Civil Disobedience

Definition of Civil Disobedience

Civil disobedience is a deliberate, public, and nonviolent violation of law, undertaken as a form of political protest. It is distinguished from ordinary lawbreaking by several features: it is public (not covert), nonviolent, conscientious (motivated by sincere moral conviction), and those who practice it willingly accept legal punishment as a demonstration of their respect for the legal system.

The philosophical justification of civil disobedience rests on the idea that the law is not the highest moral authority. There are higher principles — justice, human rights, the moral law — that may override the obligation to obey the law in specific circumstances. Civil disobedience is an appeal to the public conscience of the community, an attempt to persuade the majority that a particular law or policy is unjust and should be changed.

Key Thinkers

Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government") is the founding text of the tradition. Thoreau argued that the individual's conscience is a higher authority than the state and that it is morally imperative to resist unjust laws. Mahatma Gandhi transformed this individualist ethic into a mass political practice, developing satyagraha as a comprehensive philosophy of nonviolent resistance in the struggle for Indian independence. Martin Luther King Jr. brought civil disobedience to the American civil rights movement, arguing in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" that there are two types of laws: just laws that uplift human personality and unjust laws that degrade it, and that individuals have a moral duty to obey just laws and to disobey unjust ones. John Rawls provided a systematic liberal justification of civil disobedience within the framework of his theory of justice, arguing that it is a stabilizing mechanism for a nearly just society, allowing minorities to appeal to the majority's sense of justice.