There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the civil rights movement. In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority’s principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms—and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles. Their fidelity to the spirit of the law, commitment to civility, and allegiance to American democracy provided the blueprint for activists pursuing racial justice and set the normative horizon for liberal philosophies of civil disobedience. Seeing Like an Activist charts the emergence of this influential account of civil disobedience in the civil rights movement and demonstrates its reliance on a narrative about black protest that is itself entangled with white supremacy. Liberal political theorists whose work informed decades of scholarship saw civil disobedience “like a white state”: taking for granted the legitimacy of the constitutional order, assuming as primary the ends of constitutional integrity and stability, centering the white citizen as the normative ideal, and figuring the problem of racial injustice as limited, exceptional, and all-but-already solved. In contrast, building on historical and archival evidence, this book shows how civil rights activists, in concert with anticolonial movements across the globe, turned to civil disobedience as a practice of decolonization in order to emancipate themselves and others from a racial order that needed to be fully transformed. We can recover this powerful alternative account only by adopting a different theoretical approach—one which sees activists as themselves engaged in the creative work of political theorizing.
Theorists of political obligation have long devoted special attention to civil disobedience, establishing its pride of place as an object of philosophical analysis, and as one of a short list of exceptions to an otherwise binding obligation to obey the law. Yet all of this attention to civil disobedience has left the broader terrain of resistance to injustice relatively under-theorized. What other forms of action are justifiable – even required – in the face of systemic injustice? Candice Delmas' A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil offers an original and powerful defense of the idea that we have a duty to resist, and that carrying out this duty may sometimes require going beyond civil disobedience – engaging in forms of action that are evasive, shocking, violent, or otherwise deemed “uncivil.” Building on a wealth of recent scholarship and a rich set of examples, Delmas grounds the duty to resist in the same principles that political philosophers routinely use to defend an obligation to obey the law: the natural duty of justice, the principle of fair play, Samaritan duties to rescue others from peril, and the associative duties of membership. In making room for uncivil forms of dissent, however, I contend that Delmas ironically hollows out the category of civil disobedience, wedding it too tightly to a principle of decorum, and isolating it from protest that exceeds the boundaries of the communicative. Nevertheless, A Duty to Resist is an excellent – and much needed – contribution to the literature on dissent and disobedience.
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