Abstract
Recent scholarship has insisted on a more historically attentive approach to civil disobedience. This article follows their lead by arguing that the dominant understanding of civil disobedience relies on a conceptual confusion and a historical mistake. Conceptually, the literature fails to distinguish between violating a law and defying the authority of a legal order. Historically, the literature misreads the exemplary case of Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham, Alabama. When read in its proper context, we can see King was not just a civil disobedient, violating the law in a way that shows fidelity to the law. He was a radical disobedient, challenging the authority of the legal order. As such, he was part of a long tradition of radical disobedience, extending back through militant strikes of the labor movement. The character of this disobedience was evident, both to its main protagonists, like King and Eugene V. Debs, and to its major opponents, especially the courts. In reconstructing these historical cases, I revise the civil disobedience literature and demonstrate the distinctiveness of the radical disobedience concept.
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Acknowledgments
This article took so many years to write that I owe more debts than I can remember. But a special thanks to the following for having read and commented on drafts of this paper: Candice Delmas, Dave Estlund, Anton Ford, Erin Kelly, Ben Laurence, Alex Livingston, Aziz Rana, Corey Robin, Lucas Stanczyk, Brandon Terry, and Carla Yumatle.
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Gourevitch, A. Strikes, civil rights, and radical disobedience: From King to Debs and back. Contemp Polit Theory 22, 143–164 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-022-00564-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-022-00564-7