Civil Disobedience

Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience in 1849. It argues the superiority of the individual conscience over acquiescence to government. Thoreau was inspired to write in response to slavery and the Mexican-American war. He believed that people could not be made agents of injustice if they were governed by their own consciences.

Civil disobedience, the refusal to obey certain laws, is a method of protest famously articulated by philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau in his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau believed that protest became a moral obligation when laws collided with conscience. Since then, civil disobedience has been employed as a form of rebellion around the world. But is there a place for civil disobedience in democratic societies? When is civil disobedience justifiable? Is violence ever called for? Furthermore, how effective is civil disobedience?

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

An assessment of both classical and current philosophical thought concerning the issue of civil disobedience. Drawing upon the essays of such contemporary thinkers as Rawls, Raz and Singer, this text aims to provide the basic material required for debate on the nature of civil disorder.

Outlines the theory and practice of civil disobedience, helping to understand how it is operating in the current turbulent conditions.

Civil disobedience is a form of protest with a special standing with regards to the law that sets it apart from political violence. Such principled law-breaking has been witnessed in recent years over climate change, economic strife, and the treatment of animals. Civil disobedience is examined here in the context of contemporary political activism, in the light of classic accounts by Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi to call for a broader attitude towards what civil disobedience involves. The question of violence is discussed, arguing that civil disobedience need only be aspirationally non-violent and that although some protests do not clearly constitute law-breaking they may render people liable to arrest. For example, while there may not be violence against persons, there may be property damage, as seen in raids upon animal laboratories. Such forms of militancy raise ethical and legal questions. Arguing for a less restrictive theory of civil disobedience, the book will be a valuable resource for anyone studying social movements and issues of political philosophy, social justice, and global ethics.

Civil disobedience is a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act, contrary to law, carried out to communicate opposition to law and policy of government. This book presents a theory of civil disobedience that draws on ideas associated with deliberative democracy. This book explores the ethics of civil disobedience in democratic societies. It revisits the theoretical literature on civil disobedience with a view to taking a fresh look at long-standing questions: When is civil disobedience a justified method of political protest? What role, if any, does it play in democratic politics? Is there a moral right to civil disobedience in a democratic society? And how should a democratic state respond to citizens who commit civil disobedience? The answers given to these questions add up to a coherent and distinctive theory of civil disobedience, which draws on ideas associated with deliberative democracy to forge an account that improves upon prominent approaches to this subject. Civil Disobedience and Deliberative Democracy will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary political theory, political science, democratization studies, social movement studies, criminology, legal theory and moral philosophy.

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, called Civil Disobedience for short, is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). Famous essay of the author Henry David Thoreau: "The Service", "A Walk to Wachusett", "Paradise (to be) Regained", "Sir Walter Raleigh", "Herald of Freedom", "Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum", "Reform and the Reformers", Thomas Carlyle and His Works, Resistance to Civil Government (Civil Disobedience), "Slavery in Massachusetts", A Plea for Captain John Brown, The Last Days of John Brown, "Walking", "Life Without Principle", Excursions anthology.