Civil Disobedience

Civil Disobedience

The concept

Political doctrines of civil disobedience

Civil disobedience campaigns

Prospects for civil disobedience

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Civil disobedience” will here refer to any act or process of public defiance of a law or policy enforced by established governmental authorities, insofar as the action is premeditated, understood by the actor(s) to be illegal or of contested legality, carried out and persisted in for limited public ends and by way of carefully chosen and limited means.

This is a descriptive rather than a formal definition; and it is a recommended definition rather than one that claims to represent current usage with maximal accuracy. One difficulty with this term is that it is rarely defined and never with great precision. Equally regrettable is the absence of systematic literature on the concept and the phenomenon, assuming that the term has a consensual core of meaning.

In this article neither a stringent definition nor a comprehensive survey of doctrines and practices can be attempted. What follows is, first, an attempt to clarify the concept; second, a brief and inevitably sketchy survey of political doctrines of civil disobedience from Socrates to the present time; third, a sketch of some campaigns of civil disobedience, mainly in modern times; and finally, a brief discussion of the prospects for civil disobedience and its justification in the modern world.

The concept

The notion of “disobedience” presupposes the concept of a norm to be disobeyed—typically a legal norm, but in any event a norm which is assumed by some people in power to be authoritative in the sense that transgressions would be expected to lead to punishment in one form or another. Disobedience can be active or passive; it can be a matter of doing what is prohibited or of failing to do what is required. But mere noncompliance is not enough; the action or nonaction must be openly insisted on if it is to qualify as civil disobedience, as the concept is interpreted here. For example, failure to vote in a country in which there is a legal obligation to vote does not in itself constitute civil disobedience; one would have to state in public that one did not intend to comply with the particular law; typically but not necessarily, one would publicly encourage others to disobey also.

The act of disobedience must be illegal, or at least be deemed illegal by powerful adversaries, and the actor must know this if it is to be considered an act of civil disobedience (for a contrary view, see Freeman 1966). Note the distinction between “conscientious objection” to military service and “civil disobedience” in countries that permit exemptions from otherwise obligatory service for reasons of conscience. The conscientious objector engages in civil disobedience only if he knowingly and explicitly objects to military service on grounds not recognized by the law or in a country that makes no exceptions for reasons of conscience.

“Civil” is the more ambiguous of the two terms. At least five different meanings would appear plausible, and in this area it would seem reasonable to cast the net wide and consider each of the following meanings equally legitimate:

(1) The term “civil” can imply a recognition of general obligations of citizenship and thus the legitimacy of the existing legal order as a whole; pains taken to limit defiance to a particular legal clause or policy, and/or to avoid violence, may (but need not) be construed as an affirmation of general citizenship duties.

(2) “Civil” can be taken to refer to the opposite of “military” in a broad sense. The customary stress on nonviolence (see below) may be construed to signify either (a) a recognition of the state’s claim to monopoly with respect to legitimate use of physical violence, or (b) a rejection of all physical violence as illegitimate or morally wrong under all circumstances regardless of purpose.

(3) “Civil” can refer to the opposite of “uncivil” or “uncivilized”; acts of civil disobedience may seek to embody ideals of citizenship or morality that will inspire adversaries and/or onlookers, hopefully, toward more civilized behavior, or behavior more in harmony with the ideals that inspire a given campaign of civil disobedience. Most conceptions of civility and “more civilized behavior” stress a consistent respect for other people’s—including one’s adversaries—physical inviolability as a crucial attribute. Also, there may be an implied recognition of the probability that acts of violence, unless the civil disobedience activists are the sole victims, might divert attention from the intended message.

(4) “Civil” can also be taken to refer to public as distinct from private: as citizens we act in public. Acts of civil disobedience seek not only to affirm a principle in private but also to call public attention to the view that a principle of moral importance is being violated by a law or a policy sanctioned by public authorities. Acts of civil disobedience may be considered acts of public witness to the prior rights of conscience or of God. Defiance in private is not enough; at the very least, an act of civil disobedience must be communicated to representatives of the public order in an attempt to influence their thoughts and feelings on the general issues raised. An act of disobedience carried out with the intention of subsequently begging for mercy or for special consideration is outside the realm of civil disobedience; so is, of course, every act that attempts a surreptitious violation or evasion of the law.

(5) “Civil” can suggest that the objective of obedience is to institute changes in the political system, affecting not only one individual’s or group’s liberties but the liberties of all citizens. A religious sect persisting in outlawed practices of worship may insist only on being left alone or may at the same time consciously assert a principle to the effect that other sects, too, should enjoy equivalent rights. Degrees of consciousness about the wider implications of disobedient behavior are not well suited as conceptual demarcation lines, however, and it would seem most practical to include even very parochially motivated acts of disobedience within the scope of the concept of civil disobedience.

The ambiguities of the term “civil” are far from exhausted by this brief list, but the five meanings presented are probably among the more common. The chances are that most of those who practice civil disobedience think of their behavior as “civil” in a sense, whether articulated or not, which embraces more than one of these associations and perhaps others as well.

Returning now to the definition, let us note, first, that when there is a conflict of laws, acts of civil disobedience may be legal and illegal at the same time. Thus, campaigns were conducted against state segregation laws in the American South, in the belief that under the federal constitution such acts of disobedience will eventually be deemed legal in the federal courts.

The ends of civil disobedience must be public and limited. The ostensible aim cannot be a private or business advantage; it must have some reference to a conception of justice or the common good. (Individual motives for engaging in civil disobedience may, of course, be neurotic or narrowly self-seeking.) The proclaimed ends must also be limited, falling short of seeking the complete abolition of the existing legal system. Those who want a “nonviolent revolution” may engage in civil disobedience, but they too proclaim specific, limited ends each time. Also, according to the usage recommended here, the proclaimed aims must fall short of intending the physical or moral destruction of adversaries, even if at times a calculable risk of casualties may be tolerated. The ends of civil disobedience must be potentially acceptable to those in the role of adversaries even if the current adversaries are anathema to each other.

Above all, the proclaimed ends of civil disobedience, as the concept is understood here, must be formulated with a view to making them appear morally legitimate to onlookers and to the public. Educational objectives prompt most civil disobedience campaigns and are never wholly absent. If a trade union violates the law to gain equality or justice for its members, we may speak of civil disobedience, but not if a key position in the economic system tempts a union to violate the law for the purpose of extorting unreasonable privileges in return for obeying the law.

”Civil disobedience” should be kept apart from “nonviolent action.” The latter concept by definition rules out violent acts while the former, as defined here, does not. (An opposite view is adopted by Bedau 1961; Cohen 1964; Freeman 1966.) For a variety of historical and psychological reasons, it appears that many believers in civil disobedience see themselves as wholly committed to nonviolent means, even in self-defense or in the defense of others against murderous assault.

Among some pacifist believers in civil disobedience it seems to be assumed that a complete commitment to nonviolence, even in the sense of avoiding the provocation of violence on the part of adversaries, is ethically superior to a more pragmatic attitude toward the possible use of violence. No such assumption is made here. “Carefully chosen and limited means” in the definition at the outset refers to choice of means rationally calculated to promote the limited ends. For many reasons it seems plausible that such rational calculation normally will suggest strenuous efforts toward either avoidance or reduction of violence. Civil disobedience activists and social scientists should be equally interested in research on the causation and consequences of violence and nonviolence under conditions of social conflict. The expansion of this type of knowledge is of crucial importance for calculating the most effective and economical means to achieve the chosen ends of civil disobedience campaigns and for evaluating the likelihood of the success or failure of such campaigns.

Political doctrines of civil disobedience

The term “civil disobedience” was given currency by Thoreau’s famous essay (1849); the concept, however, is a composite of many developments in the history of human thought and action. The justification of civil disobedience has been attempted from a variety of philosophical premises.

Individual freedom . To the modern political theorist it may seem that a prior problem is to justify obedience—a problem which in turn raises tangled issues on the nature of political authority, the state, sovereignty, the law, human rights, and so on. Yet in the history of political thought the notion of individuals having the freedom to choose whether to obey the state or not is a fairly recent phenomenon. Even today this idea is accessible to relatively few and acceptable to fewer still.

Socrates. It is arguable whether Socrates was ever willing to concede that his teaching might have violated the laws of Athens; but it is certain that he would have felt compelled to continue his teaching had the court set him free, even in the event that it would have found him guilty.

Socrates may well be credited with having formulated the core of the modern argument for civil disobedience. In brief, he held that the only life worth living is the upright life, or the life committed to the search for truth and to obedience to the dictates of truth discovered. Justice was to him a matter of knowledge and therefore an aspect of truth. At the same time he acknowledged and honored his duty to obey the state, because he believed that a civilized order and therefore civilized persons can develop only in a well-ordered society, and he considered the Greek type of city-state the best kind of social order achieved so far. Yet the state, even the state of Athens, was capable of committing grievous injustice to the individual. Must the citizen obey unjust as well as just laws? Where should the line be drawn between the claims of the state and the claims of philosophy, of justice, of God, or of conscience?

In effect, Socrates drew the following limit on the state’sclaim to obedience: the citizen, bound by his implicit agreement to honor and respect the political order under which he was nurtured, and his parents before him, must be prepared to lay down his life if called on to serve his state, and he must submit to any punishment meted out to him, whether justly or unjustly. There is one realm, however, in which the claims of the state are void: the realm of conscience. The state cannot force Socrates to act unjustly; he is prepared to suffer evil but not to do evil. He respects the authority of the state to the extent of willingly giving up his life but not to the extent of being willing to act unjustly or to desist from acting justly—for example, by way of speaking out on public issues as his conscience dictates.

Early Christianity. The early Christians represented the first spectacular—and highly successful —civil disobedience movement in the West. Their fundamental justification was that God must be obeyed before man. Religious and moral obedience required civil disobedience. On the whole, the movement was nonviolent at first, not only because any other course would have been foolish but also because Christ himself had urged his followers to turn the other cheek and to shun violence (see the following: Matthew 5.9, 20–22, 38–48, and 26. 50–52).

Countless individuals in the course of history have chosen to shed their blood rather than com-promise in matters of faith or conviction. It is arguable, however, how many among them should be considered spokesmen for civil disobedience. Their acts of defiance may in many cases have been instinctual, even visceral, rather than premeditated; their goals may at times have been unlimited—say, the salvation of mankind, and their means may have not always been chosen, but at times they may have been the only ones subjectively and objectively available. Members of religious sects ready to die for their beliefs and to shun armed resistance under one set of circumstances may under new circumstances be ready to subjugate others with violence, as was seen in the early history of the New England colonies. Not every brave and for the time being nonviolent true believer is practicing civil disobedience when defying the law or the government; one would at the least require of him a reasoned determination not to repay injustice suffered with new injustice inflicted once victory has been won.

Thus understood, it is clear that the doctrine of civil disobedience as an instrument of sociopolitical change is a highly sophisticated one, for it requires a perspective that subordinates the dictates of one’s specific cause to the prior requirements of certain general rules for civilized political conduct. Most true-believer movements are suspect on this score, unless their objectives are limited and conciliatory or unless they are resigned to remain a minority indefinitely.

The empiricists. In one important sense it may be said that the modern concept of civil disobedience germinated with Thomas Hobbes, the first philosopher to espouse a doctrine of fundamental natural right as a basis for obedience to government. He distinguished right from law and asserted that laws should safeguard rights. He lived in a stormy age and was pessimistic about the prospects for civil peace, which he saw as the first prerequisite for the enjoyment of rights: without civil peace, lives will be “nasty, brutish and short.” And Hobbes believed that only an all-powerful state could ensure civil peace. While Hobbes justified government as a means of preserving human lives “and a more contented life thereby” (1651, chapter 17), he emphatically rejected the right to dissent and, more so, the right to disobey (chapter 29). His explicit rejection of this right actually helped prepare the ground for its vindication [seeHobbes].

John Locke also saw government as a means for preserving human lives as well as liberties and properties. But Locke’s idea of the social contract differed radically from the carte blancheHobbes grants the sovereign: “Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people who are thereupon absolved of any further obedience”; the people “have a right to resume their original liberty and to establish a new government” (1690, section 222). If revolution was justified against grave abuse of governmental power, then nonviolent as well as violent civil disobedience must be justified, although Locke never was clear on what criteria to use for judging the propriety of resistance. However, he did seek to rebut the expected argument that his doctrine would lay “a ferment for frequent rebellion”: an open acknowledgment of the power of the (propertied) people to rebel against tyranny, since it will discourage the abuse of governmental power, is, he insisted, “the best fence against rebellion, and the probablest means to hinder it” [ibid., section 226; see also Locke].

David Hume effectively demolished Locke’s social contract theory, and his thought paved the way for an empirical utilitarian approach to determining the limits on political obligation and the right to resist. Hume himself adopted a libertarian position in the Treatise, and with considerable vehemence. But later, in his Essays, he came to fear anarchy much more than tyranny and advocated respect for and “exact obedience” to the authority of magistrates [1739–1742; see also Hume].

Jeremy Bentham, with his characteristic logic and style, argued that the conscientious citizen ought to enter into measures of resistance as a matter of duty as well as interest when, according to the best calculation he is able to make, the probable mischiefs of resistance—speaking with respect to the community in general—appear less to him than the probable mischiefs of submission [1776, chapter iv, sections 21–22; see also Bentham].

A paradoxical and rather unusual position on civil disobedience was taken by James Mill in his essay Liberty of the Press, in which he accepted Locke’s argument that the right to argue for the overthrow of the government is a needed safeguard against abuse of governmental power. He held, as a believer in law and order, that it should be an offense to advocate the obstruction of any particular law or governmental operation but not to advocate resistance to all the powers of government at once. In effect he supported the right to advocate violent revolution while opposing the right to advocate limited civil disobedience.

Empiricists like Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, and Mill had in common a “negative” conception of individual freedom: they took “freedom” to refer to the relative absence of restraints, including (especially in Locke’s case, when he defined “freedom” as “a standing rule to live by”) the restraints imposed by unpredictability in social circumstances. While their views on the propriety of disobedience differed widely, their shared stress on freedom fromunjustifiable coercion helped prepare the ground for modern theories of resistance to improper use of governmental authority.

The idealists. On the whole, the mainstream of the idealist tradition in philosophy, from Aristotle to Rousseau and the Hegelians, as well as the Marxist offshoot, has been considerably less hospitable to the idea of civil disobedience. True, Aristotle was the father of the natural-law tradition, but in other respects all these philosophers have emphasized the importance of the state or the social class (or political party) over that of the individual; they have all stressed a “positive” concept of freedom, which allowed for meaningful individual lives only in terms of unconditional loyalty to a collectivity. “Freedom” to idealists and Marxists has meant “self-realization,” and it has been assumed that only a recognition of common bonds could constitute the basis for a viable self. Rousseau talked of the need to “force men to be free,” for freedom to him meant harmony between individual and public (“general”) will. The Marxists speak of freedom as the recognition of (and acceptance of) necessity, meaning whatever the Marxist philosopher-kings hold to be necessities by virtue of a correct (“scientific”) political diagnosis and prognosis.

Most idealists have insisted on obedience to the state, while most Marxists have urged a rival obedience; both persuasions have tended to discount the role of the individual conscience as a primary source of standards of political judgment. Marxists stress the need for discipline and believe in the necessity of a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat or of the party (Leninists). Among socialists, only anarchists have urged disobedience to the state and to every other authority, while syndicalists have urged obedience to democratic trade union leader-ships only. Anarchists in the idealist (Tolstoi) or socialist (Bakunin, Kropotkin) traditions have been unique in their combination of a total rejection of every state with a positive concept of freedom as the realization of man’s social self.

Natural law. The idea of natural law is the second principal basis, historically speaking, for the modern idea of civil disobedience. It would seem a short step from Aristotle’s premise that “an unjust law is not a law” to the conclusion that an unjust law may be or even must be disobeyed. But it is remarkable how seldom this conclusion has been drawn by leading spokesmen for the natural-law tradition and how cautiously the issue has been approached even by those who chose not to ignore it.

Take Cicero, perhaps antiquity’s most illustrious spokesman for natural law as “a true law—namely right reason—which is in accordance with nature, applies to all men, and is unchangeable and eternal” (Republic, in). “Neither the senate nor the people can absolve us from our obligation to obey this law” he says in the same context. Does this not mean that positive law in conflict with natural law ought to be disobeyed? It would seem to follow, but Cicero fails to develop a theory of civil disobedience.

Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas argues that unjust laws “are acts of violence rather than laws” and that “such laws do not bind in conscience.” Yet he continues this last sentence as follows: “…except perhaps in order to avoid scandal or disturbance, for which a man should even yield his right.” Only law contrary to divine law, like laws that would induce idolatry, must not be observed, according to Aquinas (Summa theologica), who clearly was far more fearful of anarchy than of tyranny. Disobedience to the church was rendered virtually unthinkable, while disobedience to the state was deemed proper only in extreme situations. The most memorable example of such a situation occurred almost three centuries later, when St. Thomas More died as a martyr to his Roman faith in 1535, having refused to countenance either the divorce and remarriage of King Henry VIII or his claim to supreme authority over England’s clergy in defiance of the pope; More reportedly died with these words on his lips: “The King’s good servant, but God’s first.” [SeeAquinas.]

The Roman Catholic church. Until recently, modern Neo-Thomists have tended to display the same caution as Aquinas on the issue of disobedience. Even in the event of a state power supposed to be “tyrannical and deprived of genuine authority” it is “a moral duty to give external submission … as long as one has not practically ascertained whether insurrection would not result in a greater evil for the community” (Maritain [1938] 1940, p. 105). This is a difficult task for most individuals, it would seem, unless advised and supported by the church.

After World War II the church was subjected to criticism for not having done enough to encourage its faithful to disobey or resist some aspects of Hitler’s tyranny; Rolf Hochhuth, in his play The Deputy (1963), criticized Pope Pius XII himself for not having adopted and advocated a bolder stand against the genocide of Europe’s Jews.

In recent years much soul-searching has gone on within the church, and it is likely that Pope John xxiii’s bold stand on civil disobedience will become increasingly influential inside as well as outside the Roman Catholic church. “For to safeguard the inviolable rights of the human person and to facilitate the fulfillment of his duties, should be the essential office of every public authority. This means that, if any government does not acknowledge the rights of man or violates them, it not only fails in its duty, but its orders completely lack juridical force” (italics deleted, new italics supplied; see Catholic Church … 1963, pp. 60–61). This encyclical letter clearly states that laws which grievously violate the rights of man are not only immoral but are without the force of law: while one may risk actual punishment for acts of civil disobedience on behalf of human rights which have been violated, this punishment will be just as illegal, in terms of natural law, as the positive law or government orders which have been disobeyed. No longer is the right to disobey limited in scope to violations of divine laws. With Pope John the natural-law tradition has been moved toward actual union with the empiricist tradition of individual rights in defense of civil disobedience as a proper remedy against tyranny—i.e., against severe violations of human rights.

At least two additional sources of the modern doctrines of civil disobedience must be briefly noted. One is associated with rejection of the state—either the unjust state or every state; the other is associated with a commitment to nonviolence—either an aspiration to a completely nonviolent life or a more pragmatic dedication to nonviolence as a technique in the struggle for a just cause.

Rejection of the state . Henry David Thoreau, in his influential essay Civil Disobedience (1849), rejected the unjust state and by implication perhaps every state, calling for “not at once no government, but at once a better government.” His own act of civil disobedience was inconsequential, but his ringing words have helped inspire thousands of others to go to jail cheerfully for many a just cause: “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.… The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right. … Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison” (1849).

Thoreau’s rejection of the state’s claim to moral authority belonged to the tradition of Tom Paine. William Godwin, whose Political Justice, first published in 1793, enjoyed a meteoric fame in England for several years and then was forgotten by the general public, was far more radical in rejecting every state and in expecting the millennium to result from an end to states. Subsequent generations of anarchists have preached disobedience to the state as a duty, but their objective was a total overthrow of the system rather than the limited aims that we associate with civil disobedience. And the means used were frequently uncivil; in fact, a number of terrorist acts in the name of anarchism, almost all of them prior to World War I, have made most people associate “anarchism” with bomb throwing [seeAnarchism].

Commitment to nonviolence . There was at least one gentle anarchist who believed in Christ and in nonviolence, however, and that was Leo Tolstoi. A progressively deeper and more radical religious conversion, evident from around the age of fifty, made him sympathetic to anarchism; he admired Kropotkin but took exception to his belief in violence as a necessity in the struggle to eliminate the state. Because he was passionately opposed to every deliberate use of violence Tolstoi did not call himself an anarchist; however, he hated institutionalized violence just as much. If it is too much to ask of a rich man that he give his goods to the poor, or of the soldier to disobey orders and with-draw from the armed forces, Tolstoi does urge each person at least to recognize his guilt in his own conscience and to stop lying about it to himself and others (Tolstoi 1888).

Unlike Thoreau and Tolstoi, Mohandas K. Gandhi was a born organizer of men, and his India was ready for a mass movement that would defy the English masters. Gandhi was as profoundly religious and insistent on spiritual purity as was Tolstoi, by whom he was deeply influenced, and he considered himself a spiritual teacher first and a political leader second. What was unique in Gandhi was the combination of his uncompromising commitment toahimsa, or nonviolence (“The principle of ahimsa is hurt by every evil thought, by undue haste, by lying, by hatred, by wishing ill to any-body”; cf. Gandhi [1951] 1961, pp. 41–42), and his firm commitment to political action and his shrewd tactical ability. Arne Naess aptly stresses Gandhi’s “constructive imagination and uncommon ingenuity in finding and applying morally acceptable forms of political action” (Naess 1965, p. 6). [SeeIndian political thought.]

Gandhi’s techniques have been called “moral jiujitsu” (Gregg 1934). Gandhi himself speaks ofpassive resistance as “an all-sided sword … it blesses him who uses it and him against whom it is used. Without draining a drop of blood it produces far-reaching results. … Given a just cause, capacity for endless suffering and avoidance of violence, victory is a certainty” ([1951] 1961, pp. 52, 56).

Later on Gandhi abandoned the term “passive resistance” and chose the term Satyagraha, or “truth-force,” with which to characterize his campaigns, because he had come to feel that the former term did not exclude feelings of hatred or violent means, which would render resistance less effective.

Satyagraha largely appears to the public as Civil Disobedience or Civil Resistance. It is civil in the sense that it is not criminal. The lawbreaker … openly and civilly breaks [unjust laws] and quietly suffers the penalty for their breach. And in order to register his protest against the action of the law givers, it is open to him to withdraw his co-operation from the State by disobeying such other laws whose breach does not constitute moral turpitude. In my opinion, the beauty and efficacy of Satyagraha are so great and the doctrine so simple that it can be preached even to children. ([1951] 1961, pp. 6–7)

Alienation—Albert Camus . The theme of alienation, drawn from modern existentialist philosophy, is also important to current theories of civil disobedience. Yet the major direct contributor to this area, Albert Camus, agrees with Jean-Paul Sartre and the secular existentialists only up to a point: there is no valid basis for any moral or political authority’s claim to validity (or legitimacy) or to obedience. However, Camus believes in an essential human nature—he has been called an “essentialist”—and in a life committed to the goal of becoming more humane and thereby more fully human, more fully alive as a whole person. Camus sees every power elite and every government as a probable enemy of justice; as he asserted in his Nobel Prize address, the highest callings for a writer, and by implication for every man, are “refusal to lie about what we know and resistance to oppression”

Camus’s ideal is the rebel—the man who feels revolted by oppression anywhere and who throughout his life makes common cause not with the makers of history but with their victims (see Camus 1951). For Camus, physical violence is the supreme evil, but he does not rule out its use entirely; violence must be used only to reduce or forestall far more or far worse violence in the immediate future, as a last, desperate resort, if no nonviolent means are available. To be a strict pacifist is in his view to condone the violence in the existing system; this amounts to a position of “bourgeois nihilism.” Camus’s may be called a position of permanent rebellion, or permanent civil disobedience: there will always be violence and oppression in this world, and the full-grown man must always be in revolt against men and laws and conditions that perpetuate oppression; but he must also be against men who, after a successful revolution, institute new patterns of oppression and violence. Camus does not say that this revolt must always take unlawful forms; that is a question to be settled empirically in terms of anticipated results of alternate tactics. What is crucial in Camus’s thought is that respect for the dictates of justice must precede respect for the law.

Civil disobedience campaigns

One-man campaigns of disobedience like Thoreau’s, Socrates’, or the disobedience of early Christian and other religious martyrs, whether saints or heretics, will not be discussed here. Similarly, the illegal strikes conducted by labor unions will be ignored. Most illegal (as well as legal) strikes have aimed at improving labor contracts, not at changing laws or public policies. Some, including attempted general strikes, have had the aim of revolutionary changes, sufficiently sweeping to take us beyond the scope of civil disobedience as the term has been defined here. Others, however, have had more limited aims and should properly be considered campaigns of civil disobedience, especially since they have sometimes been organized in conjunction with other types of civil disobedience campaigns. Yet for reasons of space the subject of labor strikes must be left out in the present account. This leaves us with the main subject, Gandhi’s Satyagraha campaigns, and with later campaigns which have been more or less influenced by Gandhi’s teachings.

Gandhi. Among all the theorists of civil disobedience discussed above, only one name stands out in the history of mass civil disobedience campaigns—Mohandas K. Gandhi. He may be charged with being chiefly responsible for the confusion of civil disobedience with nonviolence in many people’s minds; yet it may well be that it was Gandhi’s insistence on nonviolence that has made mass organizing for disobedience possible, since most governments deal severely with violence-prone disobedience. Not the least of Gandhi’s feats was the superior morale he established among his followers, who felt equally righteous about their means and ends.

The first real mass movement of civil disobedience, led by Gandhi, who had by then become known as the leading spokesman for Indian grievances in South Africa, was the November 1913 march to Transvaal to protest discriminatory laws, including a yearly tax on all Indians who chose to stay in South Africa after the end of the labor contracts that brought them there and an outrageous law that invalidated all non-Christian marriages. Mass arrests and police violence against nonresisting marchers created much opposition and protest in Britain as well as in India. Eventually, Prime Minister Jan Smuts consented to negotiations, which led to an almost complete victory for Gandhi, in the sense that nearly all the specific demands of the Indians were met. Gandhi had gone out of his way not to embarrass the government needlessly and had actually called off one projected mass march when Smuts was in deep difficulties with a railroad strike. In the end, “Gandhi had not won a victory over Smuts, he had won Smuts over” (Fischer 1954, p. 48).

Gandhi returned to India and after a year’s study and meditation became involved in a number of successive campaigns of civil disobedience, including his 1918 campaign for Ahmadabad’s textile workers, during which he for the first time put his life at stake by way of fasting. After four days of fasting his demands were met.

Gandhi was by no means anti-British, and he used his influence to hold back Indian demands for independence during World War I. But tensions rose after the war. At the same time, Gandhi’s influence rose in the Indian National Congress, which in 1920 voted overwhelmingly to endorse Gandhi’s program of nonviolent civil disobedience against obnoxious laws. He was given wide powers to pick the times and places for such campaigns. However, Gandhi felt strongly that education to nonviolence was an absolute necessity, and he decided in 1922, grieving over incidents of bloody mob violence in Uttar Pradesh, to call off the intended campaign of disobedience that millions had eagerly anticipated. He felt the Indian masses were not yet disciplined enough to shun violence when provoked. Nevertheless, Gandhi was sent to jail with a six-year sentence, found guilty of subversive writings; he served just under two years. The years following his release in 1924 were relatively quiet, while he prepared himself and his followers for large-scale nonviolent action against British rule.

The largest civil disobedience campaign was inaugurated on January 26, 1930, when the Indian National Congress unilaterally proclaimed India’s independence from Britain and announced a program of peaceful struggles to induce the British to yield and eventually recognize Indian independence. The first law to be broken was the law that made it illegal to take salt from the ocean or from any source other than the British salt monopoly. On March 2, 1930, Gandhi sent a remarkable letter to inform the viceroy of the impending acts of civil disobedience, together with a last plea for negotiations. Ten days later the 26-day march of Gandhi and his followers began from his residence near Ahmadabad; the solemn and yet festive procession kept growing, and not only India’s press, but the world’s major newspapers followed the unfolding drama closely. At 6:30 on Sunday morning, April 6, about 4,000 followers watched breathlessly as Gandhi, after a brief swim, according to the London Times, “stooped down, scooped up a handful of sand and salt water, and returned to his bungalow with a broad smile on his face.” This was the prepublicized launching signal for the all-Indian Satyagraha campaign for repeal of the salt laws and also, in Gandhi’s words, “the repeal of the British bondage of which the salt tax is but an off-shoot” (Sharp 1960, pp. 89, 72).

Heartened by the nonviolent discipline achieved, Gandhi announced more radical acts of civil disobedience: salt would be taken from the government’s salt depots. He was promptly jailed, on May 5. But on May 21, led by the poet Mes Sarojini Naidu and Gandhi’s son Manilal, a dramatic “attack” on the Dharasana saltworks in Gujerat was launched. Wave after wave of peaceful “attackers” were clubbed down as they approached the depot by four hundred Indian policemen commanded by six British officers. These acts of government violence against nonviolent individuals were resented all over India and in Britain as well, and they soon led to somewhat more cautious and conciliatory British policies. In January 1931, Gandhi and most other Congress leaders were set free, and in August Gandhi left for London for further negotiations, as sole representative of the Congress party.

The negotiations were fruitless, and soon Britain again had a Conservative government, which decided to get tough and declare the Indian National Congress illegal as well as institute numerous draconic penalties for even relatively trivial acts of disobedience. Gandhi, from his jail cell, chose to avoid another direct confrontation, and his next fast, in September 1934, pleaded the cause of India’s Untouchables; he succeeded in securing for them access to the temples, first in Delhi and Calcutta, as well as fair political representation in the Indian parliament. This fast was primarily aimed at changing the attitudes and behavior of the Indian people, not the policies of the British government.

Gandhi’s spiritual influence throughout India has remained undiminished; his sainthood was well established in his lifetime and accentuated by his tragic assassination by a young Hindu fanatic in 1948. But his political influence as a leader of Congress politics never again quite equalled his position just before 1931, when he went to London for his party and nation and returned almost empty-handed. His influence in the 1930s and 1940s no doubt saved tens of thousands of lives, for he kept preaching conciliation with the British and peaceful coexistence among the Hindu castes and between Hindus and Muslims. His influence did not suffice, however, to prevent the partition of India or the communal slaughter on both sides of the border after partition.

Gandhi’s ideas as well as his example have kept spurring and also restraining civil disobedience movements outside India, although none of them has been on quite the same scale as the Indian campaigns of 1930–1931. A variety of causes have stimulated civil disobedience movements in many different countries, and no chronicle of even the major post-Gandhi events can be attempted. Some of the wide range of issues, conflicts, and geographic locations for civil disobedience campaigns of recent years will be indicated, followed by a brief account of civil disobedience campaigns in the United States, especially those for racial equality.

The range of modern campaigns. Outside India and the United States, South Africa has experienced the most widely organized and reported civil disobedience campaigns. Gandhi’s influence has remained strong among the disenfranchised South African Indians and has become felt also in the African and Coloured population. The first major campaign which involved all three groups was, in 1952, aimed at the Apartheid policies of Malan; it must be rated unsuccessful, since it failed to re-verse the trend toward increasingly oppressive discriminatory legislation. On the other hand, a beginning toward interracial solidarity among nonwhites was made, and there were gains in experience and in self-esteem within the oppressed majority.

In 1957 there was the spectacular and largely successful Johannesburg bus boycott, a spontaneous protest against higher fares. It was followed in the ensuing years by less successful campaigns against the passbook laws, which restrict the movement of Africans in particular. The last legally elected leader of the now outlawed African National Congress, Chief Albert J. Luthuli, has remained in confinement ever since his arrest in March 1960, after the Sharpville massacre, when the police had fired at a crowd of African antipassbook law demonstrators. Chief Luthuli was granted permission, however, to travel to Norway in November of the same year to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (Luthuli 1962; Kuper 1956).

Prospects for continued civil disobedience and especially for Gandhian nonviolence in South Africa in years to come are uncertain. Newly independent African states have openly campaigned for armed liberation of their South African cousins, and the conflict over white-ruled Rhodesia’s declaration of independence may escalate demands for violence among Africans inside and outside South Africa and Rhodesia.

Another nonwhite population that has experimented with civil disobedience, and with some success, is the Buddhist population in South Vietnam’s major cities. Led by Buddhist priests and inspired by ancient doctrines of nonviolence which had influenced Gandhi as well, their campaigns are waged in order to bring down or modify the policies of a succession of regimes imposed on the South Vietnamese by the United States. However, the Buddhists’ actions have been only one element in a complex succession of events in which military and political violence has predominated and in which the dubious legitimacy of succeeding Saigon regimes makes it questionable whether the term “civil disobedience” is appropriate; what has been demonstrated in South Vietnam is that nonviolent resistance, with careful planning, can be a powerful force even when surrounded on all sides by military and police violence.

There are many reports of heroic nonviolent resistance against the German occupation in Denmark and Norway during World War II (Gregg 1934, pp. 28-35; Sibley 1963, pp. 156-186). It should be remembered, however, that the Nazis tended to treat their Nordic cousins with restraint, comparatively speaking, for the same racist reasons that made them decimate Slavs and exterminate millions of Jews; it should also be remembered that Danes and Norwegians accomplished a fair amount of violent resistance, too, and that the part played by nonviolent civil disobedience in defeating the Hitler regime must be rated as very minor. The Danish king’s symbolic resistance to all measures against Danish Jews did not succeed in preventing their arrest but may well have been a crucial factor in saving their lives.

Resistance against poverty and other kinds of traditional oppression has been the domain of the labor movements, whose main weapon has been the strike, whenever satisfaction could not be won by way of collective bargaining or voting. Yet civil disobedience campaigns in our sense have occurred in this area, too. Best known, perhaps, are Danilo Dolci’s “strikes in reverse” in Sicily. In the mid-1950s Dolci organized unemployed Sicilians to go to work, illegally, on improving public roads. The short-run objective was to shame the authorities into paying for the work done; instead, Dolci and some of his co-workers were arrested for trespassing. But the long-run objective of dramatizing the need for employment and the government’s responsibility in this area was successfully achieved, in the sense that later Italian governments have been working more actively to combat unemployment.

The major type of civil disobedience campaign in western Europe in the last few decades has been that which urges resistance to armaments, above all to the nuclear arms race, and resistance to specific Western foreign policies deemed aggressive or threatening to world peace. While there have been sizable demonstrations in protest against the nuclear arms race and associated foreign policies, involving pacifists and nonpacifists alike, acts of civil disobedience have usually been resorted to by relatively few individuals each time. For example, some have walked into restricted military areas, having first notified the authorities about their plans. Increasingly, however, there has been a tendency in recent years for many demonstrators, especially if they feel provoked by the police, to sit down and block civilian as well as military traffic and then “go limp” when arrested.

In eastern Europe the 1956 nonviolent disorders in Poznan, Poland and the subsequent demonstrations against Polish laws and government policies may be credited with having effected without blood-shed the change of regime that led to much higher levels of political freedom in Poland; this result was not an example of Gandhi’s principles at work, of course, but of a politically shrewd disobedience movement that challenged a weak government while scrupulously trying to avoid a confrontation with its ally, the Soviet Union.

Finally, in the Soviet Union, an example of successful use of civil disobedience, albeit under very special circumstances, was the largely nonviolent uprising in the Vorkuta prison camp in the summer of 1953, shortly after the death of Stalin (see Scholmer 1954).

American campaigns. In the United States the chief instrument of Gandhi’s influence in social action concerning race relations has been the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who writes: “I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom” (1958, p. 66). King was only 26 when he was thrust into a position of national prominence in 1955, in the midst of a civil disobedience campaign in Montgomery, Alabama. The campaign had been triggered by a seamstress, Mrs. Rosa Parks, who apparently on the spur of the moment had refused to move to the back of a bus and was arrested. To consolidate the spontaneous Negro boycott of Montgomery buses that followed, the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed, with King as president. The following year a hundred clergymen from the South formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), of which King became the undisputed leader, following the clear victory that had been achieved under his leadership in the Montgomery bus boycott. And the SCLC has remained in the spotlight, under King’s leadership, with numerous newsmaking marches and other acts, often involving disobedience, against Southern racist laws and enforcement policies. King’s most momentous confrontation with Southern police power was in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, where the principal Negro demands were desegregation in public accommodations, equal opportunity in jobs, and an interracial grievance machinery. Police brutality sparked unprecedentedly large and angry demonstrations, countered by segregationist bombs as well as electric cattle prods and police dogs; but in the end white business leaders took over effective power in the white community, forced the extremist mayor and police chief to yield, and accommodated most of the Negro demands.

The sit-in movement. The most effective civil disobedience technique in the South has been the sit-in; we may well speak of the sit-in movement. This technique was developed under the auspices of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded with the help of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1942 and headed for 24 years by an-other disciple of Gandhi, James Farmer. Negro and white members of CORE during the 1940s successfully desegregated without much fanfare many restaurants in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area by the simple expedient of occupying tables and waiting for service until they either got it, were arrested, or could enter into negotiations with the managers.

However, it was in 1960 that a new generation suddenly took over the sit-in technique, greatly expanded it, and spread it all over the South. The trigger event was the decision of four Greensboro, North Carolina, Negro students to bring their books to a segregated Woolworth lunch counter and simply stay, there and study when they were refused service. Within a year and a half, 70,000 persons had taken similar action, and over 100 Southern communities had desegregated one or more of their eating places (Quarles 1964, p. 253). A new organization of students was formed, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was led by no single individual and in fact developed a kind of antiauthoritarian style and insisted on local leadership of local campaigns (Zinn 1964).

The Free Speech Movement. Some of the SNCC momentum and style has carried over to other student protest movements and has led to new experiments in civil disobedience applied to issues of student rights and of peace. Mario Savio of SNCC became the undisputed leader of the explosive Free Speech Movement (FSM) on the Berkeley campus of the University of California during the academic year 1964/1965, which directly challenged the legitimacy of nonacademic, nondemocratic university governments and incidentally won the support of the academic senate and eventually saw its major grievances vindicated and remedied and the Berkeley chancellor replaced. At the same time, over eight hundred students were convicted for having participated in the crucial act of civil disobedience responsible for the FSM victory—an illegal sit-in in the campus administration building. The Berkeley experience with the FSM has visibly moderated the tone of many other university administrations in their dealings with liberal and radical student groups, and the self-assurance of student activists seems to have increased all over the country (Draper 1965; Lipset & Wolin 1965).

Protests against the Vietnam war. Belief in the absurdity of the Vietnam war absorbed a large portion of student activist energies. Many activists subsequently engaged in civil disobedience on be-half of the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), whose most spectacular acts of defiance were attempts to stop troop trains going through Berkeley. In the fall of 1965 the VDC leadership dramatically abandoned plans to march toward an army base in Oakland without a permit and instead filed a successful suit to force the city to grant the marching permit.

The teach-in movement which was launched at the University of Michigan in 1965 was originally planned as a civil disobedience movement, in violation of university regulations and perhaps of state laws as well. However, plans were changed, and the law-abiding could also participate in these protests.

The Vietnam Day Committee and some other war protest organizations elsewhere in the country have come close to outright violations of the draft laws in their occasional advocacy of draft refusal, but either they, the U.S. government, or both have so far avoided a head-on confrontation on this issue. Some nonpacifists have refused to fight in Vietnam, thus adopting a position of civil disobedience. In March 1966, the American Civil Liberties Union adopted the position that the courts ought to recognize moral opposition to a particular war as an additional ground for granting a conscientious objector status. Some pacifists, not satisfied with this status, have engaged in civil disobedience, refusing to register at all (a traditional stance for the most militant pacifists) or burning their draft cards (since 1965 a felony in the United States).

Politically speaking, a widespread challenge to a government’s policy in a particular war would have a greater chance of success than a pacifist position which rejects participation in all wars. Perhaps for that very reason the courts, probably in every country, will be reluctant to grant to an individual the right to choose what national cause to kill for or die for—a right which in philosophical perspective may seem elementary but which could be a dangerous one to tolerate for almost any kind of government.

Another type of civil disobedience relating to peace and war issues is the refusal to pay all or a part of the income tax, unless or until the government abandons a particular policy. Following Thoreau’s example, a good number of Americans have attempted this kind of protest, but if they have significant income or property the U.S. government usually is able to extract the tax money one way or another eventually, with fines and possible litigation costs added (Mayer 1964).

Prospects for civil disobedience

Three principal factors suggest the likelihood of a progressively expanding role for civil disobedience in the political life of modern democracies and somewhat later in communist countries, too, if their regimes become stabilized, their legal processes more dependably equitable, and their citizens more secure. One factor is our increasing knowledge of political behavior and political institutions in democracies; another is the impact of the Nuremberg verdicts and the Eichmann case on modern thought about the individual’s political responsibilities; and a third factor, perhaps, is the influence of writers like Camus and some of the modern psychologists, who associate man’s growth with a maturing independent social conscience and an increasing insistence on living according to its dictates.

Behavioral research has established the wide distance between the classical ideals of democracy and the modern realities of rule by contending minorities, some more privileged than others with respect to economic and political power. Most writers on democracy and virtually all American civics texts keep arguing, however, that in a democracy citizens have the right to vote and, therefore, are obligated, morally as well as legally, to obey the law. Bad laws must be obeyed while one goes to work to have them changed. Many defenders of liberal democracy write as if there were a social contract or some similar basis for a political obligation to obey the majority’s will, as expressed in constitutional processes, even to the extent of subordinating one’s personal sense of morality or one’s firm conviction about vital issues concerning the public good.

A more liberal position is adopted by David Spitz, who recognizes three (but only three) exceptions to the general rule that citizens in a democracy are obliged to obey all laws, on the assumption that they have been enacted with their consent. First, from those who oppose democracy no consent can be assumed. Second, one cannot in fairness claim an obligation to obey on the part of those who believe in democracy as an ideal but who claim that the democracy under which they live is a fraud. For example, there can be no moral obligation for a disenfranchised American Negro to obey the law, whether or not he believes in the ideas of democracy. The state’s claim to obedience with respect to such dissidents rests on power, not on a universal morality. A third category, Spitz continues, are those democrats who feel bound by most laws but consider a particular law or legally authorized policy patently unjust. What should a witness do when a congressional committee demands that he give names of individuals whom he once knew as communists? Spitz’s position is that the mark of the good citizen—at least in a democracy—is not loyalty to the system, but to the principle of democracy itself (1954).

John H. Schaar takes issue with Spitz on the third category, arguing that a democrat must believe in the legitimacy of majority rule and that disobedience to a particular law in effect would substitute minority rule in this context. “The principle of majority rule knows only the limits that the majority sets upon itself. Any other form of limitation is undemocratic” (1957, p. 51). An implication of this not uncommon view would seem to be that a disenfranchised Negro or an American communist would violate no political obligation by exercising civil disobedience but that almost any other citizen would. Schaar’s argument seems to assume not only that “democracy” refers to majority rule but also that majority rule is an end in itself—in fact, an all-important end; he firmly opposes the assumption he attributes to Spitz— that “a minority may set itself over the majority as final judge of what is right and good in the democratic polity” (ibid., pp. 51-52). The majority, Schaar seems to imply, must be the final judge of what is right and good regardless of levels of information and degrees of sensitivity; worse, he appears to say that what passes for majority choice in our polity, but in fact is choice by privileged minorities, must be the final judgment of right and wrong, prevailing over the individual’s conscience.

Other political scientists have contributed research to the processes by which degrees of loyalty and democratic consent are brought about. Morton Grodzins ably demonstrated some of the psychological factors on which the loyalty of underprivileged or actually persecuted minority group members may hinge (1956). Others have studied the psychological processes by whichaverage Americans develop their feelings and views, become committed or remain apathetic with respect to different political issues. Numerous researches on community power have established that there is no substantive majority rule in local communities either.

Overlooked by many writers in the liberal democratic tradition is the fact that people with political knowledge, with a sensitive social conscience, or with an inordinate moral commitment to whatever public cause, are always in a minority. Unless they appear at just the right historical moment they are doomed to a hopeless struggle against the privileged and the powerful, the makers of history and of legislation in democracies as well as other systems. Normally it is expedient to obey the laws even if one strongly disagrees with them and in fact can exert no effective influence toward changing them. But to say that a moral obligation to obey the law exists under such circumstances is to make a claim that needs more than a fagade of formal democratic institutions to back it up. In the Locke tradition there is a right not only to commit civil disobedience but also to overthrow the government if it violates its trust; revolution, writes Joseph Tussman, “lurks at the outer fringes of political life” and “comes to life when the government weakens the moral and legal basis for its authority. It calls to the aid the moral revolutionist, the self-appointed agent of a body politic betrayed by its appointed agents” (1960, p. 46). Short of revolutionary activity, civil disobedience seems to be an essential corrective in democracies whose classical legitimation has been lost.

This assertion is especially true, perhaps, from the perspective of each young generation. Young people form a large minority group in terms of numbers but a very small one in terms of political influence; most laws as well as customs are shaped to suit middle-aged and especially older people, who have a disproportionate power in almost every society. Alert young people and student activists in particular are likely to become increasingly restless under the customary bombardment of admonitions to respect all laws, laws which they know they have had no effective share in bringing about. Paradoxically, even the formal niceties of democratic representation are ignored in the military draft legislation of several Western democracies, including the United States, which expects young men to go to war, if called on, before they have won the right to vote, much less to run for office. Similarly, campus unrest over the issues of university government, which is likely to keep increasing, also stems from the fact that young people are called on to respect rules which they have had no effective share in choosing.

The classical justification of democracy as a basis for political obligation having been undermined by modern political knowledge, democratic institutions will increasingly come to be valued as means rather than ends. The role of civil disobedience may be ambiguous if majority rule is an end in itself but it becomes vital if the ends of politics are sought in the realm of substantive values like justice, liberty, equality, or human rights.

While universal agreement on specific positive ends of government is unlikely in any polity, there is in civilized societies an implicit agreement on negative ends: physical violence is to be minimized, as is persecution and oppression of underprivileged groups. One positive formulation of this widely shared attitude, which may claim a wide implicit acceptance, is the statement that governments exist for the purpose of establishing and defending human rights, with the most basic rights like protection against violence and starvation taking precedence over less basic rights. The common good, according to this view, hinges on the good of the least favored individuals, also taking into account the prospects for those not yet born.

This or any similar type of basis for political obligation directed to the ends of politics, which relegates not only democracy but also respect for the law in all its majesty to the status of means, takes the vestiges of the role of subject out of the role of citizen. It substitutes an ethics of individual responsibility for the probable results of one’s political behavior, including law-abiding as well as legally obligated behavior, for an ethics of duty to subordinate conscience, knowledge, and individual judgment to existing legal norms, government directives, or a majority vote.

The judgments at Nuremberg and the wide attention given to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem have increased acceptance for the view that the autonomy of the individual conscience is a vital resource in our modern technological and bureaucratized civilization [seeHuman rights].

Thoreau, in his America, acted as if one could choose between morality and society; he dissociated himself from a government he could not recognize as his by withdrawing to his life in the forest. For modern metropolitan or cosmopolitan man this alternative does not exist. The problem of moral integrity for the dissenting citizen is to know when to obey and when to disobey unjust laws and policies. When is the violence and injustice of such magnitude that failure to commit civil disobedience would demean a morally sensitive and enlightened individual?

Thoreau would have no part of the usual democratic argument that unjust laws must be obeyed while we are working to change them. If the injustice is minor, let it go, he writes (1849); “but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

In our complex society this is a difficult doctrine to apply. Every taxpayer lends himself to the wrongs committed by his government, yet few, if any, taxpayers, unless they stop earning, can effectively withhold their financial support to their government. There is uncomfortable truth in the slogan distributed by a New York anarchist group as a protest against American military policies: “Help stamp out human beings! Contribute to the war effort thru your local tax collector.”

The conscientious dissenter’s dilemma is complicated not only by the magnitude of evil that even democratic governments can inflict with modern technology but also by the usual lack of time to wait for evil policies to be changed and by the lack of effective ways of opting out from partnership with one’s government. A further complication of the modern dissenter’s dilemma is contributed by our expanding psychological knowledge. We are aware today of the wide extent to which government policies as well as public opinion are the outcome of neurotic anxieties and fears, which are difficult to diagnose with exactitude and are even more difficult to cure (Lewy 1961).

Modern social science has established in a general way how political opinions are developed to meet personality needs and how the individual’s ability to cope with anxieties at various levels determines his capacity for rationality and a realistic long-term assessment of his own good as well as the common good. Most people are neurotic and conformist as well as rational, in varying mixtures; enlightened, civilized policies are unlikely to emanate from democratic processes except to the extent that influential leaders become capable of farsighted rationality. Yet democratic competition for office and power almost invariably strengthens the neurotic aspects and lessens the rational aspects of political behavior; most electoral appeals, especially in times of crises when cool rationality is most needed, are directed to anxieties and paranoid sentiments rather than to reason or enlightened hopes.

The conscientious dissenter who cannot opt out of this system has no easy guide available for determining when to obey and when to disobey the law. There is no general solution to his dilemma, except to recommend that he insist on protecting his own sanity and powers of reason, the autonomy of his own social conscience, and his own right to grow toward whatever moral stature or humanity he is capable of achieving. The criteria for concrete decisions to obey or disobey must depend on the nature of each situation, anticipating by careful inquiry and reflection the consequences of either obeying or disobeying; but they must also depend on each moral dissenter’s personality and beliefs, especially his beliefs concerning priorities among evils or among good causes.

The open-endedness of the modern dilemma of civil disobedience fits well with Camus’s theory of rebellion as an individual responsibility: while only an active and pressing social conscience can bring an individual to full life as a human being, the responsibility for action or inaction as a social being is strictly individual and lonesome. Others have made a strong case for the necessity of civil disobedience as a means of instructing the powerful about the strength of grievances and thus to push toward social justice and freedom for the under-privileged. Camus’s most important contribution, which is in line with modern developments in psychology, is his stress on the necessity of resistance to injustice for the resisting individual’s own health and welfare. He asserts that only by way of rebellion can we become human beings, or individuals conscious of our own humanness. A commitment to civil disobedience is as necessary for the full growth of the individual as a human being as the steady supply of individuals prepared to commit civil disobedience is necessary for the protection and development of a human rights-oriented society.

Christian Bay

[See alsoAuthority; Constitutional law; Duty; freedom; Human rights; Justice; Pacifism. Other relevant material may be found inPolitical theory.]

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Tussman, Joseph 1960 Obligation and the Body Politic. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Zinn, Howard 1964 SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Boston: Beacon.