When was civil disobedience published

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 , 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.

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 and Thoreau refused, Staples escorted him to jail. In a public lecture that Thoreau gave twice in , 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.

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 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 , 4—5 , most scholars maintain the acceptability of indirect disobedience given that not all unjust laws or policies can be disobeyed directly M. Cohen , —; Rawls , ; Brownlee , 19— 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.

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 , —4. 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. 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. 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. 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. Rawls and Hugo Bedau , , 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.

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 , ; Smart , —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 , ; Brownlee , ; Scheuerman , 43—5.

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.

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. On this basis, some scholars deny altogether the requirement that civil disobedience be non-violent M. Cohen , ; Brownlee , —9; Moraro , 96— 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.

One way to conceive of violence is as the use of physical force causing or likely to cause injury Rawls , 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 , Psychological violence can also cause injury to others.

For one thing, words can incite physical violence. 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.

Property damage : Authorities, much of the public, and many scholars tend to conceive of non-violence strictly, as excluding any damage to property Fortas , 48—9, —6; Smith , 3, 33; Smith and Brownlee , 5; Regan Two broad reasons may explain the inclusion of property damage within the category of violence.

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. 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 a, ; Delmas a, 49, —5. Other scholars have instead argued that non-violence can encompass property damage Milligan , ch.

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.

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. 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 , — After the —56 Montgomery bus boycott, which unleashed spectacular white retaliatory violence, Martin Luther King, Jr. 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.

Cohen , 6; see also Brownlee ch. 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.

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. 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 , 11— 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 , 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 ; Zerilli What makes an act of civil disobedience special? 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 , 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. For one thing, agents intent on overthrowing their government may well resort to civil tactics simply because civil disobedience works Sharp b. 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 , 24—9; Scheuerman , 49—53; Moraro , 96— Other theorists deny that civil disobedients need to demonstrate fidelity to law, taking what Scheuerman dubs an anti-legal turn.

Civility, on a number of recent accounts Brownlee ch. Cooke , is satisfied when agents aim to communicate with an audience and engage with the public sphere. 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 , ; Delmas a, ch.

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 ; Hanson ; Livingston ; Scheuerman , ch. 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 ; Livingston a, b; Pineda b, ch.

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. 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 , 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 He was heavily influenced by the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who introduced Thoreau to the ideas of transcendentalism, a philosophy central to Thoreau's thinking and writing.

In addition to Civil Disobedience , Thoreau is best known for his book Walden , which documents his experiences living alone on Walden Pond in Massachusetts from Throughout his life, Thoreau emphasized the importance of individuality and self-reliance. He practiced civil disobedience in his own life and spent a night in jail for his refusal to pay taxes in protest of the Mexican War. Thoreau was opposed to the practice of slavery in some of the territories involved.

It is thought that this night in jail prompted Thoreau to write Civil Disobedience. Thoreau delivered the first draft of the treatise as an oration to the Concord Lyceum in , and the text was published in under the title Resistance to Civil Government. If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code. For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs , and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.

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