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Book Review: Civil Disobedience

In spite of the initial appearance of an introductory volume, William Scheuerman’s Civil Disobedience is an ambitious intervention in the ongoing debate which, animated by the global protest waves of the last decade, seeks to rethink the concept of civil disobedience in the face of contemporary theoretical and practical problems. The book is divided into two parts. In the first, the author reconstructs the history of the theory of civil disobedience (chapters 1 to 4) so as to extract from it the immanent normative criteria to, in a second step, rethink the potentials and blockages to this practice derived from the social and political transformations of the last decades (chapters 5 and 6), as well as to discuss some of the competing theoretical proposals (chapter 7). The methodological procedure at the basis of this enterprise is a variant of Habermas’ reconstruction of the history of the theory. Its starting point is the comprehension of the debate on civil disobedience ‘as a learning process of sorts, with succeeding generations of activists and thinkers trying to correct the . . .mistakes of their predecessors, and then improve on them’ (p. 6). Starting from this perspective and operating selections and stylizations, the history of the theory is reconstructed in four ideal-typical models – the religious-spiritual, the liberal, the democratic and the anarchist – and presented in an ‘analytic and roughly chronological’ (p. 6) order. The result is a rich exposition of theoretical traditions that not only continue to compete with each other but also present significant overlaps, especially when it comes to the religious-spiritual, the liberal and the democratic: they aim at ‘providing plausible interpretations of a common set of standards for legitimate civil disobedience’ (p. 84). By identifying this shared conceptual language, it becomes possible to comprehend the three models as ‘presupposing a shared, albeit unavoidably contested, normative framework’ (p. 84). This shared framework is civil disobedience’s ‘triple-pronged normativity’: moral, political and legal. Furthermore, the reconstructive procedure also points to the centrality of the legal prong in distinguishing civil disobedience as an illegality that somehow demonstrates some fealty to the law from the ordinary criminal breaking of the law. Philosophy and Social Criticism