Concept
Civil disobedience
Overview
Civil disobedience is the active and professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders, or commands of a government (or any other authority). By some definitions, civil disobedience has to be nonviolent to be called "civil". Hence, civil disobedience is sometimes equated with nonviolent resistance. Henry David Thoreau's essay Resistance to Civil Government, first published in 1849 and then published posthumously in 1866 as Civil Disobedience, popularized the term in the US, although the concept itself was practiced long before this work.
Various forms of civil disobedience have been used by prominent activists, such as American women's suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony in the late 19th century, Egyptian nationalist Saad Zaghloul during the 1910s, and Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi in 1920s British India as part of his leadership of the Indian independence movement. Martin Luther King Jr.'s and James Bevel's peaceful nonviolent protests during the civil rights movement in the 1960s United States sometimes contained important aspects of civil disobedience. Although civil disobedience is rarely justifiable in court, King regarded civil disobedience to be a display and practice of reverence for law: "Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law out of all other freedom struggles."
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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A body politic of this kind is called a Democracy, which may be defined as a society which wields all its power as a whole. The sovereign power is not restrained by any laws, but every one is bound to obey it in all things; such is the state of things implied when men either tacitly or expressly handed over to it all their power of self-defense, or in other words, all their right. For if they had wished to retain…
Benedictus de Spinoza, The Philosophy of Spinoza
States what Civil disobedience is.
Another kind of the indivisible is outside of the whole genus of the continuous; and in this way incorporeal substances, like God, angel and soul, are called indivisible. Such a kind of indivisible does not belong to the continuous, as a part of it, but as touching it by its power; hence, according as its power can extend itself to one or to many, to a small thing, or to a great one, in this way it is in one or in…
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
States what Civil disobedience is.
A determined opposition was put up against the conditions regarding Swadeshi that were laid down in the civil disobedience resolution passed by the All-India Congress Committee at Delhi. It was directed against two requirements, namely, that the civil resister offering resistance in terms of that resolution was bound to know hand-spinning and use only hand-spun and hand-woven _khadi_; and that in the event of a…
Mahatma Gandhi, The Wheel of Fortune
Names Civil disobedience twice; opens on Civil disobedience.
Philosophers who discussed Civil disobedience
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Peter Singer
- Socrates
- Henry David Thoreau
- Cornel West
- Ted Honderich
- John Zerzan
- Raimond Gaita
Related ideas
- Government
- John Rawls
- Glorious Revolution
- East Germany
- Ireland
- Public policy
- Indian independence movement
- Satyagraha
- Social action
- South Africa
- Trade union
- Nonviolence
- Law
- Mahatma Gandhi
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- A Theory of Justice
- Roman Empire
- Soviet Union
- Sophocles
- Adolf Hitler
- Al-Azhar University
- Susan B. Anthony
- Slavery
- Semantics
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.