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Civil and Uncivil Disobedience

Expected online publication date:  12 February 2026

Candice Delmas
Affiliation:
Northeastern University

Summary

What is wrong with disobedience? What makes an act of disobedience civil or uncivil? Under what conditions can an act of civil or uncivil disobedience be justified? Can a liberal democratic regime tolerate (un)civil disobedience? This Element book presents the main answers that philosophers and activist-thinkers have offered to these questions. It is organized in 3 parts: Part I presents the main philosophical accounts of civil disobedience that liberal political philosophers and democratic theorists have developed and then conceptualizes uncivil disobedience. Part II examines the origins of disobedience in the praxis of activist-thinkers: Henry David Thoreau on civil resistance, anarchists on direct action, and Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. on nonviolence. Part III takes up the question of violence in defensive action, the requirement that disobedients accept legal sanctions, and the question of whether uncivil disobedience is counterproductive and undermines civic bonds.

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Type
Element
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Online ISBN: 9781009659130
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Accessibility standard: Unknown

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Civil and Uncivil Disobedience
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Civil and Uncivil Disobedience
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Civil and Uncivil Disobedience
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