civil disobedience thesis

Civil Disobedience

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Summary: “civil disobedience”.

Henry David Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” more commonly known as “Civil Disobedience,” originated as a Concord Lyceum lecture given in January 1848 as the Mexican-American War was winding down. The essay and its central thesis—that following one’s conscience trumps the need to follow the law—have profoundly impacted global history, political philosophy, and American thought, notably influencing both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

The text was originally published in an 1849 essay collection titled Resistance to Civil Government edited by Transcendental writer and educator Elizabeth Peabody. The essay’s final form was published in 1866 under the title “Civil Disobedience” in a posthumous collection of Thoreau’s work. Today it can be found in the public domain. This guide utilizes the version found at ibiblio.org ( https://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Thoreau/Civil%20Disobedience.pdf ).

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The essay opens with Thoreau declaring that he believes in the adage “that government is best which governs least,” which he says amounts to “that government is best which governs not at all” (3). This is because the government often does not serve the public’s interest and can be “abused and perverted before the people can act through it” (3). Government is often not beneficial, as has been proven in the Mexican-American War, the work of a small group of people who have used the government as their tool despite public dissent. Thoreau also argues that government is harmful because it can be bent to the will of one person, though it was established to serve the will of the collective people.

Thoreau clarifies that he does not mean to get rid of government altogether, since people must have some entity—he uses the metaphor of the government as a machine—to hear their voices. However, he notes the US government really does not do anything the people do not do themselves: “It does not keep the country free,” “settle the West,” or “educate,” as these achievements stem from the “character inherent” to the American people, who would have accomplished even more if the government had not slowed their progress (4). Instead, Thoreau advocates not for no government but for a “better government” (4).

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This is difficult to achieve in a democracy because democracies are dominated by the majority. The majority is not always morally right but often merely stronger than the minority, so a “government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice” (4). As such, Thoreau argues that laws created by the majority do not need to be followed if they go against a person’s conscience. It is better that a person do what is right than what is lawful.

Laws do not make a person more morally sound; in fact, following some laws actually makes a human less morally sound, as “even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice” (5). Thoreau brings up the example of a soldier who fights a war, since most soldiers know that war by its nature is unjust. Those soldiers become tools of the state who cannot really be thought of as men but as “small moveable forts and magazines” who serve “some unscrupulous man in power” since they lose their humanity when they cannot follow their own consciences (5). Thoreau argues that soldiers serve the government with their bodies while politicians and legislators serve with their heads. But because legislators do not usually make “moral distinctions,” they “are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it , as God” (6). There are leaders who do challenge the government or prioritize their moral principles, but they are few and are treated as traitors or enemies by the government.

Thoreau then asks how a person should behave toward the US government, especially given the moral injustices of the Mexican-American War and slavery . He argues that a moral person cannot “be associated with” the US government, as that person’s government cannot naturally be the “slave’s government also” (6). As such, he argues that Americans have a duty to rebel against the government. The reason there has not been a revolution against slavery is not because of the Southerners but because Thoreau’s neighbors in Massachusetts “are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity” and would rather wait passively for someone else to solve the problem (8). Thoreau says the cause of building a moral government and eradicating slavery from the United States is paramount. To be a good citizen, one must follow their conscience and promote justice, even if the actions of individuals tear the nation itself apart.

Thoreau dismisses those who say they do not like the government but do nothing about it; he is especially vehement that voting is not a strong enough action to make the government just. Voting for the right thing does not do anything beyond telling the powers that be that you hope what you vote for prevails. The majority can choose whether to hear it, and regardless, the majority will always do whatever is in its own interest. Thus, the majority will only vote for the abolition of slavery, for instance, when there either are so few slaves left that the vote makes no difference or when the cause of slavery itself no longer benefits the majority’s interest. Worse, there are few independent voters left in America, as most are beholden to political party elites and vote for whomever the party places on the ballot.

However, Thoreau clarifies that a person has no obligation to eliminate the wrongs the government reinforces. A person may be busy living their own life or have other goals or interests than justice, but each person has a moral duty to “wash his hands” of injustices perpetrated by the government (10). Thoreau describes the hypocrites in his town who announce that they would not put down a slave insurrection or fight in Mexico if the government demanded it, but who still provide money to the government to support those actions.

Since everyone agrees that there are unjust laws, Thoreau asks whether people should “be content to obey” them, try to “amend them” but obey them until they are amended, or “transgress them all at once” (12). He states that most people will choose the second course of action, thinking that the cure of injustice is worse than the disease. This may be so, but this rationale is the fault of the government, as the State does not encourage dissent. Laws are set up to protect the State, and the State cannot fathom that a citizen might deny its authority. Thoreau revisits the metaphor of the machine to describe times when citizens need to rebel. If the injustice is necessary for the “machine of government” to function, it should be left alone as it will likely sort itself out (12). If the injustice has a part of the machine devoted exclusively to the injustice, it might need to be left alone as well, as it may be that the “remedy” may be “worse than the evil” (12). But if the injustice requires a citizen to be “the agent of injustice to another,” then Thoreau argues a citizen should “break the law” (12). That is, if a law requires one to live immorally and to harm another, the law must not be followed.

Breaking the law is the preferred action because the government cannot easily amend laws. In fact, the Constitution itself is “evil” as it sets up unjust laws (13). Thoreau states that his place in the world is simply to live in it, not to improve it. Besides, one person cannot do everything necessary to eliminate injustice. Rather, the preferred action is simply to withdraw support for the government. Abolitionists should stop providing their property or bodies to support the government of Massachusetts, as God would be on their side, and as each person is a “majority of one” who does not need to wait for the government to change (13).

Thoreau discusses his own actions, describing his interactions with the tax collector. Thoreau always makes sure to argue with the tax collector because he has voluntarily chosen to represent the unjust government and because Thoreau’s disagreement is with the men who make the laws, not the law itself. These conversations are small acts of rebellion, but Thoreau argues that small protests are important, as they are permanent and can combine to effect change. The tax collector, for instance, could be convinced to resign his office and, thus, slow the government. However, Thoreau laments that most men are too timid to act or risk being jailed for what they believe.

But prison is actually a freer place than society, as the prisoner can live an honorable life since they have been placed there for opposing the unjust State. Prison can also make a person more devoted to fighting injustice, since the imprisoned experience injustice firsthand rather than vicariously through the experience of the slave or the soldier.

Thoreau urges all those who stand against injustice to combine their weight against the State, since a minority that “clogs” the government can make the government change (15). After all, the State cannot imprison everyone and will choose to end a war or abolish slavery rather than arrest the masses. Additionally, Thoreau suggests that not paying taxes is preferred to letting the State use those tax dollars to cause violence and bloodshed. In fact, if enough people did not pay taxes, it would be “the definition of a peaceable revolution” (15). And even if there were to be some bloodshed in that revolution, it would be blood shed from a wounded conscience, blood Thoreau says he sees now.

Thoreau mostly focuses on prison as a consequence because the alternative—having property or goods taken—largely does not apply to the people who are most interested in ending injustice. Such people are not likely to have much property or wealth, as the wealthy are “sold to the institution”—the State—that made them wealthy (16). And wealth comes with a decreasing sense of virtue or morality. Should a person become rich, the best thing they can do is maintain the lifestyle they had before accumulating wealth. Thoreau also anticipates a criticism of his argument—that acting against the State will erode the State’s protections or, worse, that the State will come after that person’s property or family. Thoreau suggests that this quagmire is exactly why one should not attempt to accumulate wealth and should instead live with their own means, as it is impossible to live both morally and comfortably. Thoreau does not consider himself dependent on the State for anything, and because he is not rich, it costs him less to disobey the State than it would cost his soul, his humanity, and his integrity to obey it.

Thoreau then recounts his own acts of disobedience. He once refused to pay money to a church his father attended but that he did not. To avoid paying, he wrote to a town clerk that he did not wish to be viewed as a member of that church, and he has not gotten a bill since. However, he regrets that there is no way to write a similar letter for every society he wishes to divest himself from. He then states that he has not paid a poll tax in six years, and even spent one night in jail as a result, but he felt free in that jail. The wall that separated him from his town actually lifted his spirits, as he felt threatened not by the prisoners but by the world outside the prison walls. He learned to feel bad for the State because it does “not know its friends from its foes,” while he only has to answer to a higher power and obey his own laws (19). He recognized in jail that he was not part of the machinery of government and that the State could only ever take his body, not his mind.

Thoreau describes his night in prison as a trip to another country. He felt as though he was seeing his native village through the eyes of the past, as though he had entered the Middle Ages. He feels that he had never gotten a look at his town’s inner workings or institutions, especially the peculiar institution of prison, which contains perfectly formed holes for giving inmates food and open windows that let the town be heard and seen at all times. He is fascinated by how it functions, the gossip the inmates tell, and the verses they write. His roommate is a man accused of burning his barn, but Thoreau wonders if he accidentally lit a fire after passing out drunk. The cellmate shows him how the prison works and even offers friendly advice on saving his bread for later meals.

The next morning Thoreau is released because someone has paid his tax for him, against his wishes. After leaving prison, Thoreau feels changed, like he can see his city and its people more clearly. He recognizes that they are friends in “summer weather only” and that they cannot be counted on to effect change (21). He notes that none of them understand that an institution like the jail even exists. Thoreau leaves town and is no longer under the State’s oversight.

Out of town, he announces that he refuses allegiance to the State as a whole. He pays for the highway tax because it benefits his neighbors but refuses all other taxes. Thoreau admits that his neighbors probably mean well, and he wishes he could respect their wishes. However, he knows that supporting their wishes and paying all taxes would hurt others who do not live in his community. He criticizes the person who anonymously paid his taxes as being either supporting injustice (if the person paid the bill out of solidarity with the State) or interfering with the public good (if the person paid it to help him), as Thoreau’s actions (or inactions) are for the public good of change.

Despite his stances, Thoreau admits that he wants to follow the law, as he does not want conflict with anyone. He argues that the Constitution looks like it should deserve obeisance and respect from one point of view . However, when he looks at those laws from “a little higher,” they appear less moral, and he wonders if the laws are worth thinking about at all (24). He admits that most people disagree with him, but he is discontented by legislators and politicians. They are part of the unjust institutions and, therefore, cannot see how or why to change them. He argues that they may have made some useful systems, but they cannot see the inherent injustice in the law as a whole. Thoreau singles out Daniel Webster, the famous US congressman and diplomat, as a politician who will not reform government because he follows the institution and law as a whole. Webster supports slavery, for instance, not because he thinks slavery is just but because slavery is part of the original Constitution. Thus, to Thoreau, Webster has rightly been called the “Defender of the Constitution,” but that honor makes him prudent, not wise (25).

Thoreau concludes the essay by calling the authority of government “impure,” as a government cannot be just if it lacks the “sanction and consent of the governed” (27). Democracy is a step in the right direction for the power of the individual, but it does not go far enough. Thoreau imagines a State that would fully respect an individual and not mind if a few people chose to live completely free of the State altogether, “not meddling with it, nor embraced by it” (27-28). If such a State could exist, then an even “more perfect and glorious” State could follow (28).

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Civil Disobedience

From the Boston Tea Party to Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March, and from suffragists’ illegally casting their ballots to whites-only lunch counter sit-ins, civil disobedience has often played a crucial role in bending the proverbial arc of the moral universe toward justice. But what, if anything, do these acts, and countless others which we refer to as civil disobedience have in common? What distinguishes them from other forms of conscientious and political action?

On the most widely accepted account, civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies (Rawls 1999, 320). On this account, people who engage in civil disobedience operate at the boundary of fidelity to law, have general respect for their regime, and are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions, as evidence of their fidelity to the rule of law. Civil disobedience, given its place at the boundary of fidelity to law, is said on this view to fall between legal protest, on the one hand, and conscientious refusal, uncivil disobedience, militant protest, organized forcible resistance, and revolutionary action, on the other hand.

This picture of civil disobedience, and the broader accounts offered in response, will be examined in the first section of this entry, which considers conceptual issues. The second section contrasts civil disobedience, broadly, with other types of protest. The third focuses on the justification of civil disobedience, examining upstream why civil disobedience needs to be justified, and downstream what is its value and role in society. The fourth examines states’ appropriate responses to civil disobedience.

1.1 Principled Disobedience

1.2.1 communication, 1.2.2 publicity, 1.2.3 non-violence, 1.2.4 non-evasion, 1.2.5 decorum, 1.3 fidelity to law, 2.1 legal protest, 2.2 rule departures, 2.3 conscientious objection, 2.4 immigration disobedience.

• 2.5 Digital Disobedience
• 2.6 Uncivil Disobedience

2.7 Revolutionary Action

3.1 the problem of disobedience, 3.2 justificatory conditions, 4.1 punishing civil disobedience, 4.2 a right to civil disobedience, 4.3 accommodating civil disobedience, 5. conclusion, acknowledgments, other internet resources, related entries, 1. features of civil disobedience.

Henry David Thoreau is widely credited with coining the term civil disobedience . For years, Thoreau refused to pay his state poll tax as a protest against the institution of slavery, the extermination of Native Americans, and the war against Mexico. When a Concord, Massachusetts, constable named Sam Staples asked Thoreau to pay his back taxes in 1846 and Thoreau refused, Staples escorted him to jail. In a public lecture that Thoreau gave twice in 1848, he justified his tax refusal as a way to withdraw cooperation with the government and he called on his fellow townspeople to do the same. Thoreau’s lecture, titled “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government,” formed the basis of his 1849 essay, “Resistance to Civil Government.” In 1866, four years after Thoreau’s death, the essay was republished under the title “Civil Disobedience.” Some scholars believe the new title was provided by Thoreau’s sister Sophia, his sole literary executor and sole editor of his posthumous edited works (Fedorko 2016). But others have provided evidence for Thoreau’s authority over the edits in the 1866 text (Dawson 2007).

Whereas Thoreau understood the “civil” in civil disobedience to characterize the political relations between civilian subjects and their civil government, today most scholars and activists understand the “civil” to relate to civility – a kind of self-restraint necessary for concord under conditions of pluralism. The next sub-sections review central features of civil disobedience.

Lawbreaking : First, for an act to be civilly disobedient, it must involve some breach of law. In democratic societies, civil disobedience as such is not a crime. When an agent who engages in civil disobedience is punished by the law, it is not for “civil disobedience,” but for the recognized offenses she commits, such as disturbing the peace, trespassing, damaging property, picketing, violating official injunctions, intimidation, and so on.

When civil disobedients directly break the law that they oppose – such as Rosa Parks violating the Montgomery, Alabama, city ordinance requiring African Americans to sit at the back of public buses and give up those seats to white riders if the front of the bus filled up – they engage in direct civil disobedience. By contrast, when disobedients break a law which, other things being equal, they do not oppose, in order to demonstrate their protest against another law or policy – such as anti-war protesters staging sit-ins in government buildings – they engage in indirect civil disobedience. The distinction between direct and indirect civil disobedience is mainly relevant to the possibility of mounting constitutional test cases, since one cannot test the constitutionality of a law in court without actually breaching it. Although some scholars argue that direct civil disobedience is preferable to its indirect counterpart because it is most clearly legible as an act of protest against the law breached (C. Cohen 1966, 4–5), most scholars maintain the acceptability of indirect disobedience given that not all unjust laws or policies can be disobeyed directly (M. Cohen 1970, 109–110; Rawls 1999, 320; Brownlee 2012, 19–20). For instance, a same-sex couple living in a jurisdiction that forbids same-sex marriage cannot get married in violation of the law. Black Lives Matter activists cannot directly disobey police brutality, stop-and-frisk policing, or the acquittal of police officers who killed unarmed Blacks. Also, even when a person can engage in direct disobedience of a law, doing so may be unduly burdensome, such as when the punishment for the breach would be extreme.

Principledness : An act of lawbreaking must be deliberate, principled, and conscientious, if it is to be civil and, hence, distinguishable from ordinary criminal offenses. Civil disobedience cannot be unintentional (say, done in ignorance of the fact that one is violating the law): it must be undertaken deliberately. Principled disobedience can be distinguished from ordinary criminal offending by examining the motives that underlie the disobedient act. The person must intend to protest laws, policies, institutions, or practices that she believes are unjust on the basis of her sincerely held moral or political commitments. The agent may not be correct or even entirely reasonable about her convictions, but she holds them sincerely. In these ways, principled disobedience is distinct from garden-variety criminal activity, which is generally self-interested and selfish, opportunistic and unprincipled.

Conscientiousness : The deliberate and principled features of civil disobedience are often brought together under the umbrella of conscientiousness and equated with seriousness, sincerity, depth of conviction, and selflessness – again, in order to contrast civil disobedience with criminal lawbreaking. In response, some scholars highlight the pervasiveness of self-interested civil disobedience – of the ‘not in my backyard’ variety (e.g., people protesting against a new highway passing through their neighborhood) – as a challenge to the supposed conscientiousness of all civil disobedience (Celikates 2016, 38). Others insist that civil disobedience need not be selfless: oppressed groups indeed have a lot to gain from their anti-oppression struggles, including better life prospects, improved material conditions, and heightened self-respect (Delmas 2019, 183–4). And, unsurprisingly, many of the most famous civil disobedients – Mohandas Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela – were members of the groups whose rights they sought to champion. But conscientiousness – understood as sincerity and seriousness – does not require selflessness, and ordinary crime should not be equated with selfishness, as the example of Robin Hood illustrates. That said, some thinkers also challenge the requirement of seriousness by regarding, for example, the DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks undertaken by Anonymous, such as Operation: Avenge Assange , as acts of civil disobedience, despite their ‘lulz-seeking’, playful and non-serious motivations (Celikates and de Zeeuw 2016, 211–3).

1.2 Civility

What makes an act of disobedience civil ? Scholars commonly consider all or some of the five features below to define civil disobedience.

Typically, a person who commits an offense has no wish to communicate with her government or society. This is evinced by the fact that usually such a person does not intend to make it known that she has offended. In contrast, civil disobedience is understood as a communicative act – a kind of symbolic speech, which aims to convey a message to a certain audience, such as the government and public. Civil disobedients are thought to contribute arguments to the public sphere. Typically, their message is a call for reform or redress; and their audience is the majority. Civil disobedience is variously described as an act by which “one addresses the sense of justice of the majority of the community” (Rawls 1999, 320), as “a plea for reconsideration” (Singer 1973, 84–92), and as a “symbolic… appeal to the capacity for reason and sense of justice of the majority” (Habermas 1985, 99). Even when scholars expand the central criteria for civil disobedience, they agree that civil disobedience is essentially communicative. In comparison, other types of principled disobedience are not necessarily communicative. For instance, animal rescue primarily seeks to relieve the suffering of the rescued animals; the tactic of environmental sabotage known as ‘tree-spiking’ primarily seeks to prevent or stall the cutting down of trees (Delmas 2018a, 44–45). Both types of action can of course be understood in terms of their messages, too, but communicating such a message is not their primary aim in each case.

On many accounts, civil disobedience must be not only communicative, but also public in a specific way. Publicity may designate different features: (i) the openness of the act, (ii) non-anonymity of the agent, (iii) advance warning of planned action, (iv) responsibility-taking for the action, or (v) an appeal based in publicly shared principles of justice. The first four requirements may be classified together under the umbrella of publicity-as-visibility , while the fifth can be dubbed publicity-as-appeal . Since the latter requirement matters mainly for the justification of civil disobedience, it is discussed below (§3.2). That said, Rawls (1999, 321), for one, clarifies the publicity of civil disobedience by describing it as a “political act,” to wit, “an act guided and justified by political principles, that is, by the principles of justice which regulate the constitution and social institutions generally,” thereby suggesting that publicity-as-appeal is in fact part of the definition of civil disobedience.

Rawls and Hugo Bedau (1961, 655), on whom Rawls relies, defend all of the features of publicity-as-visibility, arguing that civil disobedience could never be covert or secretive but could only ever be committed in public, openly, and with advance warning to authorities (per (i)–(iii); and additionally that it involves responsibility-taking (iv). The thought is that publicity is crucial to the civil disobedient’s communicative aims and that any violation of these features of publicity would obscure or muddy the nature of civil disobedience as a communicative act. Critics have rejected the requirement to give advance warning as a defining criterion of civil disobedience. If a person publicizes her intention to breach the law, by giving advance notice about it, then she provides legal authorities with the opportunity to abort her action (Dworkin 1985, 115; Smart 1991, 206–7). For instance, anti-nuclear activists who advertise their planned trespass on military property would simply be prevented from executing their action. In this case, not giving advance warning is necessary to accomplish the communicative act.

Some theorists have also denied the first two publicity requirements above that civil disobedients need to act openly and non-anonymously. Some argue that publicity is compatible with covertness and anonymity, so long as agents claim responsibility for their actions after the fact (Greenawalt 1987, 239; Brownlee 2012, 160; Scheuerman 2018, 43–5). For instance, Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified information about the National Security Agency (NSA)’s massive surveillance programs constitute acts of civil disobedience in this view because, although Snowden obtained and leaked the documents covertly, he eventually claimed responsibility and sought to publicly justify his actions (Scheuerman 2014, 617–21; Brownlee 2016, 966). In this view, the only publicity requirement is (iv) that agents take self-identifying responsibility for their actions after the fact. The other requirements of publicity-as-visibility – openness, non-anonymity, and advance warning – can in fact detract from or undermine the attempt to communicate through civil disobedience and are therefore not necessary to identify civil disobedience. Given, however, that there is often widespread reluctance to regard as “civil” covert and anonymous acts of disobedience such as assistance to undocumented migrants or anonymous hacktivism, other thinkers accept (i), (ii), and (iv) as standard requirements of publicity-as-visibility and deem covert acts to be uncivil without pre-judging their degree of justifiability (Delmas 2018a, 44–5).

Like publicity, non-violence is supposed to be essential to the communicativeness of a civilly disobedient act, non-violence being part of its legibility as a mode of address. “To engage in violent acts likely to injure and to hurt is incompatible with civil disobedience as a mode of address. Indeed, any interference with the civil liberties of others tends to obscure the civilly disobedient quality of one’s act” (Rawls 1999, 321). (The strategic and tactical value of non-violence is discussed in §3.3.) Critics have objected to the supposed incompatibility between violence and communication, arguing that violence, depending on its form and targets, does not necessarily obscure the communicative quality of a disobedient’s act. Burning a police car or vandalizing a Confederate monument, as some protesters did under the Black Lives Matter banner, conveys a clear message of opposition to police brutality and anger at the state’s failure to address systemic racism. The compatibility between violence and communication is further underscored in cases of self-directed violence: self-immolation may provide “an eloquent statement of both the dissenter’s frustration and the importance of the issues he addresses” (Brownlee 2012, 21–2). On this basis, some scholars deny altogether the requirement that civil disobedience be non-violent (M. Cohen 1970, 103; Brownlee 2012, 198–9; Moraro 2019, 96–101).

Some scholars also see nothing inherently contradictory in the notion of “violent civil disobedience” independent of its communicative aims. John Morreall views a person’s physical assault on a slave owner chasing a runaway slave, in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, as a case of “justifiable violent civil disobedience” (1976, 42–3). Jennifer Welchman considers “violence, threats of violence, covert acts of sabotage, blackmail, and even assault” as means that civil disobedients can justifiably use to obstruct and frustrate injustice (2001, 105). But, arguably this route is too hasty, as it disregards what seems to be an essential and powerful association between civil disobedience and non-violence: the civility of civil disobedience seems to entail non-violence. The difficulty is to specify the appropriate notions of violence and non-violence .

This is a difficult task in part given its high political stakes: protests labeled as non-violent are more likely to be perceived favorably; protests labeled as violent are more likely to alienate the public and to be met with violent repression. In addition, the labeling of protests, as Robin Celikates notes, “far from being a neutral observation, is always a politically charged speech act that can reproduce forms of marginalization and exclusion that are often racialized and gendered” and tends to serve the interests of socially dominant or mainstream voices (2016, 983). On this basis, Celikates casts doubt on the usefulness of “a fixed category of non-violence … for a philosophical analysis of disobedience informed by its social and political reality” (ibid.). Nonetheless, specifying the categories of violence and non-violence is important to push back against disingenuous uses of these categories, as when the police declare a peaceful protest a ‘riot’ – a common occurrence in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests (ACLED 2020).

One way to conceive of violence is as the use of physical force causing or likely to cause injury (Rawls 1999, 321). However, non-violent acts or even legal acts may indirectly yet foreseeably cause more harm to others than do direct acts of physical force. A legal strike by ambulance workers or a roadblock on an important highway may well have more severe consequences than minor acts of vandalism (Raz 1979, 267). Psychological violence can also cause injury to others. Philosophers typically reject the childhood chant that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” recognizing that harm and injury do not come solely from the use of physical force. For one thing, words can incite physical violence. Words can also hurt even without the threat of physical injury, such as verbal insult and harassment, which can undermine the recipient’s sense of equal standing, self-worth, and safety. The implication for civil disobedience is that the requirement of non-violence prohibits the use of tactics likely to inflict psychological violence on one’s opponents. Aggressive confrontations designed to denigrate and humiliate (distinct from attempts to elicit shame through displays of unearned suffering and appeals to conscience) are incompatible with the civility and non-violence of civil disobedience.

Rawls does not mention, and it is unclear whether, non-violence prohibits certain actions that don’t physically or psychologically injure others but still cause harms, such as property damage (e.g., vandalism), violence to self (e.g., hunger strikes), and coercion (e.g., forceful occupation).

Property damage : Authorities, much of the public, and many scholars tend to conceive of non-violence strictly, as excluding any damage to property (Fortas 1968, 48–9, 123–6; Smith 2013, 3, 33; Smith and Brownlee 2017, 5; Regan 2004). Two broad reasons may explain the inclusion of property damage within the category of violence. One is the classical liberal understanding of private property as an extension of one’s person; the other is the assumption that property damage is likely to lead to violence against persons. John Locke formulates both when he argues it is “lawful for a man to kill a thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life … [because] I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away every thing else” (Locke 1690, III §18). By counting all instances of property destruction as violent, such a view dissuades one from drawing evaluative distinctions among different cases, methods, targets, and aims. However, not all property damage is or should be viewed as equal: burning one’s Selective Service card to protest the military draft is not equivalent to burning crosses to intimidate African Americans and Jews; smashing a stained-glass window depicting enslaved persons in a cotton field (as a Yale janitor did in 2016) is not equivalent to smashing the windows of a store in order to loot it. For some thinkers, such differences are not only issues of justification. They insist that violence and non-violence simply do not exhaust the descriptive possibilities and that we should think of property damage as a third conceptual category distinct from the other two and requiring its own evaluative assessment (Sharp 2012a, 307; Delmas 2018a, 49, 244–5). Other scholars have instead argued that non-violence can encompass property damage (Milligan 2013, ch. 2; Scheuerman 2018, 46–7, 77, 87). They hold that civil disobedients can remain non-violent while engaging in selective destruction of property, assuming the damage is minor and relates clearly to the civil disobedient’s message, such as when pacifists hammer warhead nose cones.

Self-violence : Self-violent protests include tactics such as lip-sewing, self-cutting, hunger strikes, self-exposure to the elements, and self-immolation. When theorists list hunger strikes among the tactics of civil disobedience, they often do not address the question of whether self-violence is compatible with non-violence properly conceived, but simply assume an affirmative answer. Some scholars cast doubt on this notion, given the violence of self-destructive protests and given activists’ self-understanding of their own actions (see Bargu’s 2014 critical ethnographic study on the 2000–2007 death fast by left-wing militants in Turkish prisons). A notable exception to the theoretical neglect of self-violence is Gandhi (1973, 103–5, 120–5), who thought that hunger strikes were coercive and violent but that fasts of moral pressure and Satyagrahic fasts were persuasive and non-violent (Sharp 2012a, 134, 151, 262); and likewise, that self-immolation could accord with non-violence ( ahimsa ) and be fueled by satyagraha (‘Truth-force’ in Sanskrit) under the right circumstances (Gandhi 1999, 79.177; Milligan 2014, 295–9).

Coercion and persuasion : Theorists often complete the dichotomy between violence and non-violence by seeing violence as a means of coercion, non-violence as a means of persuasion, and the two as incompatible. Coercion can be defined as “any interference by an agent, A, in the choices of another agent, B, with the aim of compelling B to behave in a way that they would not otherwise do” (Aitchison 2018a, 668; see also entry on coercion ). Persuasion, by contrast, requires initiating a dialogue with an interlocutor and aiming to elicit a change of position or even their moral conversion. Coercive tactics impose costs on opponents. For instance, land occupation by environmental activists is designed to prevent or delay oil pipeline construction. Boycotts are also considered to be coercive tactics to the extent that they impose acute costs on businesses (through lost revenue) and sometimes involve intimidation and the threat of force to ensure maximum compliance with the boycott (Umoja 2013, 135–42). Some theorists of civil disobedience hold that civil disobedients cannot resort to coercion; they can only seek to persuade and appeal to their opponent’s moral conscience, which excludes confrontational and coercive tactics (Lefkowitz 2007, 216; Brownlee 2012, 24).

Practitioners and other critics maintain that this dichotomy between non-violent persuasion and violent coercion is false on the grounds that there is such a thing as ‘non-violent coercion’, which is furthermore compatible with the goal of moral suasion. Non-violence appeals to the conscience of the public, by eliciting shame and indignation at the witnessing of civil disobedients’ suffering and their discipline in the face of violent repression. After the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, which unleashed spectacular white retaliatory violence, Martin Luther King, Jr., saw appeals to conscience as insufficient without disruption and “some form of constructive coercive power” (King 1968, 137). “Nonviolent coercion always brings tension to the surface”, he wrote (ibid.), affirming “the coercive face of nonviolence” along with its persuasive face (Livingston 2020a, 704; see also Terry 2018, 305). “The purpose of our direct action program,” King proclaimed in his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, “is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation” (King 1991). Non-violent action is thus the means to the goal of both forcing negotiations – an essential “mechanism for social change” (Atack 2012, 139) – and of persuading – its corresponding mechanism for moral and cultural change. This leaves open the question whether confrontational attacks that single out particular persons through harassment, doxing, and ‘calling out’ are compatible with non-violence. Such acts are coercive and, like verbal insults, they may be said to inflict psychological violence on the target.

Civil disobedients are standardly expected to take responsibility for, and accept the legal consequences of, their lawbreaking. Their evading punishment would make their acts ordinary crimes or acts of rebellion; their willingness to invite punishment is supposed to demonstrate their endorsement of the legal system’s legitimacy and their “intense concern over the issue at hand” (C. Cohen 1966, 6; see also Brownlee 2012 ch. 1; Tai 2017, 146). Non-evasion is an essential correlate of the conscientiousness and non-violence of civil disobedience: submitting to law enforcement is part of the dramatic display of suffering required by non-violence. That said, theorists have fleshed out this requirement of non-evasion in different ways, arguing variously that the agent must (i) willingly submit to arrest and prosecution, (ii) plead guilty in court, (iii) not try to defend her crime, and/or (iv) not complain about the punishment received (Delmas 2019, arguing that only (i) is necessarily entailed by non-evasion). Some theorists reject (ii) and (iii), proposing instead that agents plead ‘not guilty’ in court, so as to deny the state’s characterization of the civil disobedient act as a public wrong (in this view, disobedients should either deny responsibility of having committed the action as alleged by the prosecutor or admit responsibility but deny criminal liability) (Moraro 2019, 143–7). Indeed, while the civil disobedient who pleads ‘guilty’ and does not try to defend her ‘crime’ highlights her willingness to self-sacrifice, a ‘not guilty’ plea accompanied by a defense of her action might be more effective at communicating her convictions and persuading others, including by inviting jury nullification. By contrast, some thinkers reject (i) and (iv) on the grounds that when civil disobedience is morally justified, the state’s imposition of punishment is itself problematic and arguably impermissible, so that further protests against civil disobedients’ arrests, prosecutions, and sentences are justified (Zinn 2002, 27–31). Critics have also noted that punishment can be detrimental to dissenters’ efforts by compromising future attempts to assist others through protest (Greenawalt 1987, 239) and that willingness to accept punishment cannot be reasonably expected when agents know they risk heavy fines or very long sentences for their actions (Scheuerman 2018, 49–51).

In some views, being civil means that civil disobedients behave in a dignified and respectful manner by following the conventional social scripts that spell out displays of dignity and ways of showing respect in their society. Some theorists understand civility itself as respect for “minimal civil norms” (Milligan 2013, ch. 2); others count decorum as an additional, implicit requirement of civility in line with manifestations of self-restraint (Delmas in Çıdam, et al. 2020, 524–5). Decorum may be understood to prohibit conduct that would be seen as offensive, insulting, or obscene (with the standards for each varying widely across cultures). In Scheuerman’s view, Gandhi and King, but not liberals and democrats, thought that politeness and decorum had a role to play (2018, 11–31). Yet one reason to think that decorum has seeped into the common understanding of civil disobedience is that it helps to explain why some protests by Pussy Riot, ACT UP, and Black Lives Matter, among others, which were conscientious, communicative, public, non-violent, and non-evasive, were denied the label civil : to wit, because protesters shouted down their opponents, expressed anger, used offensive language, or disrespected religious sites (Delmas 2020, 18–9). Critics, however, deny that civil disobedience needs to be decorous and push back against denials of civility, insofar as these are often deployed to silence activists (Harcourt 2012; Zerilli 2014). They deem expressions of anger and offensive or obscene displays to be compatible with civility (Scheuerman 2019, 5–7; Çıdam, et al. 2020, 517–8) and insist on dissociating the politics of ‘respectability’ from civil disobedience (Pineda 2021a, 161–3).

What makes an act of civil disobedience special? On some accounts, an act that satisfies the criteria of civility identified above, especially non-evasion, signals disobedients’ respect for and fidelity to the legal system in which they carry out their protest, in contrast with ordinary offenders and revolutionary agents (Rawls 1999, 322). Signaling one’s fidelity to law by abiding the demands of civility is seen as necessary to thwart fears of disorder or counter the impression that civil disobedients are contemptuous of democratic procedures. Critics point out that agents do not necessarily respect, nor have any reasons to respect, the legal system in which they carry out their civil disobedience (Lyons 1998, 33–6). It is thus useful to distinguish the outward features of the civilly disobedient act from the inward attitudes of the civilly disobedient agent.

Many thinkers argue that the link between the disobedient act’s civility and her fidelity to law or endorsement of the legal system can indeed be pulled apart. For one thing, agents intent on overthrowing their government may well resort to civil tactics simply because civil disobedience works (Sharp 2012b). Some theorists nonetheless hold on to the connection between civility and fidelity to law. For instance, some discard some of the requirements of civility but maintain that the civilly disobedient agent can still be motivated by respect for law and act within the limits of fidelity to law while disobeying covertly, evading punishment, damaging property, or offending the public (Brownlee 2012, 24–9; Scheuerman 2018, 49–53; Moraro 2019, 96–101). Others hold that it is worthwhile to maintain the link between the act’s civility and its conveying fidelity to law, whether or not agents actually endorse the system’s legitimacy, insofar as its self-restraint holds the key to civil disobedience’s place in democratic culture (Smith 2013, 32–5; Delmas 2019, 173–4).

Other theorists deny that civil disobedients need to demonstrate fidelity to law, taking what Scheuerman (2015) dubs an anti-legal turn . Civility, on a number of recent accounts (Brownlee 2012 ch. 1; Moraro 2019, ch. 2; M. Cooke 2021), is satisfied when agents aim to communicate with an audience and engage with the public sphere. On a radical understanding, the civility of civil disobedience is compatible with tactics “that will be regarded as uncivil because of their confrontational or even violent character, including massive disruption, the destruction of property, and the use of restrained force in self-defense,” only excluding para-military confrontation (Celikates 2021, 143).

This anti-legal turn goes along with what we may call a critical turn in scholarship on civil disobedience. Not only do theorists critique the liberal account of civil disobedience as unduly narrow and restrictive (as contemporary critics of Rawls already did) and articulate a more inclusive concept; but they also critique the ideology that undergirds the common account, uncovering the ways in which it distorts the reality of the practice, deters resistance, and buttresses the status quo (Celikates 2014, 2016; Delmas 2018a, ch. 1; Pineda 2021b, ch. 1). In this vein, several scholars have reassessed the complex legacy of Thoreau and Gandhi to the civil disobedience tradition, in order to both show the misappropriation of their writings on political resistance and to call for a reappropriation and appreciation of their visions (Mantena 2012; Hanson 2021; Livingston 2018; Scheuerman 2018, ch. 1, 4). Scholars have also reconsidered the historical record of the American Civil Rights Movement to excavate the radical understanding of civil disobedience forged by actors themselves, in lieu of the romantic and sanitized version that dominates public perception of the Movement (Hooker 2016; Livingston 2020a, 2020b; Pineda 2021b, ch. 2–5; Mantena 2018; and Shelby and Terry 2018). Setting the record straight matters not just for historical accuracy but also because the Civil Rights Movement is used as the benchmark to judge contemporary protest movements such as Black Lives Matter, unfavorably comparing today’s activists with an idealized standard with the effect of prejudicing the public against them.

2. Other Types of Protest

Although civil disobedience often overlaps broadly with other types of dissent, nevertheless some distinctions may be drawn between the key features of civil disobedience and the key features of these other practices.

The obvious difference between legal protest and civil disobedience is that the former lies within the bounds of the law, but the latter does not. Legal ways of protesting include, among many others, making speeches, signing petitions, organizing for a cause, donating money, taking part in authorized demonstrations, and boycotting. Some of these can become illegal, for instance when law enforcement declares an assembly unlawful and orders the crowd to disperse, or under anti-boycott legislation. Some causes may also be declared illegal, such that one cannot be associated with the cause or donate to it (such as the Communist Party in the U.S.). Most of the features exemplified in civil disobedience – other than its illegality – can be found in legal protest: a conscientious and communicative demonstration of protest, a desire to bring about through moral dialogue some lasting change in policy or principle, an attempt to educate and to raise awareness, and so on.

A practice distinct from, but related to, civil disobedience is rule departure on the part of authorities. Rule departure is essentially the deliberate decision by an official, for conscientious reasons, not to discharge the duties of her office (Feinberg 1992, 152). If an official’s breach of a specific duty is more in keeping with the spirit and overall aims of the office than a painstaking respect for its particular duties is, then the former might be said to adhere better than the latter does to the demands of the office (Greenawalt 1987, 281). Rule departures resemble civil disobedience in that both communicate the agent’s dissociation from and condemnation of certain policies and practices. Civil disobedience and rule departure differ mainly in the identity of their practitioners and in their legality. First, whereas rule departure typically is done by an agent of the state (including citizens serving in juries), civil disobedience typically is done by citizens (including officials acting as ordinary citizens and not in the capacity of their official role). Second, whereas the civil disobedient breaks the law, the official who departs from the rules associated with her role is not usually violating the law, unless the rule she breaks is also codified in law. For instance, jurors may refuse to convict a person for violating an unjust law. When they do, they nullify the law. However, many judges forbid any mention of jury nullification in their courtroom, so that jurors are not allowed to advise each other of the possibility to refuse to convict (Brooks 2004).

Conscientious objection may be defined as a refusal to conform to some rule, mandate, or legal directive on grounds of personal opposition to it. Examples include conscripts refusing to serve in the army; public officials refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses; and parents refusing to vaccinate their children as mandated by state law. Public officials’ conscientious objection is indistinguishable from rule departures insofar as the agent refuses to discharge the set of duties associated with her official role. Conscientious objectors’ non-conformity may stem from very different kinds of motives: the conscript’s religious pacifism or moral and political opposition to a particular war or military occupation, for instance, has little in common with anti-vaxxers’ pseudo-scientific beliefs. But, in many views, conscientious objection is conscientious in the sense identified above, that is to say, sincere, serious, and reflecting the depth of the person’s conviction. In other views, however, when an objector seeks to keep her act private and to avoid detection, this casts doubt on her sincerity and seriousness (Brownlee 2012, ch. 1). As an objection, conscientious objection also shares with civil disobedience the agent’s opposition to the law, since the conscientious objector refuses to conform with the law because she considers it bad or wrong, totally or in part, and thus seeks to disassociate herself from it.

Conscientious objection is often considered to be the private counterpart of civil disobedience: where civil disobedients address the public, are motivated by and appeal to general considerations of justice, and seek to bring about reform, conscientious objectors are supposed to be animated by personal convictions and to simply seek to preserve their own moral integrity through exemption (Smith and Brownlee 2017). For instance, consider that the refusal of Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag is a matter of private religious morality; they do not seek to abolish the practice of saluting the flag for all citizens. Their example is instructive in another way: Jehovah’s Witnesses’ refusal is legally protected. Conscientious objection, unlike civil disobedience, is not necessarily unlawful. Indeed, the law protects conscientious objectors in many contexts, including in the military and healthcare, by carving out exemptions for them.

Some thinkers distinguish conscientious objection from conscientious evasion and stress that we should not overstate the private and personal characteristics of the former. Conscientious objectors often act openly and non-anonymously and take responsibility for their non-conforming act by attempting or being willing to justify it to authorities. To that extent, they may be said to meet the publicity-as-visibility requirement. Some agents, in contrast, undertake their conscientious objection covertly and evasively as conscientious evasion. A young man drafted to fight a war he opposes, for instance, may openly refuse to serve and be arrested and charged for his refusal, or covertly dodge the draft by going AWOL. While conscientious evasion is incompatible with the intention to communicate, conscientious objection may have a public or communicative component, as Thoreau clearly did with his conscientious tax refusal, in a way that blurs the distinction with civil disobedience. Moreover, when such actions are taken by many people – as they often are – their collective impact can approximate the kind of communicative protest exemplified in civil disobedience (Delmas 2018a, ch. 7). In this vein, Emanuela Ceva (2015) highlights the public and political character of conscientious objection (what we call publicity-as-appeal above), which she conceives of as ‘a form of political participation’.

Writings on immigration and on civil disobedience have merged into an area of research devoted to principled disobedience in response to anti-immigration policies. One view, which focuses on what individual actors should do about immigration, examines various unlawful tactics of resistance, including evasion, deception, use of force against state officials, and smuggling (Hidalgo 2019, chs. 5–6). Another view conceives of illegal migration as a form of resistance to global poverty (Blunt 2019, ch. 4), while a third sees unauthorized border crossing as a type of conscientious evasion (Cabrera 2010, 136–43, 165). It is further useful to distinguish transnational civil disobedience from global civil disobedience. Transnational (or trans-state) civil disobedience is the principled violation of a state’s law or policy (a) by individuals who are not citizens or authorized permanent residents of that state, such as asylum-seekers marching from Hungary to Austria against E.U. regulations; or (b) by the state’s own citizens on behalf of outsiders, such as U.S. citizens active in the Sanctuary movement who provided illegal assistance to asylum-seekers from Central America in the 1980s. Both kinds of cases involve at root the “principled claim… that the state’s law is misaligned with the foundational moral principles of the current global system” (Cabrera 2021, 322). Acts of global civil disobedience, on this view, involve “claims implicating structural principles of the global system itself, as misaligned with its foundational moral principles” (Cabrera ibid.). For instance, when the sans-papiers in France openly protest against their socio-political and legal exclusion through occupations, demonstrations, and hunger strikes, they may be viewed as engaged in acts of global civil disobedience. One last useful category of principled disobedience that relates to immigration restrictions, although it overlaps with rule departures and conscientious objection, is official or local disobedience, as when local authorities declare themselves ‘Sanctuary cities’ to protect immigrants by refusing to cooperate with federal authorities (Blake and Hereth 2020, 468–71. See also Applbaum 1999, ch. 9 on ‘official disobedience’ and Scheuerman 2020 on ‘state-based’ or ‘political institutional civil disobedience’).

2.5 Digital disobedience

Digitalization – access to personal computers and the Internet – has transformed not only our lives and interactions, but also our disobedient practices. From piracy to DDoS attacks and from open-access coding to Digital Care Packages (which provide tools to circumvent censorship and surveillance), digital disobedience has emerged as a rich terrain for theoretical inquiry. Scholars disagree about the application of the defining features of civil disobedience to the digital, e.g., whether client-sided DDoS actions, which involve only voluntary botnets, amount to “virtual sit-ins”; whether hacktivists such as Anonymous may be considered civil disobedients despite their covert and evasive actions, their penchant for pranks, and their singling out of particular individuals for doxing and retaliation (such as in Operation Hunt Hunter which targeted ‘revenge porn’ magnate Hunter Moore); or whether the use of zombie botnets in DDoS attacks and the cost of updating security systems for the target evinces the violation of non-violence (see, e.g., Critical Art Ensemble 1998; Himma 2006; Scheuerman 2018, ch. 6; Celikates 2015, 2016; Sauter 2016; Delmas 2018b; Züger 2021).

These debates aside, it is useful to distinguish different kinds of digital tools, sites, strategies, and aims. First, activists use digital technology as tools to organize, document, communicate, raise funds, and make decisions. For instance, Black Lives Matter activists use social media to promote their cause, raise consciousness about systemic racism, and publicize instances of police brutality. They use crowdfunding platforms for fundraising to cover bail and other legal expenses for those arrested. They encourage people to use police scanner apps to watch police activity and legal assistance apps to record encounters with law enforcement officials. Second, the digital is itself a crucial site and object of activism. Hacktivists envision a different Internet – one that is democratic and democratically controlled, free, respectful of privacy, and creative. They protest against the digital architecture of surveillance and control that has been imposed on netizens without their consent. For instance, a number of websites, search engines, and online communities launched coordinated actions in 2012 to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), whose overbroad scope they saw as threats to online freedom of speech. Third, some properly digital strategies of principled disobedience have emerged, such as DDoS actions, web defacement, and hacking. For instance, the No Border network created a fake Lufthansa website touting its “Deportation Class service … the most economic way to travel the world” (“special restrictions apply … no round trips available”). The Open Access Movement, which advocates for open-source software and an open-source repository of academic and scientific research, combines all three dimensions of digital disobedience: it uses networked computers to organize and communicate; it seeks to bring about a free Internet characterized by the free flow of software, science, and culture and has developed a coherent political platform in its defense; and it deploys properly digital strategies, such as illegal downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing (which is illegal when the content torrented is copyrighted material). The Open Access Movement epitomizes a public, geeks-and-grassroots mass movement that not only promotes online democratic governance, but also enacts it within the movement (Swartz 2008 [Other Internet Resources]; Delmas 2018b, 79–80).

2.6 Uncivil disobedience

Uncivil disobedience is not a distinct category of political action, but a cluster concept or umbrella term that can be used to designate acts of principled disobedience that may or may not be communicative, and which violate one or more of the marks of civility by being covert, violent, evasive, or offensive (Delmas 2018a, 2020; Lai 2019). Examples include animal rescue, Sanctuary assistance, sabotage, ecotage (e.g., monkeywrenching and tree-spiking), graffiti, leaks, government whistleblowing, hacktivism (including DDoS attacks), guerrilla protests, and riots. These various act-types do not share any essential property, besides violating one or more of the commonly accepted criteria of civility. Each form of uncivil disobedience must be examined (conceptualized and assessed) on its own. By conceptualizing uncivil disobedience, scholars intend to counter the theoretical impetus to make the concept of civil disobedience ever broader to encompass protests that one approves of, but which do not fit the standard account and may not even fit activists’ self-understanding either. For instance, in her 1913 speech “Freedom or Death”, the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst described herself as a “soldier” in a “civil war” waged against the state and defended the use of militant tactics, including heckling, window-smashing, sabotage, arson, and hunger strikes: radical defiance was the point of such uncivil tactics. Identifying some principled disobedient acts as uncivil makes room to focus on their justification. Scholars have defended such uncivil disobedience as political rioting (Pasternak 2019), vandalism (Lim 2020; Lai 2020), violent protest (Kling and Mitchell 2019), coercive strike tactics (Gourevitch 2018), and direct action (Smith 2018).

While a civil disobedient does not necessarily oppose the regime in which she acts, the revolutionary agent is deeply opposed to that regime (or a core aspect of that regime). Revolutionary agents may not seek to persuade others of the merits of their position – communication is usually not their primary aim, although they convey the urgency of a regime change. When revolution is called for, such as under colonial occupation, there is no need to justify constrained acts of protest like civil disobedience. Indeed, more forceful resistance can be justified as we pass into the realm of just war theory (Buchanan 2013; Finlay 2015). This is not to say that all violent tactics, including terror, are permissible, since the use of violence must not only pursue a just cause but also accord with proportionality and necessity (i.e., be undertaken in last resort and with a reasonable chance of success). As will be discussed in the next section, revolutionary activists and thinkers like Frantz Fanon (2004, ch. 1) and Gandhi disagreed about the effectiveness of violence in emancipatory struggles, but not about its justifiability, as Karuna Mantena (2018, 83–4) has shown.

3. Justification

The task of defending civil disobedience is commonly undertaken with the assumption that in reasonably just, liberal societies people have a general moral duty to follow the law (often called political obligation ). It is on the basis of such an assumption that civil disobedience requires justification. This section examines common understandings of the problem of disobedience (3.1), before presenting prominent accounts and critiques of the conditions under which civil disobedience may be justified (3.2). Whether or not theorists assume that civil disobedience is presumptively impermissible and in need of justification, their analyses also articulate the value and role of civil disobedience in non-ideal, nearly just or less-than-nearly-just liberal democracies (3.3).

Philosophers have given many arguments in favor of the moral duty to obey the law (see entry on political obligation ). Despite the many critiques of, and general skepticism toward, arguments for the moral duty to obey the law, most prominently following A. John Simmons (1979), theorists of civil disobedience have continued to conceive of the practice’s illegality as a hurdle to surmount (see Lyons 1998 for an analysis of the endurance of such a problematic assumption). They conceive of principled disobedience in general as presumptively wrong because it violates political obligation, undermines the rule of law, and destabilizes society both through example, by signaling to others that anyone can disobey if they feel the urge, and in principle, by expressing disrespect for law’s authority. They contend that civil disobedience in particular is presumptively wrong because of its anti-democratic nature. The agent who violates the outcomes of democratic decision-making processes because she disapproves of them puts herself above the law and threatens the legal and democratic order. Some see in it a violation of reciprocity, a kind of political “blackmail” and a sign of “moral self-indulgence” and arrogance, insofar as a minority, whose views didn’t prevail, disregards democratic processes and imposes on the majority its own view of the good and just (C. Cohen 1971, 138–45; Dworkin 1985, 112; Weinstock 2016, 709; for a response to the charge of ‘epistemic arrogance’, see Hindkjær Madsen 2021).

Recent scholarship on civil disobedience has taken what may be dubbed an anarchist turn , as theorists tend to no longer approach civil disobedience as presumptively wrong and in tension with political obligation. Although some theorists still defend the latter (Smith 2013), most start from skepticism vis-à-vis the moral duty to obey the law (Brownlee 2012; Celikates 2014, 2016). Others defend a disjunctive moral duty to obey the law or disobey it civilly (Lefkowitz 2007); and still others argue that the grounds commonly used to support political obligation – the natural duty of justice, the principle of fairness, the Samaritan duty, and associative obligations – yield duties to resist injustice, through civil and uncivil disobedience, under non-ideal circumstances, and that such duties should be considered among our political obligations (Delmas 2018a). Likewise, on a virtue-ethical account, political obligation can be understood as an obligation to respect rather than to obey the law, which can sometimes give rise to a duty to engage in civil disobedience (Moraro 2019, ch. 6).

Given the assumption that people have a moral duty to obey the law and the concern that civil disobedience has the potential to destabilize society, Rawls famously raised the bar for the justified use of the practice, requiring acts of civil disobedience 1) to target serious and long-standing injustice and at the same time appeal to widely accepted principles of justice, 2) to be undertaken as a last resort, and 3) to be done in coordination with other minority groups with similar grievances (Rawls 1999, 326–9). These conditions for the justification of civil disobedience, which are critically examined in this part, are closely tied not only to the ostensible need to diffuse its destabilizing potential and discourage proliferation of the practice, but also to the efficacy and role of civil disobedience in society (which is explored further in 3.3).

Longstanding Injustice : Why did Rawls restrict the target of civil disobedience to entrenched, longstanding injustices – in particular, violations of the principle of equal basic liberties? For Rawls, civil disobedience’s chance of success rests on the clarity of the injustice: everyone must be able to recognize the violation as an injustice, given widely accepted principles of political morality. Racial segregation fell in this category, according to Rawls, but not economic inequality. Rawls thinks that appeals to publicly shared principles of constitutional morality (per the publicity-as-appeal requirement) are more likely to persuade the majority and succeed to bring about reform. Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Ronald Dworkin restrict both civil disobedients’ appeals and their possible targets: they exclude matters of policy, as well as injustices that do not consist of incontrovertible violations of widely accepted principles of justice.

Critics reject this justificatory condition because it arbitrarily excludes both progressive but not widely shared conceptions of justice (such as cosmopolitanism) and appeals to other principles of morality besides justice (say, regarding the ethical treatment of animals; Singer 1973, 86–92). And whereas Dworkin (1985, 111–2) finds anti-nuclear protest unjustifiable to the extent that it turns on judgments of policy instead of appealing to fundamental principles of political morality, Robert Goodin (1987) counters that the justice/policy distinction is flimsy and arbitrarily drawn and insists that civil disobedients should pursue the common good by protesting international and climate policies. Scholars also include in the class of justifiable targets private agents such as trade unions, banks, health insurance companies, labs, farm factories, and private universities (Walzer 1982, ch.2; Smith 2013, 55–6; Milligan 2013, ch. 11–12; S. Cooke 2016). Finally, observation of past and present social movements, including the Abolitionist movement, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter, suggests that, rather than appealing to the public principles of political morality, civil disobedients may in fact seek to transform common sense morality.

Last Resort : What grounds the widely accepted requirement that civil disobedience be undertaken as a last resort? How do we know agents have met it? One position is that, in a liberal democracy, citizens should use proper legal channels of political participation to express their grievances (Raz 1979; though Raz grants that individual acts of disobedience can be justified in liberal regimes). But, since causes defended by a minority are often those most opposed by persons in power, legal channels may be less than wholly effective (Rawls 1999, 327). Moreover, it is unclear when a person could claim to have reached a situation of last resort; she could continue to use the same tired legal methods without end. To ward off such challenges, Rawls suggests that, if past actions, including by others, have shown the majority to be immovable or apathetic, then further attempts may reasonably be thought fruitless and the dissenter may be confident her civil disobedience is a last resort (1999, 328).

Minority Group Coordination : The coordination requirement is designed to regulate the overall level of dissent (Rawls 1999, 327). The idea is that since minority groups are equally justified in resorting to civil disobedience when they have sufficiently weighty objections, these groups should avoid undermining each other’s efforts through simultaneous appeals to the attention of society and government. While there is some merit to this condition, arguably civil disobedience that does not meet it can still be justifiable. In some cases, there will be no time or opportunity to coordinate with other minorities. In other cases, other minority groups may be unable or unwilling to coordinate. The refusal or inability of other groups to cooperate should arguably not affect the ultimate defensibility of a person’s or group’s use of civil disobedience.

A reason for Rawls to defend this coordination requirement is that often coordination serves a more important concern, namely, the achievement of good consequences. It is often argued that civil disobedience can only be justified if there is a high probability that it will produce positive change, since only such change can justify exposing society to the risks of harm usually associated with civil disobedience – namely, its destabilizing and divisive potential and the risk that it could encourage lawbreaking or escalate into uncivil disobedience. In response to these challenges, one might question the empirical claims that civil disobedience is divisive and that it has the consequence of leading others to use disobedience to achieve changes in policy. One might also question whether it necessarily would be a bad thing if civil disobedience had these consequences. Concerning likelihood of success, civil disobedience can seem most justifiable when the situation appears hopeless and when the government refuses to listen to conventional forms of communication. Additionally, even when general success seems unlikely, civil disobedience might be defended for any reprieve from harm that it brings to victims of a bad law or policy. Tree-hugging, for example, can delay or curtail a clear-cut logging scheme and thereby prolong the protection of an ecosystem.

The justification of civil disobedience further articulates the conditions for its effective role in society. Far from undermining the rule of law or destabilizing society, civil disobedience could strengthen the social and legal order. Civil disobedience can have a justice-enhancing value: it can serve “to inhibit departures from justice and to correct them when they occur” (Rawls 1999, 336). Equally, it can have a legitimacy-enhancing function, with some thinkers conceiving of civil disobedience as ‘the guardian of legitimacy’ (Habermas 1985, 103). Both ideas deem the practice of civil disobedience to be a valuable component of the public political culture of a near-just constitutional democratic society. Habermas even took the state’s treatment of civil disobedience as a ‘litmus test’ for the maturity of the political culture of a constitutional democracy: “Every constitutional democracy that is sure of itself considers civil disobedience as a normalized – because necessary – component of its political culture” (Habermas 1985, 99).

While Habermas’s account resembles Rawls’s liberal approach in many ways, its distinctive deliberative strand has also influenced democracy-based accounts, which defend the justification and role of civil disobedience on the basis of its contribution to democracy. Deliberative democrats (Markovits 2005; Smith 2013, ch. 1–3), republican democrats (Arendt 1972), and radical democrats (Celikates 2014, 2016) focus on the potential of civil disobedience to enhance democratic legitimacy and to constitute in itself a form of democratic empowerment. Agents engaged in civil disobedience can enhance democratic legitimacy in a number of ways, including by putting a heretofore-neglected issue on the political agenda and raising awareness about its stakes; contributing to and informing democratic deliberation; highlighting the outsize influence of powerful players and the exclusionary effects of certain processes of public deliberation, and working to make the latter more inclusive. Civil disobedience does not only aim to invigorate democratic sovereignty, but also can constitute a form of democratic empowerment in itself – an exercise of political agency that is especially meaningful for marginalized groups. Through civil disobedience, individuals discover and realize their power. They work together and forge bonds of solidarity. They engage in democratic politics. Theorists’ examples to illustrate democratic civil disobedience include: the Occupy Movement, pro-democracy movements around the world, anti-globalization and anti-austerity protests, climate justice activism, and Campesino movements for land redistribution and agrarian reform. Many activists further enact within their movement the norms and values that guide their struggles, for instance through radical inclusion, direct democratic decision-making, aspiration to consensus, and leaderless organizational structures. Some theorists insist on the need to align the means of protest with its aims, by deploying only persuasive, non-violent forms of protest that reflect democratic ideals (Habermas 1997, 383–4; M. Cooke 2016), while others contend that civil disobedience can be confrontational and coercive without betraying its democratic aims (Smith 2021; Fung 2005, 409).

A third approach to the value of civil disobedience, besides the liberal and democratic lenses, comes from the political realist perspective. Robert Jubb (2019) critiques Rawlsian accounts of civil disobedience for the binary theory of political authority they rest on: they take the whole political order to be either legitimate or illegitimate, and thereby ignore or deny the possibility that a regime may be authoritative in virtue of having a democratic mandate, yet fail to protect everyone’s basic liberties or to treat all its members as equals, for example. Jubb proposes instead to “disaggregate” political authority, that is, to distinguish between the different forms of authority which a political order may possess or lack, in order to make sense of the conditions under which different forms of protest and resistance may be appropriate. Other realists criticize both liberal and deliberative democratic perspectives for their deductive, top-down approach to moral analysis, their quest for rational consensus, and their assumption that people can be persuaded by rational arguments alone (Sabl 2001, 2021; Mantena 2012). Realist accounts of civil disobedience stress instead “the ubiquity of moral disagreement and the permanence of political conflict” (Sabl 2021, 153). Andrew Sabl, for instance, envisions civil disobedience as a properly ‘political technology’ (2021, 165), situated between submission and revolution, through which agents seek to effect change in the basic allocation of burdens and benefits by raising costs for adversaries, but without undermining the state’s basic functions such as its provision of public goods.

For her part, Mantena debunks the common understanding of Gandhi and King as committed in principle and absolutely to non-violence, showing that their endorsement of non-violence reflected concerns of political efficacy. They considered political violence to be “futile”, that is, ineffective for social change and likely to bring about “dangerous and perverse consequences in politics” (Mantena 2018, 84). In Gandhi’s view, violence would cultivate the wrong kind of independence for India and breed the wrong kind of polity, amounting to a mere change of personnel in a violent state and generating unstable conditions. Mantena identifies “three faces of nonviolent action”, which we can reframe as realists’ account of the triple value of civil disobedience: 1) morally, civil disobedience is the right means by which oppressed people can regain dignity and self-respect; 2) strategically, it is a necessary means to just and stable political results and future democratic concord; and 3) tactically, the dramatization of civil disobedients’ discipline works effectively to persuade opponents. Recent social scientific research has corroborated the effectiveness of non-violence in campaigns of civil resistance, which seek to topple dictatorships or colonial powers (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011; Schock 2015).

Many democratic theorists incorporate political realism in their approach as they strive to think about and “learn from the streets” (Celikates 2014), in a “bottom-up” approach designed to understand particular contemporary protest movements. This approach constitutes a stark departure from “top-down” liberal approaches like Rawls’s and Dworkin’s that require agents justify their disobedient protest before engaging in it. As Alexander Livingston puts it, many democratic and critical theorists today seek to draw “theoretical insights from protest movements themselves around the globe rather than legislating moral guidelines for activist praxis from the sidelines” (Çıdam et al 2020, 540). Guy Aitchison sees this as a central feature of the ‘new civil disobedience debate’, in which scholars seek to respond to ‘a new era of political protest and unrest’ characterized by “the proliferation and intensification of oppositional political action by groups challenging economic inequality, racist policing, immigration enforcement, austerity, war, climate change, financial oligarchy, privatization, and corporate domination of cyberspace” (Aitchison 2018b, 5, 7–8) – which theorists tend to be in broad sympathy with. Such bottom-up approach also diverges from David Lefkowitz’s and Kimberley Brownlee’s defenses of a moral right to civil disobedience that applies impartially to all acts of civil disobedience, justified or not (see 4.2).

4. Responding to Civil Disobedience

How should the state respond to civil disobedience? The question of appropriate legal response applies, first, to the actions of law-enforcers when deciding whether and how to intervene in a civilly disobedient action. It applies, second, to the actions of prosecutors when deciding whether to file charges and proceed to trial. Finally, it applies to the actions of judges (and juries) when deciding whether to convict and (for judges) how much to punish. All three contexts of legal sanctions beg the question of criminal law’s function.

How much punishment is appropriate for civil disobedients? Is punishment appropriate at all? If there is a right to civil disobedience, then, as we saw, it protects people from punishment. Even if there isn’t, is punishment indefensible if it sanctions morally justified civil disobedience? The tensions become clear when we consider the criminal law’s function, which is to punish and prevent crimes, that is, to tackle wrongful conduct. Unlike civil wrongs, which are privately brought, criminal wrongs are public wrongs: the polity, not the victim (there may not be any), prosecutes the alleged wrongdoer. Punishment, depending on one’s overarching account, serves to: dissuade people from committing the types of conduct identified as wrongful (Bentham 1789 [1970]); appropriately respond to those who culpably commit them (Moore 1997), including by engaging with them in a moral dialogue so that they repent and reform (Duff 1998); and/or express the community’s moral disapproval of such conduct (Feinberg 1994). So, we may ask, from the consequentialist, forward-looking standpoint, whether the state should deter civil disobedience; and, from a retributivist (desert-based) or communicative, backward-looking perspective, whether civil disobedients deserve the community’s censure (Bennett and Brownlee 2021).

If civilly disobedient breaches of law are public wrongs, comparable to or worse than ordinary offenses, then civil disobedients should be punished similarly or more severely than those who commit ordinary offenses. Kent Greenawalt lays out reasons to hold that civil disobedients deserve the same punishment as others who breach the same laws. First, the demands of proportionality would seem to recommend a uniform application of legal prohibitions. Since trespass is prohibited, persons who breach trespass laws in protest of either those laws or other laws would seem to be equally liable to persons who breach trespass laws for private purposes. Second, any principle that officials may use to excuse justified illegal acts will result in some failures to punish unjustified acts, for which the purposes of punishment would be more fully served. Even when officials make correct judgments about which acts to excuse, citizens may draw mistaken inferences, and restraints of deterrence and norm acceptance may be weakened for unjustified acts that resemble justified ones (Greenawalt 1987, 273). What follows is that all such violations, justified and unjustified, should be treated the same.

There also are reasons to believe that civil disobedients should be dealt with more severely than are others who have offended. First, as mentioned above, disobedients seem to have put themselves above the law in preferring their own moral judgment about a certain issue to that of the democratic decision-making process and the rule of law. Second, the communicative aspect of civil disobedience could be said to aggravate disobedient offenses since their communication usually is attended by much greater publicity than most covert violations are. This forces legal authorities to concern themselves with the possibility that law-abiding citizens will feel distressed, insecure, and perhaps imposed on, if no action is taken. So, notes Greenawalt, while authorities may quietly let minor breaches pass, failure to respond to violations performed, in some respect, in the presence of authority, may undercut claims that the rules and the persons who administered them deserve respect (1987, 351–2). Third, and related, civil disobedients often invite, and might inspire, other citizens to do what they do. Such risk of proliferation of civil disobedience and, further, of its escalation into lawlessness and violence, may support the imposition of more severe punishment for agents engaged in civil disobedience.

However, both the models of civil disobedience presented above, which stress its role and value in liberal democracies, and the arguments for the right to civil disobedience examined below, strongly push for the opposite view that civil disobedients, if punished at all, should be dealt with more leniently than others who have offended. The preceding discussion highlights that civil disobedience is in fact a public good – a crucial component of democratic culture, in Habermas’s words – and, hence, many theorists defend the state’s responsibility to treat civil disobedients leniently.

Dworkin argues that the state has a “special responsibility to try to protect [the civil disobedient], and soften his predicament, whenever it can do so without great damage to other policies” (Dworkin 1978, 260). The government can exercise its responsibility of leniency by not prosecuting civil disobedience at all, depending on the balance of reasons, including individual rights, state interests, social costs, and constitutional benefits. Reasons for prosecuting in any particular case are ‘practical’, not intrinsic or deontological, and always potentially defeasible. In general, prosecutors should not charge disobedients with the most serious offenses applicable and judges should give them light sentences. Leniency follows from the recognition of the special constitutional status of civil disobedience.

In this view, officials at all levels have the discretion to not sanction civil disobedients, and they should use it. Prosecutors have and should use their discretion not to press charges against civil disobedients in some cases, or to charge them with the least serious offense possible. Dworkin (1985) urges judges to engage in an open dialogue with civil disobedients (at least those who articulate legal arguments in defense of their actions) and dismiss their charges after hearing them, or to use their discretion in sentencing, for instance by accepting guilty pleas or guilty verdicts but imposing trivial punishments.

However, this proposal could amount to letting judges evaluate the worthiness of individual civil disobedients’ causes, which would not on its own guarantee judicial leniency. To the contrary, judges might well systematically decide against civil disobedients, upholding the special interests of the ruling class of which they are part. The proceduralist insistence on courts’ neutrality avoids this pitfall, and generally warns against turning courtrooms into political forums. Yet the transformation of courts into public fora might not be so insidious, and may indeed be part of a necessary institutional reform to provide civil disobedients with a platform, perhaps along the lines of Arendt’s (1972, 101–2) proposal to treat civil disobedients as a kind of people’s lobbyists (see Smith 2011).

For Rawls, there is only a moral right to engage in justified civil disobedience. But many other theorists defend at least a limited right to engage in civil disobedience irrespective of a particular act’s justification, given the general value of the practice. Dworkin (1978) outlines what such a right of conduct might look like, analogizing civil disobedients with Supreme Court justices, who test the constitutional validity of (unjust) law through direct disobedience of that law. In doing so, they can make law more faithful to the principles of justice and fairness that justify it (on Dworkin’s theory of law). Some theorists accept the value of constitutional challenges but argue that once the law is found by a high court to be constitutional and disobedients’ initial conviction is upheld, disobedients have a duty to accept their punishment and recognize the law’s validity (Fortas 1968; Nussbaum 2019, 177). In contrast, Dworkin argues that forcing citizens to obey court decisions – including the Supreme Court’s – would mean forcing them to do something their conscience forbids them to do, which would contravene the constitutional imperative, entrenched in the First Amendment and rooted in dignity, to respect individuals’ “right to conscience” and protect their freedom of speech.

The right to conscience, on this account, thus grounds a weak “right to break the law”. It is a right in the sense that one “does the right thing to break the law, so that we should all respect” the agent when she follows her conscientious judgment about doubtful law and refuses to comply with a law that requires her to do what her conscience forbids (Dworkin 1978, 228–37), but it does not ground a right in the strong sense that the government would do wrong to stop her from disobeying. In other words, on this view, the right to disobedience is deemed to be compatible with the state’s right to punish. Contra Cohen (1966, 6), Rawls (1999, 322), and others, however, Dworkin does not defend agents’ moral duty to accept punishment (1985, 114–5). He considers non-evasion of legal sanctions to be a good strategy for civil disobedients denouncing unconstitutional law and unjust policy ( justice - and policy -based civil disobedience on his view) but denies that accepting punishment is a conceptual, moral, or tactical requirement for civil disobedience motivated by personal convictions (‘integrity-based’ civil disobedience). For the latter, Dworkin argues that utilitarian reasons for punishing should be weighed against the fact that the accused acted out of principled convictions, and that the balance should generally favor leniency.

Joseph Raz puts forward a different account of the right to civil disobedience, insisting that this right extends to cases in which people ought not to exercise the right: it is part of the nature and purpose of rights of conduct that they give persons a protected sphere in which to act rightly or wrongly. To say that there is a right to civil disobedience is to allow the legitimacy of resorting to this form of political action for causes one opposes (Raz 1979, 268). That said, Raz places great emphasis on the kind of regime in which a disobedient acts, arguing that only in an illiberal regime could individuals have a right to civil disobedience to reclaim their political participation rights which their illiberal state is violating: they are entitled to “disregard the offending laws and exercise their moral right as if it were recognized by law.” Raz adds that “members of the illiberal state do have a right to civil disobedience which is roughly that part of their moral right to political participation which is not recognized in law” (Raz 1979, 272–3). By contrast, in a liberal state, the right to political activity is, by hypothesis, adequately protected by law and, hence, the right to political participation cannot ground a right to civil disobedience.

A different view of rights holds that when a person appeals to political participation rights to defend her disobedience, she does not necessarily criticize the law for outlawing her action. Lefkowitz maintains that members of minorities can appreciate that democratic discussions often must be cut short so that decisions may be taken, and those who engage in civil disobedience may view current policy as the best compromise between the need to act and the need to accommodate continued debate. Nonetheless, they also can point out that, with greater resources or further time for debate, their view might have held sway. Given this possibility, the right to political participation must include a right to continue to contest the result after the votes are counted or the decisions taken. And this right should include suitably constrained civil disobedience because the best conception of political participation rights is one that reduces as much as possible the impact that luck has on the popularity of a view (Lefkowitz 2007; see also Smith 2013, ch. 4; Ceva 2015).

An alternative response to Raz questions whether the right to civil disobedience must be derived from rights to political participation. Brownlee (2012, ch. 4) bases the right to civil disobedience on a right to object on the basis of sincere conviction. Whether such a right would fall under participation rights depends on the expansiveness of the latter rights. When the right to participate is understood to accommodate only legal protest, then the right conscientiously to object, which commonsensically includes civil disobedience, must be viewed as distinct from political participation rights.

A further challenge to a regime-focused account is that real societies do not align with a dichotomy between liberal and illiberal regimes; rather they fall along a spectrum of liberality and illiberality, being both more or less liberal relative to each other and being more or less liberal in some domains than in others. Perhaps, in a society that approximates a liberal regime, the political-participation case for a right to civil disobedience diminishes, but to make legally protected participation fully adequate, a liberal society would have to address Bertrand Russell’s charge that controllers of the media give defenders of unpopular views few opportunities to make their case unless they resort to sensational methods such as disobedience (1998, 635).

Philosophers have typically focused on the question of how courts should treat civil disobedients, while neglecting to apply that question to law enforcement. Yet the police have much discretion in how to deal with civil disobedients. In particular, they have no obligation to arrest protesters when they commit minor violations of the law such as traffic obstruction: accommodation of and communication with protesters is something they can but all too rarely decide to do. Instead, many governments practice militarized repression of protests. Local police departments in the U.S. often respond to demonstrations with riot gear and other military equipment. Also, the British government sought to strengthen public order laws and secure new police powers to crack down on Extinction Rebellion (XR), the global environmental movement whose street protests, die-ins, and roadblocks for climate justice have brought cities to a standstill.

One notable exception to the theoretical neglect of law enforcement is Smith’s (2013, ch. 5) articulation of a “policing philosophy” that orientates policing strategies toward accommodation, rather than prevention or repression, of civil disobedience. On Smith’s view, “the police should, where possible, cooperate with civilly disobedient activists in order to assist in their commission of a protest that is effective as an expression of their grievance against law or policy” (2013, 111). Accommodation requires communication channels between police and activists and involves strategies such as pre-negotiated arrests. While the U.S. often implements punitive and strong-handed law enforcement strategies, the U.K.’s current goal (at the time of writing) is, according to one senior police source, to develop ‘move forward’ – proactive and preventive – tactics that are designed to clear the streets of XR demonstrators. Neither approach respects anything like a right to civil disobedience.

A constitutional government committed to recognizing the right to civil disobedience would also have to reform part of its criminal laws and make available certain defenses. Brownlee proposes two. First, disobedients should have access to a “demands-of-conviction,” excusatory defense to point to the deep and sincere reasons they had for believing they were justified in acting the way they did (Brownlee 2012, ch. 5). Second, states should accept necessity as a justificatory defense for civil disobedience undertaken as a reasonable and parsimonious response to violations of and threats to non-contingent basic needs (Brownlee 2012, ch. 6). As these defenses suggest, constitutionally recognizing civil disobedience does not mean making civil disobedience legal. Disobedients would still be arrested and prosecuted, but they would get to explain and defend their actions in court. They would be heard.

There have been shifts in the paradigm forms and goals of civil disobedience over the past century, from the suffragettes’ militant activism in pursuit of their basic rights of citizenship to the youth climate movement’s school walkouts and mass demonstrations to demand governments take urgent action to combat the climate crisis. Even so, civil disobedience remains an enduring, vibrant part of political activism and, increasingly, benefits from transnational alliances.

Theorists have long assumed that civil disobedience only begs justification in liberal, democratic societies – the best real-world candidates for legitimate states. However, civil disobedience also raises questions in undemocratic and illegitimate contexts, regarding its overall role, strategic value, and tactical efficacy. For instance, disobedient protests in support of democracy in Hong Kong may not be presumptively impermissible given China’s authoritarian rule. Yet they still beg significant questions concerning the proper contours of extra-institutional dissident politics and the justification of uncivil and forceful tactics in repressive contexts, including violence against police and the destruction of pro-China shops and Chinese banks.

Finally, whereas theorists have tended to think of civil disobedience as generally undertaken to achieve worthy public goals, liberal democratic states have recently witnessed much disobedience in pursuit of anti-democratic and illiberal goals, including conscientious refusal to abide by antidiscrimination statutes and violations of, and protests against, laws requiring the provision of reproductive services and the public health measures enacted to slow the spread of the coronavirus. We may need a different lens than liberal and democratic theorists have offered to evaluate the full range of conservative social movements, counter-movements, and reactionary movements which resort to civil (and other forms of) disobedience.

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We thank Adrian Blau, Adam Cureton, Alan Hamlin, Jonathan Quong, Ben Saunders, Hillel Steiner, Zofia Stemplowska, John Tasioulas, Joseph Raz, and an anonymous referee for their useful suggestions. Thanks to Kelsey Vicar for research assistance.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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This essay originally appeared in Christopher B. Gray (ed.), Philosophy of Law:  An Encyclopedia , Garland Pub. Co, 1999, II.110-113.   Copyright © 1999, Peter Suber . Civil Disobedience Peter Suber , Philosophy Department , Earlham College Civil disobedience is a form of protest in which protestors deliberately violate a law. Classically, they violate the law they are protesting, such as segregation or draft laws, but sometimes they violate other laws which they find unobjectionable, such as trespass or traffic laws. Most activists who perform civil disobedience are scrupulously non-violent, and willingly accept legal penalties. The purpose of civil disobedience can be to publicize an unjust law or a just cause; to appeal to the conscience of the public; to force negotiation with recalcitrant officials; to "clog the machine" (in Thoreau's phrase) with political prisoners; to get into court where one can challenge the constitutionality of a law; to exculpate oneself, or to put an end to one's personal complicity in the injustice which flows from obedience to unjust law —or some combination of these. While civil disobedience in a broad sense is as old as the Hebrew midwives' defiance of Pharaoh, most of the moral and legal theory surrounding it, as well as most of the instances in the street, have been inspired by Thoreau, Gandhi, and King. In this article we will focus on the moral arguments for and against its use in a democracy. Objection:   Civil disobedience cannot be justified in a democracy. Unjust laws made by a democratic legislature can be changed by a democratic legislature. The existence of lawful channels of change makes civil disobedience unnecessary. Reply:   Thoreau, who performed civil disobedience in a democracy, argued that sometimes the constitution is the problem, not the solution. Moreover, legal channels can take too long, he argued, for he was born to live, not to lobby. His individualism gave him another answer: individuals are sovereign, especially in a democracy, and the government only holds its power by delegation from free individuals. Any individual may, then, elect to stand apart from the domain of law. Martin Luther King, Jr., who also performed civil disobedience in a democracy, asks us to look more closely at the legal channels of change. If they are open in theory, but closed or unfairly obstructed in practice, then the system is not democratic in the way needed to make civil disobedience unnecessary. Other activists have pointed out that if judicial review is one of the features of American democracy which is supposed to make civil disobedience unnecessary, then it ironically subverts this goal; for to obtain standing to bring an unjust statute to court for review, often a plaintiff must be arrested for violating it. Finally, the Nuremberg principles require disobedience to national laws or orders which violate international law, an overriding duty even in (perhaps especially in) a democracy. Objection:   Even if civil disobedience is sometimes justified in a democracy, activists must first exhaust the legal channels of change and turn to disobedience only as a last resort. Reply:   Legal channels can never be "exhausted". Activists can always write another letter to their congressional delegation or to newspapers; they can always wait for another election and cast another vote. But justice delayed, King proclaimed, is justice denied. After a point, he argued, patience in fighting an injustice perpetuates the injustice, and this point had long since been passed in the 340 year struggle against segregation in America. In the tradition which justifies civil disobedience by appeal to higher law, legal niceties count for relatively little. If God trumps Caesar to justify disobedience to unjust law, then God can trump Caesar to permit this disobedience sooner rather than later. In this tradition, A.J. Muste argued that to use legal channels to fight unjust laws is to participate in an evil machine, and to disguise dissent as conformity; this in turn corrupts the activist and discourages others by leading them to underestimate the numbers of their congeners. Objection:   We must obey the law under a contract with other members of our society. We have tacitly consented to the laws by residing in the state and enjoying its benefits. Reply:   Obviously this objection can be evaded by anyone who denies the social contract theory. But surprisingly many disobedient activists affirm that theory, making this an objection they must answer. Socrates makes this objection to Crito who is encouraging him to disobey the law by escaping from prison before he is executed. Thoreau and Gandhi both reply (as part of larger, more complex replies) that those who object deeply to the injustices committed by the state can, and should, relinquish the benefits they receive from the state by living a life of voluntary simplicity and poverty; this form of sacrifice is in effect to revoke one's tacit consent to obey the law. Another of Thoreau's replies is that consent to join a society and obey its laws must always be express, and never tacit. But even for Locke, whose social contract theory introduces the term "tacit consent," the theory permits disobedience, even revolution, if the state breaches its side of the contract. A reply from the natural law tradition, used by King, is that an unjust law is not even a law, but a perversion of law (Augustine, Aquinas). Hence, consent to obey the laws does not extend to unjust laws. A reply made by many Blacks, women, and native Americans is that the duty to obey is a matter of degree; if they are not fully enfranchised members of American society, then they are not fully bound by its laws. Objection:   What if everybody did it? Civil disobedience fails Kant's universalizability test. Most critics prefer to press this objection as a slippery slope argument; the objection then has descriptive and normative versions. In the descriptive version, one predicts that the example of disobedients will be imitated, increasing lawlessness and tending toward anarchy. In the normative version, one notes that if disobedience is justified for one group whose moral beliefs condemn the law, then it is justified for any group similarly situated, which is a recipe for anarchy. The first reply, offered in seriousness by Thoreau and Gandhi, is that anarchy is not so bad an outcome. In fact, both depict anarchy as an ideal form of society. However, both are willing to put off the anarchical utopia for another day and fight in the meantime for improved laws; consequently, this strand of their thinking is often overlooked. Another reply is a variation on the first. Anarchy may be bad, but despotism is worse (Locke instead of Hobbes). If we face an iniquitous law, then we may permissibly disobey, and risk anarchy, in order to resist the tendency toward the greater evil of despotism. A.J. Muste extended this line of thinking to turn the slippery slope objection against itself. If we let the state conscript young men against their wills to fight immoral wars, then what will the state do next? For Muste, conscription puts us on a slippery slope toward despotism, and obedience would bring us to the bottom. Utilitarians observe that disobedience and obedience may both be harmful. The slippery slope objection falsely assumes that the former sort of harm always outweighs the latter. In the case of an iniquitous law, the harm of disobedience can be the lesser evil. This utilitarian reply is sometimes found to coexist with a complementary deontological reply, for example in Thoreau: one simply must not lend one's weight to an unjust cause. Ronald Dworkin replies, in effect, that the descriptive version of the argument is false and the normative version irrelevant. There is no evidence that civil disobedience, even when tolerated by legal officials, leads to an increase in lawlessness. Moreover, rights trump utility. Since (for Dworkin) there is a strong right to disobey certain kinds of unjust laws, and since the slippery slope argument points only to the disutility of disobedience, this is a case of a right in conflict with utility; hence the right to disobey must prevail. The normative version of the slippery slope argument has little force if the criteria used by activists permit some but not all disobedience. In Kant's language again, universalizability fails if the maxim of the action is "disobey a law whenever you disapprove of it," but it can succeed if instead the maxim is, "disobey when obedience would cause more harm than disobedience," or "disobey when a law is unjust in the following specific ways...." And it must be said, virtually all activists who practice civil disobedience follow criteria which endorse some, but not all, disobedience. King, for example, did not advocate indiscriminate disobedience; he advocated disobedience of unjust laws and obedience to the just. He articulated what he regarded as public, objective criteria which help us identify the unjust laws which may or must be disobeyed, and the just laws which must obeyed. Any attempt to articulate the distinction between the two sorts of law is in effect an attempt to show that the slide down the slope can be halted, or that the maxim to disobey can be universalized. King had a second reply, inspired by Gandhi: he deliberately made his example difficult to imitate. He pressed for negotiation before turning to disobedience; he underwent self-purification before every disobedient action; he accepted blows from police without retaliation; he accepted arrest and punishment. These tactical features of his actions had other purposes as well, but there is little doubt that they prevented onlookers from thinking that here was a criminal getting away with murder whose example could be imitated with profit. The counter reply, made by Waldman and Storing is that the example of the careful disobedient will be imitated by the careless, and cannot be confined, especially if activists cloak their disobedient acts in the rhetoric of righteousness. If true, this instantly makes replies to the normative version of the slippery slope objection irrelevant. Caution in stating our criteria so that normatively we stop our slide far from the bottom does nothing to prevent the example from being misinterpreted or oversimplified by the less cautious. Scrupulosity in self-purification, courage in accepting blows, and sacrifice in accepting punishment do not stop the unscrupulous from being inspired by the example of disobedience as such. One direct response, then, to the descriptive version held by Waldman and Storing comes from Rawls, who argued that civil disobedience can actually help to stabilize a community. It can be destabilizing if a very large number of people do it, but this rarely happens, and when only a few do it, it can have the beneficial and stabilizing effect of nudging a society closer to its shared vision of justice. Thoreau and Wasserstrom argue that while many in fact might be morally justified in disobeying, few in fact will actually disobey. For Thoreau and A.J. Muste, this inertia and docility in the general population are far larger problems than incipient anarchy. Sometimes activists can point to the lawlessness of their opponents as the real concern. Thoreau claimed that the only harmful consequences of civil disobedience were triggered by the government's reaction to it. King painted white segregationists as the group most likely to precipitate anarchy, since it disobeyed desegregation laws without regard to their legitimacy or justice. Moreover, an activist need not be an anarchist to welcome widespread imitation. Thoreau ardently wished that all opponents of slavery would act on their convictions. He would regard a prediction of widespread imitation of his disobedience as an inducement to act, not as an objection. At this point, critics must be careful not to use the slippery slope objection inconsistently, by predicting anarchy to those who fear it, and inert indifference to those who fear that. On the other hand, activists who welcome imitation should probably do all they can to encourage this imitation; Thoreau did nothing of this kind until he wrote his extremely influential essay two years after he was arrested for withholding his poll tax. Gandhi, Mohandas K. Satyagraha in South Africa . Trans. Valji Govindji Desai. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1928. Bedau, Hugo Adam (ed.). Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice . New York: Macmillan, 1969. Harris, Paul (ed.). Civil Disobedience . Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1989. King, Martin Luther, Jr. "Letter From Birmingham Jail." In his Why We Can't Wait . New York: New American Library, 1964, pp. 76-95. Thoreau, Henry David. The Variorum Civil Disobedience . Ed. Walter Harding. New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1967

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Civil disobedience and the duty to obey the law: a critical assessment of lefkowitz's view.

John Pizzato Follow

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Andrew Altman

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Christie Hartley

In this paper I critically assess David Lefkowitz’s view that the right to political participation encompasses a right to suitably constrained civil disobedience. I claim that his argument is not successful because it has an explanatory gap. I then examine two strategies for repairing his argument. The first attempts to show that acts of civil disobedience fulfill the duty to obey the law. The second attempts to establish that the moral value of civil disobedience outweighs the moral value of obeying the law. I argue that both strategies may be successful—to a certain extent—but only the latter can establish a right to civil disobedience.

https://doi.org/10.57709/12445689

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Pizzato, John, "Civil Disobedience and the Duty to Obey the Law: A Critical Assessment of Lefkowitz's View." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2018. doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/12445689

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Lesson Plan

April 2, 2020, 10:29 a.m.

What is the role of civil disobedience today?

Interview with Cesar Chavez. 1979. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko via Library of Congress

Estimated time:, grade level.

• Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.
• To make a great dream come true, the first requirement is a great capacity to dream; the second is persistence.
• Preservation of one's own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.
• History will judge societies and governments - and their institutions - not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and the powerful, but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless.
• The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.
• Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or weak... Non-violence is hard work.
• You are never strong enough that you don't need help.
• Never, never is it possible to reach someone if you become angry or bitter. Only love and gentleness can do it. Maybe not this time but maybe the next or the hundredth time.
• We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.

Background:

Dig deeper:.

• Either individually or in groups, read the background information, the articles provided and the list of famous quotations regarding civil disobedience. Take notes on the readings (which may be assigned prior to the lesson).
• You may want to divide into groups of two to three students.
• When and where did the person's act(s) of civil disobedience take place?
• What specific societal issue(s) inspired him/her to commit civil disobedience?
• How much recognition (or notoriety) did the person receive as a result?
• When viewed in hindsight, how successful were the actions? Was there a change in policy as a result? Did the acts bring the issues into focus for the public?
• Have a representative from each group present the research findings to the class.
• Which quotes are most/least relevant to our own times? Which are least relevant?
• Come back together as a class, and have a representative from each group summarize the answers of his/her group.
• What conclusions can you draw about civil disobedience?
• What sacrifices would one need to make to commit an act of passive resistance? What could some of the negative consequences of the action be? In what ways does a person who commits civil disobedience alienate him/herself from society?
• In your view, how effective is civil disobedience in causing positive change in the world?
• What do you think about the protesters discussed in the articles?
• How successful have the followers of anti-Iraq war activist Cindy Sheehan been in generating meaningful discussion about the conflict's legitimacy? Based on what you have read, do you take them seriously?
• If you were to offer an opposing argument to Sheehan and other like-minded people, what would be your main point? In a protest of Sheehan's organization, Gold Star Families for Peace, what would be your counter stance?
• From what you have read, do the protesters seem genuinely committed to stopping the war, or could they be motivated by something else?

Extension Activity: Writing about civil disobedience

• What policy or law am I protesting and why?
• How am I choosing to passively resist? What are my methods?
• Am I alone in the act or part of an organization?
• What could be (or are) the consequences of my action, both positive and negative?
• How do others, including my family and peers, view the act I am committing?
• What are my motivations for committing the act? Are they truly altruistic, or am I seeking something for myself?
• What was achieved by the act? Did I receive publicity, recognition or notoriety? Did the action largely go unnoticed? Was a law or policy changed as a result? Was I successful in bringing attention to the issue?
• What was the experience like as a whole? Was breaking the law worth what was accomplished? Am I a better person for it now? Given the chance, would I do it again?

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Social Movements — Civil Disobedience

Essays on Civil Disobedience

Hook examples for civil disobedience essays, the echoes of thoreau hook.

Begin your essay by revisiting the influential writings of Henry David Thoreau. Explore his essay "Civil Disobedience" and its enduring impact on movements for social and political change.

The Power of Nonviolent Resistance Hook

Examine the concept of nonviolent resistance as a form of civil disobedience. Discuss iconic figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., who used peaceful protest to effect transformative change.

From Suffragettes to Sit-Ins Hook

Trace the history of civil disobedience movements. Highlight pivotal moments, such as the suffragette movement or lunch counter sit-ins during the civil rights era, to illustrate the diversity of causes and methods.

The Moral Obligation Hook

Explore the ethical and moral underpinnings of civil disobedience. Discuss the idea that individuals engage in acts of protest not only to challenge unjust laws but also as a moral duty to uphold justice.

Environmental Activism and Civil Disobedience Hook

Connect civil disobedience to contemporary environmental movements. Analyze the actions of activists who engage in acts of protest to raise awareness about climate change and environmental conservation.

The Digital Age of Civil Disobedience Hook

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The Legal and Ethical Boundaries Hook

Examine the fine line between civil disobedience and lawbreaking. Discuss the ethical considerations of breaking the law for a just cause and the consequences faced by individuals who engage in acts of protest.

Lessons from International Movements Hook

Look beyond national borders and explore civil disobedience in international contexts. Investigate movements like the Arab Spring or Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests to gain insights into global struggles for change.

Artistic Expression and Civil Disobedience Hook

Highlight the intersection of art and civil disobedience. Discuss how artists have used their creative talents to convey powerful messages and challenge societal norms, sparking conversations and change.

Civil Disobedience Thesis Statement: Tool for Social Change

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Civil disobedience is a form of nonviolent resistance characterized by the deliberate and conscientious violation of laws, rules, or policies enacted by a governing authority, with the aim of challenging perceived injustices or promoting social change. Rooted in the belief that certain laws or actions are morally or ethically unacceptable, civil disobedience involves individuals or groups engaging in peaceful acts of protest or defiance to bring attention to and challenge oppressive systems, discriminatory practices, or unjust policies.

Civil disobedience, as a concept and practice, has its origins in various historical contexts and philosophical traditions. It traces its roots back to ancient times, with examples of individuals and groups engaging in acts of resistance against unjust laws or oppressive regimes. However, the modern concept of civil disobedience emerged prominently in the 19th and 20th centuries. One significant influence on the development of civil disobedience was the philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, an American writer and transcendentalist. In his essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849), Thoreau advocated for the idea that individuals have a moral duty to resist unjust laws and government actions. His writings inspired many subsequent activists and thinkers, including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., who employed civil disobedience as a means of achieving social and political change. Throughout history, civil disobedience has been utilized by various movements and individuals advocating for different causes, such as the suffragettes fighting for women's rights, the civil rights movement in the United States, and protests against oppressive regimes worldwide. Civil disobedience has often been employed as a nonviolent strategy to challenge unjust policies, raise awareness, and prompt dialogue and reform.

1. Mahatma Gandhi: Gandhi, a leader in India's struggle for independence from British rule, popularized the concept of nonviolent resistance. His approach to civil disobedience, known as Satyagraha, emphasized peaceful resistance, civil disobedience, and self-sacrifice. 2. Martin Luther King Jr.: A prominent leader in the American civil rights movement, King advocated for racial equality and justice. He utilized civil disobedience tactics, such as peaceful protests and boycotts, to challenge racial segregation and discrimination in the United States. 3. Rosa Parks: Parks is widely known for her pivotal role in the civil rights movement. By refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, she sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a significant event in the fight against racial segregation. 4. Nelson Mandela: Mandela, an anti-apartheid activist and former president of South Africa, fought against racial oppression through civil disobedience. He spent 27 years in prison for his activism before becoming a symbol of resistance and reconciliation.

1. Nonviolent Protests: Nonviolent protests involve gathering in public spaces to express dissent peacefully. This can include sit-ins, marches, rallies, or public demonstrations that aim to raise awareness, disrupt systems, and challenge the status quo. 2. Civil Disobedience Campaigns: Civil disobedience campaigns involve planned actions where participants deliberately and openly violate specific laws or regulations to highlight their unjust nature. This could include acts such as public acts of defiance, refusal to pay taxes, or intentional acts of civil disobedience. 3. Boycotts: Boycotts involve the organized refusal to engage with or purchase goods or services from institutions or businesses that support or perpetuate unjust practices. Economic pressure is used as a means to bring attention to the cause and prompt change. 4. Civil Resistance: Civil resistance encompasses a range of nonviolent actions aimed at disrupting or obstructing unjust systems. This can include acts of noncooperation, such as strikes, walkouts, or work slowdowns, to challenge oppressive policies or practices. 5. Symbolic Actions: Symbolic actions are often employed in civil disobedience to convey a message or draw attention to an issue. This can include public gestures, artistic expressions, or symbolic acts that resonate with the cause and create a visual impact.

1. Nonviolent Resistance: Civil disobedience is rooted in the principle of nonviolence. It rejects the use of physical force and instead relies on peaceful means to challenge unjust laws or policies. By refusing to resort to violence, civil disobedience aims to demonstrate moral integrity and inspire change through empathy and compassion. 2. Conscious Lawbreaking: Civil disobedience involves a deliberate and conscious violation of specific laws or regulations that are deemed unjust or oppressive. Participants willingly accept the legal consequences of their actions, viewing their acts of defiance as a way to expose and challenge unjust systems. 3. Moral and Ethical Grounding: Civil disobedience is driven by a strong moral and ethical conviction. Participants believe that their actions are morally justified and that they have a responsibility to stand up against injustice. It often emerges from a deep commitment to core principles such as equality, human rights, and social justice. 4. Public and Symbolic Nature: Civil disobedience typically takes place in public spaces to maximize visibility and impact. By engaging in acts of protest openly, participants seek to raise awareness, spark dialogue, and encourage others to question the legitimacy of unjust laws or policies. Symbolic gestures and actions are often employed to convey a powerful message and evoke empathy or solidarity. 5. Pursuit of Change and Reconciliation: Civil disobedience is not merely an act of rebellion; it is a call for change and reconciliation. It aims to prompt dialogue, create pressure for reform, and ultimately lead to a more just and equitable society. By highlighting the flaws in existing systems, civil disobedience seeks to initiate constructive discussions and foster positive transformation.

1. Literature: One notable literary representation of civil disobedience is Henry David Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience." Thoreau's work inspired future activists, including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and has become a foundational text in understanding the philosophy and practice of civil disobedience. 2. Film: The movie "Selma" (2014) directed by Ava DuVernay portrays the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The film depicts the nonviolent civil disobedience strategies employed by activists to combat racial discrimination and secure voting rights. 3. Music: The song "We Shall Overcome" has become an anthem for civil rights movements around the world. It originated as a gospel hymn and was later adapted as a protest song during the civil rights movement in the United States. Its powerful lyrics and melody capture the spirit of solidarity and resilience in the face of oppression.

1. One significant example of civil disobedience is Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. This act of defiance sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted for over a year and played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement. 2. Mahatma Gandhi's Salt March in 1930 is another notable act of civil disobedience. In protest against British colonial salt laws, Gandhi and his followers marched over 240 miles to the Arabian Sea to make their own salt. This event garnered international attention and highlighted the power of nonviolent resistance in the fight for Indian independence. 3. In recent years, the climate change movement has witnessed acts of civil disobedience on a global scale. One prominent example is the formation of Extinction Rebellion, a socio-political movement that employs nonviolent civil disobedience to demand urgent action on climate change. Their protests and disruptive actions have gained attention worldwide, raising awareness about the need for immediate and transformative environmental policies.

Civil disobedience is an important and captivating topic to explore in an essay due to its profound impact on society, history, and the pursuit of justice. It provides a lens through which to examine the power of individuals and communities in challenging unjust laws and oppressive systems. By examining the history and philosophy of civil disobedience, an essay can shed light on the transformative role it has played in various movements, from the civil rights movement to environmental activism. It invites reflection on the ethical and moral dimensions of dissent and resistance in the face of injustice. Furthermore, exploring civil disobedience allows for an examination of the tension between law and morality, and the role of dissent in shaping a more equitable society. It prompts critical analysis of the relationship between citizens and their governments, highlighting the importance of civil liberties and the exercise of individual agency.

1. Arendt, H. (1972). Crises of the Republic. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 2. Brownlee, K. (2012). Civil disobedience. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/civil-disobedience/ 3. Gandhi, M. K. (1907). Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Navajivan Publishing House. 4. King, M. L. (1963). Letter from Birmingham Jail. In J. M. Washington (Ed.), A testament of hope: The essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (pp. 289-302). HarperOne. 5. Martin, B. (2007). Defining civil disobedience. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 35(1), 3-26. 6. Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press. 7. Rawls, J. (1999). The justification of civil disobedience. In Collected papers (pp. 525-546). Harvard University Press. 8. Raz, J. (1979). The rule of law and its virtue. In The authority of law: Essays on law and morality (pp. 210-241). Oxford University Press. 9. Simmons, J. (2009). Civil disobedience and the duty to obey the law. Cambridge University Press. 10. Thoreau, H. D. (1849). Civil Disobedience. In Resistance to Civil Government. Cosimo Classics.

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'Universities play a substantial role in fostering the civic responsibility of students'

5/17/2024 A&S Communications

Elizabeth Rene

Government & American Studies Los Angeles, Calif.

Why did you choose Cornell?

Having grown up in Los Angeles, though I never experienced the Rodney King riots firsthand, I’ve always been fascinated by social movements. The Willard Straight Hall takeover in 1969, for instance, has also always been of much interest to me, where students were able to get their demands met by faculty who had largely defaulted on their role in terms of supporting minority students. Given Cornell has had a history of students advocating for political change through demonstration, I took particular interest in applying here. I believe that universities play a substantial role in fostering the civic responsibility of students, however, this can only be truly achieved by empowering students to actively contribute for social change.

What was your favorite class and why?  

My favorite class was definitely Civil Disobedience, which is taught by Professor Alexander Livingston, who I was lucky to have advise my thesis. In high school, my understanding of government did not necessarily go further than what material was published in outdated textbooks. A lot of the material in high school portrayed our government as a flawless beacon of democracy. Of course, you don't even have to look that far back in history to find that this is far from the case. The summer prior to starting Cornell, I had to leave work early as the nation rightfully erupted in demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd. This instance of protest, I felt, spoke to the profound gap this country has between the democratic principles it preaches and the practices of discrimination it nevertheless continues to permit. My reason for finding Civil Disobedience so engaging was that it did not shy away from acknowledging this gap. Instead, it focused on the ways the narrative of the Civil Rights movement gets sanitized, while nonviolent protestors continue to face repression from authorities.

What are the most valuable skills you gained from your Arts & Sciences education?  

Cornell instilled in me the notion that everything is done on the basis of your own intuition. At first, this can seem quite daunting. However, I quickly learned that this skill is beneficial for making the most of the resources you have around you — whether it's establishing relationships with professors, joining clubs or simply going to a dining hall with your friend. I also learned that it is completely normal to change paths or interests throughout your undergraduate experience. Prior to Cornell, I was completely immersed in track & field and was pretty set on running under a Division 1 program. However, as I picked up different interests during freshman year and wanted to commit more time to law school preparation, I made the tough decision of quitting the team at Cornell. By no means have I stopped running, as I love running with friends through Ithaca trails. I simply decided I wanted to shift my energy elsewhere.       

What have you accomplished as a Cornell student that you are most proud of?

I just submitted my thesis on the originalism of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. I was definitely daunted by the amount of work at first, but with the support and guidance of my thesis advisor, I not only improved my writing but also was able to further explore areas of constitutional law that I am passionate about. 

Who or what influenced your Cornell education the most?  

The vibrant community surrounding me, within both clubs and classes, probably had the greatest influence on my Cornell education. Interacting with students from diverse majors and backgrounds exposed me to many different perspectives and passions. I've consistently found inspiration not only in professors but also in the student body. In tandem, both foster an environment of intellectual collaboration and growth.   

Every year, our faculty nominate graduating Arts & Sciences students to be featured as part of our Extraordinary Journeys series.  Read more about the Class of 202 4.

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A scene from the film 'Civil War,' written and directed by Alex Garland, now in theaters.

US Oligarchs Started One Civil War — and They Could Do It Again

The ideology of the republican party and the stranglehold of powerful corporations of our political system overall has transformed america from a democracy into a late-stage oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible..

The headline in this week’s Fortune reads :

“Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is ‘on the brink’ and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war”

Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6th in apparent support of Donald Trump‘s attempt to overthrow our government.

Americans for Tax Fairness reports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system — the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump — in an effort to maintain enough control of our political system that their taxes won’t go up. And that total is just what’s reported: it doesn’t count the billions in unknowable dark money that’s sloshing around the system thanks to Citizens United .

Back in the day, the late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned us:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”

The number one movie in America last month was Civil War . Rightwing militias are on the march. More than half of Republicans say they are “ expecting ” a civil war.

How did we get here? And what does oligarchy have to do with civil war?

The clear result of five corrupt Republicans on the 1978 and 2010 Supreme Courts legalizing political bribery of politicians (and Supreme Court justices) by both corporations and the morbidly rich is that America is now well past the halfway mark of a fatal-to-democracy slide into oligarchy and the strongman autocracy typically associated with it. And the conflict that can follow that.

You can see the consequence in any contemporary survey. The majority of people want things — gun control, a strengthened social safety net, a cleaner and safer environment, quality, free education, higher taxes on the rich — that Congress refuses to do anything about because it is in thrall to great wealth.

As President Jimmy Carter   told me eight years ago:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

For example, just last week, Donald Trump solicited a $1 billion bribe from a group of fossil fuel executives in exchange for undoing all of President Biden’s climate regulations.

In a testament to how today’s form of transactional oligarchy has become normalized in America, the only national news organization that reported this shocking story was MSNBC; every other news outlet thought it was entirely normal for an American politician to have their hand out in exchange for legislative or policy changes. As Media Matters reported this week:

“ CNN, Fox News Channel; ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week; CBS’ Mornings, Evening News , and Face the Nation ; and NBC’s Today, Nightly News , and Meet the Press” all completely ignored the story.

What we are watching is the final stage of the 40-year neoliberal transition of our nation from a forward-looking and still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs.

Some years ago, Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore (before he was Trump’s advisor) was a guest on my radio/TV program . I asked him, “Which is more important, democracy or capitalism?“

Without hesitation, Moore answered, “Capitalism.” He went on to imply this was how the Founders wanted things. After all, as George Orwell said:

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

That philosophy and a phony American history have held the Republican Party in its thrall for the past 40+ years and have brought America to this moment of great crisis and danger.

It has transformed America from a democracy into a late-stage oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible. Which presents a true crisis for America, because oligarchy is almost always merely a transitional phase in the evolution to full-blown tyranny and/or fascism, and often civil war.

Oligarchies are inherently unstable forms of government because they transfer resources and power from working people to the oligarchs. Average people, seeing that they’re constantly falling behind and can’t do anything about it, first become cynical and disengage, and, when things get bad enough, they try to revolt.

That “revolution” can either lead to the oligarchy failing and the nation flipping back to democracy, as happened here in the 1860s and the 1930s , or it can flip into full-blown strong-man tyranny, as happened recently in Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, and nearly happened here on January 6th.

Oligarchies usually become police states, where any average person who dares seriously challenge the ruling oligarchs is squashed like a bug either legally or financially; the oligarchs themselves are immune from prosecution and get to keep their billions regardless of how many people’s lives are ruined or die because of their crimes.

Oligarchic governments almost always do a few predictable things, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy :

— They change monopoly laws and regulations so their rich buddies can take control of most of the nation’s businesses and media. — They stack the courts and regulatory agencies with oligarch-friendly ideologues or outright corrupt toadies, while eliminating regulatory protections for average citizens. — They cut taxes on the rich and drive wages low on working people while criminalizing and cracking down on dissent, particularly if it involves any sort of direct action or property damage. — They distract voters from their own looting by demonizing minorities and encouraging racism, religious/gender conflict, and regionalism. — They reinvent history to argue that the country was “always an oligarchy and that’s the way the nation’s founders wanted it. It’s what works best.” — They actively suppress the vote among people inclined to oppose them (typically minorities and the young), or outright rig the vote to insure their own victory. — And they transform their nations into police states, heavily criminalizing demonstrations, nonviolent resistance, or “direct action” while radicalizing and encouraging rightwing vigilante “militias” to put down the inevitable pro-democracy rebellions as people realize what’s happening.

To the end of cementing their own oligarchy here, the billionaires who own the GOP are now actively promoting the same sort of revisionist history the Confederacy did, claiming that the Founders were all rich guys who hated taxes, wanted rich men to rule America, and wrote the Constitution to make that happen. It was a story popular in the South leading up to the Civil War, now part of the “ Lost Cause ” mythology.

To that end, they’re purging our schools and colleges of books and history courses; professors and teachers who don’t toe their line that America was designed from its founding to be an oligarchy are being fired as you read these words. In this, they’re promoting — for their own benefit — a dangerous lie.

A lie that rationalizes oligarchy.

While there were some in America among the Founders and Framers who had amassed great land holdings and what was perceived then as a patrician lifestyle, Pulitzer Prize winning author Bernard Bailyn suggests in his brilliant 2003 book To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders that they couldn’t hold a candle, in terms of wealth, to the true aristocrats of England.

With page after page of photographs and old paintings of the homes of the Founders and Framers, Bailyn shows that none of those who created this nation were rich by European standards. After an artful and thoughtful comparison of American and British estates, Bailyn concludes bluntly:

“There is no possible correspondence, no remote connection, between these provincial dwellings and the magnificent showplaces of the English nobility...”

Showing and describing to his readers the mansions of the families of power in 18th century Europe, Bailyn writes:

“There is nothing in the American World to compare with this.”

While the Founders and Framers had achieved a level of literacy, creativity, and a depth of thinking that rivaled that of any European states or eras, nonetheless, Bailyn notes:

“The Founders were provincials, alive to the values of a greater world, but not, they knew, of it – comfortable in a lesser world but aware of its limitations.”

As Kevin Phillips describes in his masterpiece book Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich :

“George Washington, one of the richest Americans, was no more than a wealthy squire in British terms.”

Phillips documents that it wasn’t until the 1790’s — a generation after the War of Independence — that the first American accumulated a fortune that would be worth one million of today’s dollars. The Founders and Framers were, at best, what today would be called the upper-middle-class in terms of lifestyle, assets, and disposable income.

In 1958, one of America’s great professors of history, Forrest McDonald, published an extraordinary book debunking Charles Beard’s 1913 hypothesis that the Constitution was created exclusively of, by, and for rich white men. McDonald’s book, titled We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution , bluntly states:

“Economic interpretation of the Constitution does not work.”

Over the course of more than 400 meticulously researched pages, McDonald goes back to original historical records and reveals who was promoting and who was opposing the new Constitution, and why. So far as I can tell, he is the first and only historian to do this type of original-source research, and his conclusions are startling.

McDonald notes that a quarter of all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had voted in their own state legislatures for laws that would have helped debtors and the poor and thus harmed the interests of the rich.

“These [debt relief laws] were the very kinds of laws which, according to Beard’s hypothesis, the delegates had convened to prevent,” says McDonald. He adds: “Another fourth of the delegates had important economic interests that were adversely affected, directly and immediately, by the Constitution they helped write.”

While Beard theorizes that the Framers were largely drawn from the class of wealthy bankers and businessmen, McDonald shows that wasn’t true at all:

“The most common and by far the most important property holdings of the delegates were not, as Beard has asserted, mercantile, manufacturing, and public security investments, but agricultural property.”

Most were farmers or plantation owners and, as noted earlier, owning a lot of land did not always make one rich in those days, particularly compared to the bankers and mercantilists of New York and Boston.

“Finally,” McDonald concludes, “it is abundantly evident that the delegates, once inside the convention, behaved as anything but a consolidated economic group.”

After dissecting the means and motivations of the Framers who wrote the Constitution, McDonald goes into an exhaustive and detailed state-by-state analysis of the constitutional ratifying conventions that finally brought the U.S. Constitution into law.

For example, in the state of Delaware, which voted for ratification:

“[A]lmost 77 percent of the delegates were farmers, more than two-thirds of them small farmers with incomes ranging from 75 cents to $5.00 a week. Slightly more than 23 percent of the delegates were professional men – doctors, judges, and lawyers. None of the delegates was a merchant, manufacturer, banker, or speculator in western lands.”

In other states, similar numbers showed up. Of the New Jersey delegates supporting ratification, 64.1 percent were small farmers. In Maryland, “the opponents of ratification included from three to six times as large a proportion of merchants, lawyers, and investors in shipping, confiscated estates, and manufacturing as did the [poorer] delegates who favored ratification.”

In South Carolina it was those in economic distress who carried the day: “No fewer than 82 percent of the debtors and borrowers of paper money in the convention voted for ratification.” In New Hampshire, “of the known farmers in the convention 68.7 percent favored ratification.”

But did farmers support the Constitution because they were slave owners or the wealthiest of the landowners, as Charles Beard had guessed back in 1913?

McDonald shows that this certainly wasn’t the case in northern states like New Hampshire or New Jersey, which were not slave states.

But what about Virginia and North Carolina, the two largest slave-holding states, asks McDonald rhetorically. Were their plantation owners favoring the Constitution because it protected their economic and slave-holding interests?

“The opposite is true,” writes McDonald. “In both states the wealthy planters – those with personality interests [enslaved people] as well as those without personality interests – were divided approximately equally on the issue of ratification. In North Carolina small farmers and debtors were likewise equally divided, and in Virginia the great mass of the small farmers and a large majority of the debtors favored ratification.”

After dissecting the results of the ratification votes state by state — the first author in history to do so, as far as I can determine — McDonald sums up:

“Beard’s thesis — that the line of cleavage as regards the Constitution was between substantial personality interests [wealth and slave ownership] on the one hand and small farming and debtor interests on the other — is entirely incompatible with the facts.”

Here we find the explanation for James Madison sealing his notes on the Constitutional Convention until every man who participated was dead (they were finally published more than 50 years later in 1840). He and many others at the convention were essentially betraying their own economic class in favor of democracy. Something today’s wealthy Americans apparently can’t imagine doing.

No matter how hard Republicans try to reinvent the Founders and Framers of this nation in the image of their libertarian billionaire patrons, and no matter how imperfect and even brutal their time was, the simple reality is that in 1770’s America this nation’s Founders undertook American history’s first truly great progressive experiment.

And they all put their lives on the line to do it: when they signed their names on the Declaration, a death warrant was issued against each one of them by the largest and most powerful empire in the world.

And then, four generations later, we backslid.

The only other time in American history when an entire region of America was converted from a democracy into an oligarchy was the 1830-1860 era in the South. It’s why Republicans are so fond of the Confederate flag and Civil War memorial monuments.

The invention of the Cotton Gin made a few hundred families of southern planters richer than Midas; they seized political control of the region and then destroyed democracy in those states. Even white men who dared stand up to them were imprisoned or lynched, ballot boxes were stuffed, and social mobility came to a standstill.

By the 1840s, the South had become a full-blown police state, much like Trump and his acolytes would like America to become in the near future.

Offended and worried by the democratic example of the Northern states, the Confederacy declared war on the United States itself with the goal of ending democracy in America altogether. Almost 700,000 people died defending our form of government.

And now, for a second time in American history, we’re confronted with a near-complete takeover of about half of our nation by America’s oligarchs.

And with it has come not just the threat of political violence, but the reality, from the death of Heather Heyer to the George Floyd protests to January 6th and the assault on Paul Pelosi.

All driven by oligarchs determined to pit us against each other so we won’t recognize how they’re robbing us blind.

Unless and until our tax laws are changed and the Supreme Court’s legalization of political bribery is reversed, we’ll continue this disintegrative slide into fascism and the danger of domestic armed conflict.

This fall we’ll have the opportunity to elect politicians who actively oppose oligarchy and fascism while embracing the true spirit of American egalitarianism.

President Biden is the first president in 80 years to consequentially raise taxes on both rich people and corporations. That political bravery has brought him powerful enemies: this fall’s election will be hard fought.

Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, and if you live in a Republican-controlled state double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org .

America’s future — and the integrity of our history — depend on it.

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AES Statement on Campus Protests and Civil Disobedience

As a department that traces its origins to campus protests, the Department of American Ethnic Studies stands firmly and unequivocally in support of students’ rights to protest. We affirm their right to engage in civil disobedience and vigorously express their views without fear of violence or reprisal. We call on the University and all of its members and representatives to uphold these values and to guard and support our students and engage with them in good faith as they call attention to injustices and call into question the University’s involvement and implication in them.  We assert our solidarity with students, faculty, staff, and community members around the country and around the world who have been unjustly and often violently targeted for protesting the war in Gaza.

The student and community protests, sit-ins, and occupations that ultimately gave rise to our Department and to the interdisciplinary academic fields of ethnic studies were highly controversial in their time, condemned in ways that echo the current moral panic over campus protests. Yet the tangible results produced by those earlier protests are now embraced and celebrated by the University and local and state government, and former student organizers have gone on to become respected community leaders, proudly claimed and honored as UW alumni.

We call on our University to support and honor the passionate ethical commitment of our student organizers now, when it is most needed, rather than waiting twenty or forty or fifty years to do so.

We further insist on our students’ unquestionable right to safety from violence, threats of violence, harassment, and retaliation. Even as student protesters have taken on significant personal risk, protests nationwide have been overwhelmingly peaceful, and the greatest threat to campus safety has come from the use of police. We look with horror at assaults on student protesters, student journalists, and faculty who attempted to de-escalate and defend their students. This violence is a concerted effort to suppress public protest, delegitimize independent journalism, and undermine the role of students and faculty in shaping university decisions. We acknowledge that this violence is connected to the incalculably greater violence that has fallen on schools, scholars, teachers, journalists, and students in Gaza.

With deep concern for student protesters at UW and across the world, we call on our University and community to keep our campus safe from violence, and commit not to use police force to quell student protest.

Anjélica Hernández-Cordero

Lauro Flores

Lorna Hamill

La TaSha Levy

Linh Thủy Nguyễn

Carolyn Pinedo-Turnovsky

Sonnet Retman

Oliver Rollins

Vince Schleitwiler

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