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CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, POLITICS AND VIOLENCE

  • RICHARD H. KING (a1)
Extract

The tradition of civil disobedience in America seems to be in pretty good health. Recent examples, including the Occupy movement, disruption of the functioning of abortion clinics, and even the release of classified government documents by Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, suggest that it is alive and kicking. Yet a consideration of these examples also re-enforces how fuzzy the edges and undefined the essential core of civil disobedience are. Indeed, a main achievement of Lewis Perry's book under review here is to emphasize that what we now consider the definitive traits of civil disobedience—respect for the law in principle, willingness to accept punishment for violating an unjust law, and a commitment to nonviolence—have rarely all been present when civil disobedience has been engaged in. Perhaps Perry's minimalist description of civil disobedience is the best we can do: “the national heritage of resistance to unjust laws.”

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COPYRIGHT: © Cambridge University Press 2014 
References
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1 Perry, Civil Disobedience, 3.

2 Arendt, Hannah, “Civil Disobedience”, in Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York, 1972), 51–102, 83.

3 Ibid., 85,88.

4 Perry, Civil Disobedience, 33–5.

5 Ibid., 58.

6 Ibid., 23.

7 Ibid., 23

8 Ibid., 23–4.

9 Richardson, Robert D. Jr, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley, CA, 1986), 178.

10 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd edn (Cleveland, OH, 1958), 296, 298.

11 Perry, Civil Disobedience, 198.

12 Ibid., 281.

13 Ibid., 97.

14 Ibid., 100–1.

15 Ibid., 100.

16 Cited in Perry, Civil Disobedience, 277.

17 Leigh K. Jenco, “Thoreau's Critique of Democracy”, in Turner, A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, 71.

18 Kateb, George, “Wildness and Conscience: Thoreau and Emerson”, in Kateb, Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New Haven and London, 2006), 245–71, 253–4.

19 Harry Jaffa, “Thoreau and Lincoln”, in Turner, A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, 190.

20 Turner, “Thoreau and John Brown”, in Turner, A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, 162; Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown”, in Stauffer and Trodd, The Tribunal, 108.

21 Turner, “Thoreau and John Brown”, in Turner, A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, 155.

22 Ibid., 165.

23 Cavell, Stanley, The Senses of Walden (San Francisco, 1981; first published 1972), 85.

24 “Slavery in Massachusetts” can be found online at http://thoreau.eserver.org/slavery.html; while the Brecht poem can be found at http://harpers.org/blog/2008/01/brecht-to-those-who-follow-in-our-wake.

25 In this respect alone, it resembles the recurring debates touched off by Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).

26 Stauffer and Trodd, The Tribunal, 457, 477, 459.

27 Ibid., xxviii; Reynolds, David S.. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York, 2006).

28 Weber, Max, “Politics as a Vocation”, in From Max Weber, ed. Gerth, Hans and Mills, C. Wright (New York, 1958), 122.

29 Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown”, 105.

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Modern Intellectual History
  • ISSN: 1479-2443
  • EISSN: 1479-2451
  • URL: /core/journals/modern-intellectual-history
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