7 - Anarchism: Provincializing Civil Disobedience

Summary

Civil disobedience presupposes a state, a legitimate authority that governs a territorial community through binding law. Yet it is often noted that two of the three canonical inspirations for civil disobedience, with whom the practice is said to have begun and to whom nearly all discussions refer, did not grant this premise. Far from accepting the legitimacy of the authorities against which they protested, Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas K. Gandhi expressly rejected them, not only in their current but in any imminently achievable form. The literature on civil disobedience tends to deal with this by treating them as precursors rather than models, mustered alongside figures such as Antigone, Socrates, or Jesus into expansive prehistories of the practice. While they may be exemplars of morally motivated, nonviolent resistance to unjust authority, they did not practice civil disobedience, strictly speaking.¹