Philosophically inclined writers are again revisiting the topic; later we take a careful look at their efforts (chapter 7). Though multifaceted, the ongoing exchange seems motivated to a great degree by a skeptical reading of the allegedly hegemonic liberal model of civil disobedience, and especially the influential account provided by the philosopher John Rawls in his classic A Theory of Justice (1971). The ongoing debate's premise is that only by transcending the orthodox liberal model of civil disobedience can we accommodate contemporary political realities and realize a sufficiently supple conceptual alternative. Preoccupied with knocking Rawls off his pedestal, critics tend to revert to cramped interpretations of a rich body of prior political and theoretical reflections. They simplify key ideas about civil disobedience, liberal or otherwise. They make things too easy for themselves by obscuring the concept's complex history.
There is no single classical or orthodox idea of civil disobedience: rival political traditions have formulated overlapping yet basically different models of civil disobedience. Consequently, this volume examines four separate accounts of civil disobedience – namely, competing religious-spiritual, liberal, democratic, and anarchist concepts.7 Ideas about civil disobedience have been articulated in diverging and indeed conflicting ways. Civil disobedience's presuppositions, normative justifications, and political aspirations can only be properly grasped when situated in the context of four rival traditions, each of which has made some notable contributions. My exposition is both analytic and roughly chronological: we can view the longstanding debate about civil disobedience as a learning process of sorts, with succeeding generations of activists and thinkers trying to correct the real (or at least perceived) mistakes of their predecessors, and then improving on them. By proceeding in this fashion, we can gain a better sense of how more recent notions of civil disobedience – in particular its impressive democratic variant – represent real conceptual and political progress. We should also eventually be able to see where contemporary philosophical analysis goes astray.
For religious believers Gandhi and King, civil disobedience was principally a device to counter evil, a form of divine witness requiring of practitioners a suitably demanding spiritual comportment. Every element of this original model, accordingly, possessed a directly religious-spiritual significance (chapter 1).8 In contrast, the liberal model of civil disobedience, as fashioned by Rawls and other liberals in the 1960s and early 1970s, struggled to free civil disobedience from its initial religious bearings, recognizing that it could only remain politically relevant when reconfigured in accordance with modern pluralism. In the process, liberals came to interpret civil disobedience primarily as a useful corrective to overbearing political majorities that periodically threaten minority rights (chapter 2). The democratic model of civil disobedience, whose most significant defenders have included Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, challenged liberalism's narrow understanding of democracy and its insufficiently critical diagnosis of the liberal political status quo. Civil disobedience, on their wide-ranging and sometimes politically radical account, could help overcome far-reaching democratic deficits and open the door to extensive political and social reform (chapter 3). Finally, the anarchist model, as practiced by generations of political militants, and recently reformulated by self-described philosophical anarchists, defied core presuppositions about the state and law on which previous approaches rested. Posing a profound challenge to all prior accounts, contemporary anarchism remains deeply conflicted about civil disobedience as conventionally understood (chapter 4).
This typology hardly denies the existence of vital alternative ideas about civil disobedience. The women's movement, for example, has made significant practical and intellectual contributions (Perry 2013: 126–56). Nonetheless, the four frameworks discussed here (religious, liberal, democratic, anarchist) remain hugely influential and theoretically most decisive. Feminists who write fruitfully about civil disobedience, in fact, often rely on them.9
Notwithstanding differences between and among rival models, we can identify crucial commonalities, especially among its religious, liberal, and democratic renditions. Despite its plural conceptual formations, civil disobedience rests on some shared components and aspirations.
Most importantly, religious, liberal, and democratic accounts all view civil disobedience as a distinctive mode of lawbreaking predicated, however paradoxically, on a deeper respect for law or legality. As King eloquently commented in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law.
(King 1991 [1963]: 74)
With the notable exception of most anarchists, activists and intellectuals from Gandhi to Habermas have typically offered some rendition of the idea that civil disobedience means not only morally or politically motivated lawbreaking, but also lawbreaking demonstrating fidelity to – or respect for – law. Absent some version of this notion of lawbreaking for the sake of law, or illegality in the name of legality, King and many others suggested, it would prove difficult to counter the commonplace criticism, recently rehashed by Trump and others hostile to BLM, that civil disobedience represents deplorable lawlessness or shameful criminality. As I intend to document, this simple but powerful intuition has been formulated in a diversity of more-or-less plausible ways. It remains, in fact, hard to imagine a sound concept of civil disobedience without it, despite creative efforts by recent writers to do just that.
Competing models of civil disobedience, despite their sizable disagreements, also make use of a joint conceptual language, even as they employ that language for different purposes. Even some anarchists, when push comes to shove, implicitly suggest that lawbreaking's legitimacy depends on civility, conscientiousness, nonviolence, and publicity, though they interpret such preconditions in ways dissimilar from those in competing religious, liberal, and democratic approaches. One of the more surprising features of the story I retell below is how many elements of Gandhi's original model of civil disobedience tend to resurface, in novel and sometimes barely recognizable forms, in subsequent accounts. Civil disobedience is not, at any rate, an empty pot into which rival political and theoretical traditions simply pour their own potions. Its exponents depend on a common analytic language. Even when speaking that language in ways that are so heavily accented by their own political and philosophical views that others may find them hard to comprehend, theirs remains a common tongue. As such, it provides some minimal yet meaningful constraints on what can or cannot be meaningfully expressed by it.
Just as an ordinary English speaker hoping to communicate successfully would not arbitrarily reclassify the word “dog” to mean “cat,” so too would those interpreting “civility” to cover verbal or physical harassment, or “nonviolence” to enable corporal abuse, seem confused and perhaps incomprehensible to standard users of civil disobedience's conceptual language.10 Civility, conscientiousness, nonviolence, and publicity, within civil disobedience's pluralistic conceptual discourse, take on different and sometimes antagonistic connotations. Yet they remain shared ideational mainstays.
Whither civil disobedience?
Lest readers have already become vexed that I intend to provide a Panglossian story about civil disobedience, let me put your worries – or rather lack of worries – to rest. In fact, standard (religious, liberal, and democratic) versions are under strain today; there are many grounds for anxiety about their prospects. Some strains result from a now widespread anti-statism and anti-legalism, a trend motored by a resurgence of anarchist (and libertarian) currents. For those who view state and law as congenitally illegitimate, King's view of civil disobedience as intrinsically linked to the “very highest respect for law” must seem hopelessly naïve. Other strains derive from the ongoing postnationalization and privatization of public authority, fundamental shifts in state/society relations that work to undermine the nation-state-centered or Westphalian presuppositions of mainstream thinking about civil disobedience (chapter 5). One reason why many illegal protests today no longer mesh neatly with conventional ideas of civil disobedience is that their implicit social and institutional presuppositions are dissipating. Present-day activists face the unattractive task of applying “old-fashioned” notions of civil disobedience to a “newfangled” political and social context by no means conducive to their efforts, and the results can prove messy.
Parallel quagmires tend to plague digital disobedience, or politically motivated digital or online lawbreaking. Prominent digital lawbreakers such as Edward Snowden have occasionally categorized their acts under the rubric of civil disobedience. In some scenarios, there may be sound reasons for endorsing this claim. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether concepts designed with physical or “on-the-street” lawbreaking in mind can or should be seamlessly applied to digital lawbreaking. There are real perils in stretching the concept of civil disobedience to capture phenomena probably better analyzed by alternative means. By overextending it, we rob the concept of the requisite analytic and normative contours, denying ourselves tools we need to respond to political challenges in a responsible, well-informed manner. Civil disobedience is an essential piece of the puzzle of contemporary politics. Yet that puzzle contains many other pieces as well.
What then about BLM, global migrants, or countless other contemporary examples that potentially come to mind? Does it make sense to employ the term civil disobedience when analyzing them? What do we gain – and potentially lose – by doing so? Answering these questions requires a lengthy detour. That detour begins with the religious-spiritual model of civil disobedience sketched so vividly by Gandhi and King.
Notes
1
In an interview with Fox News on July 18, 2016, presidential candidate Trump accused BLM of encouraging violence against police officers, referring to videos of protestors chanting anti-police slogans (“What do we want? Dead cops”). A few days earlier, Fox News commentator Todd Starnes charged BLM with fomenting violence and anarchy, pointedly reminding its militants that “the rule of law matters” (2016).
2
The quotations come from a statement, “11 Major Misconceptions About the Black Lives Matter Movement” (Black Lives Matter 2015), posted on the group's website (
http://blacklivesmatter.com
).
3
As I write, however, Republican state legislatures in the US are debating the possibility of additional criminal penalties for those engaging in civil disobedience (by blocking highways, for example), in part as a crackdown on BLM.
4
Most examples of civil disobedience mentioned in this volume are drawn from the US and western Europe; my approach might be accused of Euro- or, even worse, US-centrism. However, I rely on these examples only because I know them best, not because I believe they should be imitated by others elsewhere, or that they prove more illuminating or valuable than non-western examples. I do not frankly know whether an alternative discussion, relying on a more representative global sample, would alter my overall conceptual story. I doubt, in any event, that the conceptual frameworks for civil disobedience analyzed throughout this book can be easily written off as congenitally US-American or European and thus perhaps irrelevant elsewhere. Our story, in fact, begins with Mahatma Gandhi: every subsequent account of civil disobedience, if only implicitly, starts with Gandhi and his ideas, which underwent an astonishing global dispersion. From the very outset, ideas about civil disobedience have traversed national borders, as have the competing models analyzed in this volume.
5
There are good reasons why social scientists prefer the term “resistance,” as useful empirical research shows. Some employ this broader category to paint a multicolored portrait of resistance, in which civil disobedience is only one of its many colors (Chenoweth and Stephan 2013; Roberts and Garton Ash 2011; Schock 2005; 2015). Within normative theory, however, the move sometimes obliterate key distinctions, as does the closely related tendency to jettison the term “civil disobedience” for the more generic “disobedience” (Caygill 2013; Laudani 2013). To be sure, the anarchist preference for “resistance” rests on specific theoretical and political shifts requiring careful consideration (see
chapter 4
).
6
As I write, US political moderates and liberals (participating in legal demonstrations), left-liberals and radicals (some engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience), and anarchists (including those who damage property and fight with police) speak of “resistance” to the Trump Administration. Whatever its virtues as an umbrella term, “resistance” here – as in other contexts – masks the reality of competing political views, strategies, and tactics (Scheuerman 2017).
7
One methodological caveat is probably in order: the competing models analyzed below represent ideal-types, meaning that they are indispensable for making sense of social reality, yet also stand in a complicated relationship to any concrete social setting. For example, many real-life examples of civil disobedience cannot be interpreted as falling completely under any individual (religious, liberal, democratic, anarchist) rubric; they seem, on many occasions, to combine elements from more than one. Nevertheless, we still require ideal-typical models to understand them and their (potentially conflicting) traits.
8
My decision to start with Gandhi will perhaps irritate some historically minded readers. Did not Socrates engage in civil disobedience? What about the nineteenth-century US dissident, Henry Thoreau, widely credited with having invented the term? Though I cannot sufficiently defend this claim here, I believe it is mistaken to read modern notions of civil disobedience back into classical antiquity: “The Greeks did not go on protest marches; Socrates never staged a sit-in” (Kraut 1984: 75). Thoreau's place in our story is more complicated (Hanson 2017); I address it in
chapter 6
.
9
For example, Holloway Sparks (1997) provides an impressive feminist-inflected analysis of Rosa Parks and other modern women civil disobedients. Yet her basic approach remains at its core (radical) democratic.
10
Of course, we know that over the course of history even seemingly simple, straightforward terms can take on new and unexpected meanings. Yet I do not aspire here to offer a timeless, trans-historical conceptual overview of civil disobedience, but instead one that I hope will prove useful in the present and foreseeable future.
1Divine Witness
Civil disobedience was probably invented by religious believers who envisaged it as a sacred duty forced upon them by their God. Principled lawbreaking in the face of immoral laws represented not just a moral right but a divine obligation, ignored only at a terrible spiritual cost. Although this model of civil disobedience can trace some roots to the distant past, it was the great twentieth-century political figures Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. who vividly outlined, via their actions and closely related writings, what rapidly became the canonical exemplar of religious civil disobedience.1 In more recent decades, their ideas have inspired a diverse range of activists who openly violate laws allegedly inconsonant with God's will.
Properly conducted lawbreaking, operating as a corrective to a social world plagued by sin and evil, is conceived as tapping directly into divine forces. Outlining a series of demanding conditions for legitimate civil disobedience, Gandhi, King, and their disciples view each component in decidedly spiritual terms. Civil disobedience represents a religious quest requiring of practitioners a proper moral bearing. During the famous “salt satyagraha” (1930–1), Gandhi slept in the open with only the barest material necessities, traveling from town to town where he and his disciples repeatedly violated a salt tax they viewed as embodying British colonial exploitation. Gandhi
saw this as a sacred pilgrimage in which discipline and purity were essential. Indeed, a religious aura surrounded the whole enterprise. He and his followers kept quoting the Gospels, presumably drawing comparisons between Gandhi and Christ deliberately setting his face towards Jerusalem and confrontation with the authorities; the sale of Bibles among Ahmedabad Hindus shot up. The government noted that Gandhi's position in the public mind was completely different from that of any ordinary political leader.
(Brown 1989: 237)
US civil rights activists who broke segregation statutes in the late 1950s and early 1960s were recruited heavily from African-American churches and sang spirituals when carted off to jail. King, no less than Gandhi, viewed his movement as religiously inspired. In this respect, as in so many others, he creatively adapted Gandhi's ideas to US conditions.
We start by analyzing this religious conception of civil disobedience because of its massive historical and intellectual impact. Subsequent, more secular, liberal, democratic, and anarchist accounts of civil disobedience all implicitly start with Gandhi's and King's ideas, trying to preserve their skeletal features while fitting them with a new philosophical and political body. They take up many pieces of the puzzle Gandhi and King constructed, but then remake it. Given the spiritual contours of the original, their more secular orientation sometimes means they have had a hard time doing so.
Special attention is paid to the fertile idea that civil disobedience represents neither ordinary lawbreaking nor mere criminality, but instead, as King put it in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” action exemplifying “the very highest respect for law” (1991 [1963]: 74). The notion of civil disobedience as premised on respect for law vividly emerged in Gandhi's thinking, as did the soon commonplace intuition that civil disobedience demands “a willingness to be identified and to accept punishment” (Perry 2013: 15). To understand the lasting appeal of these ideas we need to examine their original religious rendition.
Many virtues notwithstanding, religiously based civil disobedience suffers from serious flaws. Its spiritual underpinnings raise difficult questions for modern pluralism. They also risk inviting troublesome – and no longer identifiably civil – lawbreaking.
Civil disobedience and satyagraha
Though Gandhi was perhaps never fully satisfied with the term “civil disobedience,” he used it to describe politically motivated contraventions of the law, like many others wrongly attributing its invention to the nineteenth-century American dissident Henry Thoreau.2 Alongside boycotts, noncooperation, pickets, strikes, and walkouts, civil disobedience represented one particularly effective type of satyagraha, or political action motivated by “love” or “truth-force,” whose divine strictures gave moral meaning to the universe. In its most literal sense, satyagraha entailed “insistence on truth, and the force derivable from such insistence” (Gandhi 2008 [1919]: 324). “The universe would disappear without the existence of that force,” Gandhi claimed (1986a [1909]: 244). Gandhi accordingly described his own life-long spiritual quest and activities as “experiments with truth” (1993 [1957]).
How best to practice and thereby advance divine truthfulness? Our inner voice, or moral conscience, provided access to divinity and thus was by nature indubitable. God is ready to speak to each of us personally and directly (Sorabji 2014: 200). Yet one could only properly recognize that voice by means of the “strictest discipline. Irresponsible youngsters therefore … have no conscience, nor therefore have all grown-up people” (Gandhi 1986b [1924]: 125). Those who engaged in rigorous processes of self-purification, where both mind and body were subjected to mental and physical discipline (a strict diet and sexual abstinence, or brachmacharya), would alone prove receptive to godly conscience.
By necessity, civil disobedience was always conscientious lawbreaking: Gandhi never delineated civil disobedience from what liberals and others later called conscientious objection. Rightful lawbreaking had to rest directly on “the voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth, or the Inner Voice” (1986b [1933]: 131). It had to be civil, not because it entailed common or civic obligations to a community of political equals, but because its practitioners should abide rigorous norms of proper moral behavior and decorum. Why? Because God demanded nothing less.
In Gandhi's reworked version of Hinduism, “God is Truth,” and genuine religious faith entailed an unceasing quest for absolute truth, and by necessity principled indifference to anything (for example, material well-being or sexual pleasure) getting in the way of that quest. The search for absolute truth should not, however, engender disdain for others. Because no mortal could ever legitimately assert that he or she had fully approximated divine truth, or that conscience spoke decisively to him or her alone, a basic respect for others – Gandhi, following Leo Tolstoy (1967), in this context generally refers to love – was required of anyone hoping to avoid sinful hubris. “[C]onduct based on truth is impossible without love. Truth-force then is love-force” since no human being was qualified or competent to harm or punish, by destructive or violent means, others similarly situated (2008 [1919]: 324; also, Bondurant 1958). Truth, love, and nonviolence (ahimsa) were intimately intermingled because the quest for absolute truth presupposed an acknowledgment of human cognitive and moral limitations. Human fallibility required nonviolence, since only the hubristic mistakenly believed that they were entitled to do violence to others. Those rightly attuned to the human capacity for error instead refused to force on their peers their own potentially mistaken “experiments with truth.”
Civil disobedience represented spiritual truth-seeking in action, a sacred duty in the face of morally corrupt laws. When the law humiliates or discriminates, makes arbitrary or unfair distinctions, or rests on mere brute force, it clashes with divine Truth or Soul-Force. If secular powers successfully resist attempts to change or abrogate such laws when pursued by alternative channels (for example, economic boycotts or negotiations with power holders), then it becomes obligatory on divine truth-seekers to repair a damaged moral order. “That we should obey laws whether good or bad is a new-fangled notion” (1986a [1909]: 246). Even laws made by powerful political majorities can be unjust since democracy and majority rule provide no guarantee of moral rectitude (1986a [1909]: 247). When and how it was best to engage in lawbreaking, Gandhi conceded, raised difficult political questions. Yet it remained a moral – and ultimately divine – obligation to do so.3
In part because of its risks, and in part its spiritual preconditions, Gandhi tended to suggest conscientious lawbreaking should only occur after ordinary political and legal channels had been properly exhausted. Lawbreaking was a serious matter, and when recklessly committed could easily generate violence or chaos. At crucial junctures – for example, when opposing colonial anti-sedition statutes passed during 1919 – Gandhi abruptly broke off his endeavors precisely because of such fears. “Every possible provision should be made against an outbreak of violence or general lawlessness” (
