Introduction: Why, Once Again, Civil Disobedience?

Summary

Why another volume devoted to civil disobedience? Libraries are filled with thick tomes devoted to the topic. Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., canonical figures in the history of civil disobedience, not only inspired countless familiar and not-so-familiar movements but also ignited extensive political and scholarly debate.¹ From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, civil disobedience became a fashionable subject for discussion among lawyers, philosophers, political scientists, and many others. Prominent intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt, Ronald Dworkin, Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, and Bertrand Russell, produced significant theoretical statements about it. What possibly remains to be said about something that fascinated so many of the most innovative and influential political thinkers in the last century?