The proliferation of civil disobedience in recent times has prompted questions about violence and justified resistance. Non-violence has traditionally been associated with civil disobedience. If civil disobedience is a political exercise, there are good normative and pragmatic reasons for adhering to non-violence. But some violent actions may be compatible with civil disobedience. This paper defines violence as the application of force intending to cause or reckless about causing harm, and seeks to distinguish violent actions compatible with civil disobedience from conduct too violent to qualify. Whereas civil disobedience is irreconcilable with attacks against other human beings, some violence against property, targeted and symbolic, coheres with the communicative ends of civil disobedience. More intriguing questions arise when disobedience entails extensive attacks against property, such as activities of environmental groups against environmentally harmful practices (ecotage). Despite the extent of violence against property, such activities might still qualify as civil disobedience.
Faced with a choice between escaping without consequences and submitting to a democratic decision, Socrates chooses the latter. So immense is Socrates’ duty to obey law, we are led to believe, that even the threat of death is insufficient to abrogate it. Crito proposes several arguments purporting to ground Socrates’ strong duty to obey, with the appeal to the Athenian system’s democratic credentials carrying most of the normative weight. A careful reading of the dialogue, in conjunction with the ‘Apology’, reveals, however, a more complex picture. If Crito sets the conditions that render a regime legitimate, and therefore warranting of obedience, the Apology reveals a legal system’s shortcomings that justify disobedience. This article substantiates this position by delineating circumstances that can justify resistance. Contemporary forms of political resistance can also rely on similar conditions. Plato’s texts anticipate the current democratic turn of civil disobedience.
By the nineteenth century, modern codification movements had marked an apogee in the emergence of the post-Enlightenment, "Napoleonic" State. If Europe had once been a heap of rival, parochial backwaters, codification would issue from a unified, centralized legislature. If law had once languished in the randomness of custom and tradition, codification promised the rigour of system and logic. Strictly speaking, codification means taking a corpus of existing law in order merely to restate it in some orderly fashion. But if the aim is to overcome inherited gaps and inconsistencies, then codification entails more. It requires selection of the best norms. What counts as "best" then depends on the legislators' broader aims. Do they seek economic competitiveness? Or distributive justice? Or respect for fundamental rights? Or clarity and ease of implementation? The gaps and inconsistencies which the legislators seek to remedy do not necessarily result from sheer oversight. They may reflect rival social interests. Construed as the end product of a legislative act, a code might seek to reconcile those opposed factions through processes of interest-group bargaining-"horse trading". On that model, rival voices would all hash out their differences within the political arena, with experts and legislators then steadily progressing towards an optimal text. One problem, however, is that not all voices will be equally loud in that arena, nor equally welcome. Outright policy choices will be made, even heavy-handedly imposed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.