LAUDANI Raffaele - Didisobedience in Western Political Thought-a-genealogy

Disobedience in Western Political Thought A Genealogy

The global age is distinguished by disobedience, from the protests in Tiananmen Square to the fall of the Berlin Wall to the anti-G8 and anti–World Trade Organization demonstrations. In this book, Raffaele Laudani offers a systematic review of how disobedience has been conceptualized, supported, and criticized throughout history. Laudani documents the appearance of disobedience in the political lexicon from ancient times to the present and explains the word’s manifestations, showing how its semantic wealth transcended its liberal interpretations in the 1960s and 1970s. Disobedience, Laudani finds, is not merely an alternative to revolution and rebellion but a different way of conceiving radical politics, one based on withdrawal of consent and defection in relation to the established order. Raffaele Laudani teaches the History of Political Thought and Atlantic Studies in the Department of History at the University of Bologna.

Disobedience in Western Political Thought A Genealogy

RAFFAELE LAUDANI University of Bologna

FOREWORD BY ADAM SITZE Amherst College

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao ˜ Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title:www.cambridge.org/9781107606692 © Raffaele Laudani 2011, 2013 Original title: Disobbedienza (II Mulino, 2011) Translated by Jason Francis McGimsey This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in Italian as Disobbedienza by II Mulino 2011 First English edition 2013 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Laudani, Raffaele. Disobedience in Western political thought : a genealogy / Raffaele Laudani, University of Bologna. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-02264-5 (hardback) – isbn 978-1-107-60669-2 (pbk.) 1. Civil disobedience – Philosophy. 2. Political science – Philosophy. I. Title. jc328.3.l37 2013 303.6′ 101–dc23 2012043431 isbn 978-1-107-02264-5 Hardback isbn 978-1-107-60669-2 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Published thanks to the cooperation of the Department of History, Cultures and Civilization of the University of Bologna.

Contents

Foreword by Adam Sitze

page vii

Introduction Before Disobedience: Antiquity and the Middle Ages 1.1. The Tragedy and Mockery of Greek Disobedience 1.2. Disobeying in Concordia 1.3. Horror Vacui: At the Origins of the Christian Negation of Disobedience 1.4. Disobedience without Sedition: Medieval and Late Medieval Resistance

1 9 9 15

2

The Modernity of Disobedience 2.1. Disobedient Humanism 2.2. The Duty to Resist and the Negation of Disobedience 2.3. The Atlantic Space of Disobedience 2.4. Logics of Sovereignty and Disobedience

33 33 38 42 47

3

Disobedience in the Age of Revolutions 3.1. Disobedience and Colonial Power 3.2. A Disobedient Revolution 3.3. Revolution without Disobedience 3.4. Disobedience after the Revolution 3.5. Postcolonial Disobedience

55 55 60 66 73 80

4

When Disobedience Is “Civil” 4.1. The Legacy of a Misunderstanding 4.2. Civil Disobedience as Direct Action 4.3. From Direct Action to Civil Disobedience

1

v

21 26

91 91 99 104

Contents

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4.4. The Limits of Civil Disobedience 4.5. Crisis and Criticism of Civil Disobedience

112 116

Disobedience in the Crisis of Sovereignty

121 121 132

5.1. Unjustified Absence: Disobedience Facing Nazism 5.2. Contaminations 5.3. Two European Perspectives on American Civil Disobedience 5.4. Disobedience and Globalization

Index

141 149

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It is, to say the least, a propitious moment for Raffaele Laudani’s study of disobedience to appear in English translation. Over the course of the first, long decade of this new century, “disobedience” would seem to have acquired the status of a paradigmatic political experience. Beginning with the antiglobalization protests in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Genoa, and ending with the “Arab Spring” and the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, various populations now more than ever before seem to be expressing their opposition to their governments’ decisions and policies neither through the institutions of modern political representation (elections, public debates, petitions, and even polls) nor through public rallies, mass demonstrations, and strikes (practices that, in some countries, are themselves “institutions” in the sociological sense of the word) but rather in an altogether different form: by consciously refusing to carry out the constituted laws and even the law-constituting authority of those who hold formal political power.1 Dissent and

1

This is how Laudani defines disobbedienza in his contribution to the Enciclopedia del pensiero politico: autori, concetti, dottrine, 2nd ed., ed. Roberto Esposito and Carlo Galli (Roma-Bari: Laterza & Figli, 2010), 234. Compare Laudani’s summary of the “paradigmatic” modern concept of disobedience, as set forth by ´ Etienne de la Bo´etie. See page 38 herein.

I thank Harshit Rathi and Meghna Sridhar for their comments on an earlier draft of this Foreword.

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defiance, revolt and resistance, tumults and uprisings – much more than “servitude volontaire,”2 “tacit and express consent,”3 “compliance through coercion,”4 “assujettissement,”5 “control,”6 or even “command obeying”7 – seem increasingly to be emerging as the normal modes in which many populations today relate to their lawfully constituted governments. We find ourselves today, philosopher Alain Badiou has declared, “in a time of riots.”8 Disobedience, it would seem, is the order of the day. It is curious, therefore, that despite its rise to prominence, or perhaps precisely because of it, the concept of “disobedience” seems less coherent than ever. For a long time, of course, this concept has made sense only as a metonym, signifying within a linguistic series derived as much from classical politics (through terms like insurrection, rebellion, and sedition) and modern politics (which gave new meaning to the terms revolution and resistance) as from the portmanteau of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century radicalism (which gave us neologisms like activism, boycott, direct action, hackerism, sabotage, and, above all, satyagraha). Because of this metonymy, the language of disobedience always has been deeply ambiguous, only rarely managing to fight its way out of indeterminacy, and even then only with the aid of hair-splitting taxonomies.9 Much more frequent is the sort of slippage one 2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

´ ´ Etienne de la Bo´etie, Discours de la servitude volontaire (Paris: Editions Payot, 1993), 196. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), §119. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 34, cf. 313, 336. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982), 781. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992), 3–7. Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics, trans. George Ciccariello-Maher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 19, 26–27. Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History, trans. Gregory Elliot (New York: Verso, 2012), 5. See, e.g., John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 363–71; Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 263–65; Vinit Haksar, “Civil Disobedience and Non-cooperation,” in Civil Disobedience in Focus, ed. Hugo Bedau (New York: Routledge, 1991), 144–58.

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finds in Paul Mason’s recent explanation of the various acts of disobedience that lately have emerged in so many different parts of the world.10 “Why is it kicking off everywhere?” Mason asks his reader, but the more his narrative unfolds, the more one begins to sense within it the shadow of an unasked question. What exactly is this “it” that’s kicking off everywhere, after all? In implicit response, Mason’s text ends up deploying nearly the entire vocabulary of disobedience, as if it formed a single network of interconnected and interchangeable synonyms: the “it” that’s “kicking off everywhere,” Mason would seem to claim, is at once activism, resistance, sabotage, boycott, unrest, hackerism, revolt, rebellion, insurrection, riot, and revolution – all of these at once, but perhaps also none at all, inasmuch as there really may be no better name than “it” for the energy that today, as never before, seems to link each of these names to the others. The result is no less paradoxical, however, even when this “it” is discussed explicitly as “disobedience.” Even in this case, the term still seems less to explain current events than itself to stand in need of explanation. The experiences of recent years, after all, no longer seem to bear much resemblance to the Thoreauvian, Gandhian, and Kingian concepts of “civil disobedience” that, for a very long time, have been commonplace within public debate, academic study, and activist planning alike. “Civil disobedience,” as Bernard Harcourt observed in a recent reflection on OWS, “accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws.” Contemporary forms of disobedience, Harcourt goes on to suggest, resist something very different: “the very way in which we are governed[:] the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.”11 As such, Harcourt

10

11

Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (New York: Verso, 2012). Bernard Harcourt, “Occupy Wall Street’s ‘Political Disobedience,’ ” New York Times, October 13, 2011, online at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes .com/2011/10/13/occupy-wall-streets-political-disobedience/ (last checked March 25, 2013). See also Bernard Harcourt, “Occupy’s New Grammar of Political Disobedience,” The Guardian, November 30, 2011, online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/30/ occupy-new-grammar-political-disobedience (last checked March 25, 2013).

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argues, contemporary disobedience poses a challenge not only to law but also to politics itself and, above all, to the very lexicon that’s available to us for speaking and thinking about politics. Harcourt’s own name for this enigmatic new form of action, “political disobedience,” is a bit forced, for if indeed it is the case, as he claims, that contemporary disobedience is “a resistance to politics tout court,” then surely “political disobedience” is a less fitting name for this resistance than would be, say, “unpolitical disobedience.”12 Nevertheless, Harcourt’s diagnosis contains an important insight. To think “disobedience” today is to think an experience that outstrips the forms and terms of our political lexicons. Contemporary disobedience is an act in search of a concept, a practice without a theory, a phenomenon that lacks a paradigm.13 On this read, the term disobedience would not then be a name for our present (as a reader of Mason might reasonably conclude). In just the opposite way, it would seem to be a name for our inability to name our present, a name for the pronounced silence that is the surest sign of a true conceptual crisis, a name for a categorical vacuum that, in turn, calls out for a response from thought. The book you hold in your hands provides just such a response. Composed in brisk and crystalline prose, Laudani’s Disobedience in Western Political Thought offers a history of the concept of “disobedience” that is indispensable for any really probing comprehension of the experiences of disobedience that define our present. The central claim of this text is that the concept of “disobedience” poses an especially paradoxical problem in and for the history of political thought (most especially modern political thought, beginning ´ with the French jurist Etienne de Bo´etie). Disobedience is, Laudani argues, a symptom – perhaps even the exemplary symptom – of the contradictory foundation of modern politics as such. On one hand, modern political thought presupposes obedience. Absent obedience, law is not only ineffective but also invalid, lacking the power to construct political orders in which modern principles (such as 12

13

Particularly in the sense that Roberto Esposito has given to the term unpolitical. See Roberto Esposito, Categories of the Unpolitical, trans. Connal Parsley (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming). Cf. pages 5–6, 150–51 herein.

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reason, freedom, and equality) can flourish.14 Obedience is thus an indispensable condition for the modern attempt to fabricate laws grounded in a conscience that is no longer theological and transcendent (formed with reference to “higher laws” such as divine right) but now political and immanent. On the other hand, however, modern political thought discovers that obedience hinders the full and complete actualization of the very conscience that motivates it. The same experience of obedience that allows modern law to host a conscience motivated by principles such as reason, freedom, and equality also imposes fundamental checks on that same conscience, limiting its ability to fully or completely realize any of its motivating principles. Obedience thus turns out to constrain the very conscience whose uniquely secular and rational voice it also enables and that indeed confers on modern politics its selfunderstanding as an epoch. Obedience is, for this same reason, the site of a subtle but serious aporia in and for modern politics: even as obedience opens up space for the birth of modern conscience, it also establishes the conditions for modern conscience to reject and refuse the very laws that house it. Obedience, in other words, is nonidentical with itself: it produces an excess that recoils on it, negating it. Obedience itself calls forth the very disobedience that undoes it from within. With its unapologetically broad sweep and capacious interpretive horizon, this argument no doubt will catch some readers off guard. Missing from Laudani’s book, such a reader might worry, is the sort of discourse we have come to expect from philosophic studies of disobedience, where the central question is how – according to what unexamined assumptions about justice, democracy, morality, and legality – disobedience may or may not be justified in and for the individual conscience of the secular, rational, deliberative citizen. In place of this discourse, Laudani offers us something very different: an historical–intellectual portrait of the origins of disobedient conscience, a genealogy of disobedient conscience that ends up posing quite unexpected questions to that conscience, asking it 14

H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 116–17; cf. Hans Kelsen, “What Is the Pure Theory of Law?” Tulane Law Review 269 (1959–60), 272.

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to wrestle not simply with its “inner voice” but also now with a new self-consciousness about the genesis and basis of that inner voice, one focused less on the anxious decisions this voice would sometimes seem to require of us than on the historicity, even transience, of the forms and schemata that allow this voice to speak in the first place. Nowhere is this contrast greater than when it comes to the taxonomies that appear with such automatic, even ritualistic regularity in conventional studies of disobedience. Laudani certainly does patiently sort out some of the differences between disobedience and the various metonyms that both preceded and postdated its modern theorization (such as rebellion, revolution, resistance, sedition, and insurrection). But take note: Laudani performs this labor not because he believes that taxonomic order is the precondition for any valid discourse on disobedience but rather because the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of taxonomizing the metonymy of “disobedience” – of establishing an order that would arrest its slippage into the contiguous notions of resistance, rebellion, revolution, sedition, and so on – is a clue that, in turn, allows him to put his finger on the constitutive limit of the experience of the disobedient conscience. History, as Theodor Adorno once argued, must become philosophical if it is not to become nonidentical with the nonhistorical concepts it can’t help but assume as a condition of its intelligibility.15 Alert to this dialectic,16 Laudani allows his conceptual history of disobedience to pass into something quite different, a discourse we might be tempted to call a “political theory” of disobedience. Put in the form of a hypothesis: if the disobedient conscience has such difficulty thinking disobedience on its own terms – if discourses on disobedience consistently assume the form of sprawling metonymy or elaborate taxonomy – this is because disobedience is, at root, the sign of an enigmatic political energy that 15

16

Theodor Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 40, 87, 94, 122. Cf. J. G. A. Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 6–7, 54. Laudani, it is worth noting, authored the entry for “dialettica” in the Enciclopedia del pensiero politico (216–17), and his first book was a study of the thought of Herbert Marcuse. See Raffaele Laudani, Politica come movimento: il pensiero di Herbert Marcuse (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005).

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Laudani, drawing a term from contemporary Argentinean activism, proposes to call destituent power (potere destituente).17 Given how central this highly original concept is to Laudani’s argumentation, it will be useful to spend a few pages clarifying its precise ambit, a task that may be accomplished by outlining its relations to two additional concepts that would seem to participate in its conceptual constellation. The first, constituent power (pouvoir constituant), was introduced by the French abb´e Emmanuel Siey`es in connection with the events of the French Revolution and emerged as the site of considerable dispute within twentieth-century political philosophy (most notably between Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt). Contemporary jurisprudence would seem to have resolved this debate, defining constituent power as “the power to make a constitution and therefore to dictate the fundamental norms that organize the powers of the State.”18 But the simplicity of this definition is misleading. Despite, or perhaps because of, its centrality to the founding myths of so many modern nation-states, the concept of constituent power is aporetic to the point of incoherence. “Constituent power,” after all, would propose to name a most improbable sort of power, a power that’s somehow able to create law ex nihilo and yet that is not itself legal (for only if it succeeds in creating a new legal order would it then be possible to speak of “constituent power” as anything other than an exceptional crime such as treason, rebellion, or sedition). In the event that constituent power does succeed in its task, however, it must oppose the very law it makes, for once a constitution is already made, constituent power – the power to make a new constitution, to create new legal norms – will pose a threat to that same constituted power so long as it remains fully loyal to its essence. If it’s not to end up unmaking the very law it makes, constituent power must then, at some indeterminate but decisive threshold, begin to be neutralized and contained. As a condition for its success, in other words, constituent power must begin to fail: it must abandon its innermost essence and force. At once prejuridical (because the origin of constituted law) and antijuridical (because opposed 17 18

See page 4 herein. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizi Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 2.

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to constituted law), constituent power thus would seem to remain in permanent excess of the very laws it calls into being. For this same reason, it would seem to escape the comprehension of those academic disciplines, most notably jurisprudence, that are content to approach the study of law by answering only those questions that constituted law has already posed for itself. So long as we seek to understand constituent power as a juridical category – so long as we seek to grasp it from the theoretical standpoint of the very constituted power it at once precedes and opposes – it would thus seem that we’re bound to misunderstand it.19 Destituent power, as Laudani traces it, would seem to be at once the double of constituent power as well as its polar opposite. It is its double because, exactly like constituent power, destituent power refers to a potency that remains in permanent excess of the very same juridical institutions to which it gives rise.20 Also like constituent power, destituent power is very difficult to think in and for itself. Just as jurisprudence cannot understand constituent power except within a horizon centered on constituted power, so, too, political philosophy cannot understand destituent power except as obedience to the second degree (where disobedience is interpreted as nothing more than obedience to a higher law, whether that law be a command of moral right, divine right, or natural law).21 These resemblances are certainly signs that, as Laudani puts it, destituent power and constituent power are each expressions of one and the same potency. But even so, destituent power expresses this power according to a modality that is very different from, even opposed to, that of constituent power. Whereas constituting power describes a revolutionary situation characterized by the creation of juridical norms ex nihilo, 19

20 21

For this argument, see ibid., 12. See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 39–48. See, e.g., pages 4–5 herein. See, e.g., page 43 herein. Even in its more theoretical forms, as in Ronald Dworkin’s theory that the right to civilly disobey a law is not simply a moral right but is implicit in the very idea of legal right itself, one encounters the same paradox: disobedience is rarely, if ever, thought without reference to juridical categories, to the category of law. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 206–22.

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destituent power describes a revolutionary situation characterized by the withdrawal from, resistance to, or refusal of juridical norms. The opposition between these two modes of power should not, of course, be exaggerated: in much the same way that the death drive in Freudian psychoanalysis never appears in isolation from the pleasure principle,22 so, too, are the unbinding or dissolving effects of destituent power rarely without connection to the creative effects of constituent power.23 But the connection is not dialectical; it does not proceed by a logic of sublation or Aufhebung, and at no point does it come to rest in an identity of opposites. As with the relation between the death drive and the pleasure principle, the relation between destituent and constituent power would seem to be little more than a disjunctive synthesis, an unstable coupling. Even though destituent power often may be pressed into the service of constituent power, even preceding and enabling it, its mode nevertheless remains the latter’s polar opposite: destituent power takes effect not by producing and creating law but by negating and abolishing it. In this sense, destituent power is to law what entropy is to matter: it is an energy immanent to law, internal to its system of command and obedience, that tends toward the dissipation or disordering of law itself.24 22

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Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 121–22. See pages 4–5 herein. As Negri argues, constituent power not only has historical links to the “right of resistance” (which he calls the “negative power par excellence”) but also manifests itself within historical experience in and through a destituent mode, by resisting and rebelling against existing juridical norms (Negri, Insurgencies, 3, 21, 24). The paradigmatic example here is the long, destituent struggle to abolish slavery and racism in the United States, which gave rise not only to amendments to the U.S. Constitution but also, arguably, to an altogether new constitution (on which point, see Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Volume 1: Foundations [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993], 83–4, 179–217). Whatever its precise relation to constituent power, it at least should be clear that destituent power, however constitutively negative it may be, is nevertheless not a force of reaction and passive nihilism (inclined toward melancholy, meaninglessness, or despair). “Destituent” power is not the same as destitution; it is not what Spinoza would call a “sad passion.” In the interests of space, I set aside the very difficult question of the relationships between Laudani’s concept of “destituent power,” on one hand, and, on the other, Jacques Lacan’s analysis of law and sin, Giorgio Agamben’s mention of an

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This same energy may be clarified in another way, from a different direction still, by bringing it into contact with a second concept. Destituent power, as Laudani construes it, is a remarkably skillful extension of the concept of the political, as thought by the German political thinker Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) and as rethought by Laudani’s teacher at the University of Bologna, the historian of political thought Carlo Galli (one of the world’s leading authorities on Schmitt).25 In 1996, Galli published a monumental study of Schmitt that sought to redefine Schmitt’s accomplishment as a political thinker. In Galli’s view, Schmitt’s achievement was to have opened himself to, to radicalize, the crises that together completed the collapse of medieval politics and that combined to constitute the origin of the modern epoch (such as the Copernican revolution, the Wars of Reformation, and, above all, the conquest of America).26 As a result, Galli argued, Schmitt became unusually attentive to the subtle way that the catastrophic origins of modern politics persisted, in the form of a silent, unnamed, but distinctive energy, in the institutions, theories, and practices of modern politics. On Galli’s read, Schmitt is a specifically genealogical critic of modernity: Schmitt’s single-minded focus, according to Galli, was to grasp the origin of the strangely double-sided conflictual energy he perceived in the institutions and practices of modern politics. Schmitt’s discovery, Galli argues, was that this conflictual energy derived from “an originary crisis – or, better still, an originary

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“anomic drive” internal to law, Alain Badiou’s analysis of St. Paul’s “law of the ´ break with law,” or Etienne Balibar’s discussion of the “moment of negation,” or Unrecht, internal to “the structure of law” itself. See, variously, Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 83–84, 179–217; Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 72; Alain Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University ´ Press, 2003), 88–89; and Etienne Balibar, “The Invention of the Super-Ego” (unpublished manuscript, n.d.). For readers who are unfamiliar with Carl Schmitt, the most comprehensive introduction to his life and thought in English is Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (New York: Verso Books, 2000). Carlo Galli, Genealogia della politica: Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno, 2nd ed. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010), xv.

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contradiction – which is not a simple contradiction, but, rather, the exhibition of two sides, two extremes,” such that “the origin of politics is not, in either of its two sides, an objective foundation for politics, but rather its foundering or unfounding (sfondamento).”27 The political, as Galli interprets Schmitt, is not then a stable name for one among many timeless categories of human experience (in contrast to the economic, the social, the geographical), nor is it simply an argument about the need to distinguish friend from enemy. It is Schmitt’s name for the free-floating conflictual energy that came into being alongside the crises at the origin of modern politics and that persists in modern politics in a most uncanny way, by undermining the very institutions and practices it simultaneously founds, deforming the same political forms it produces, and disordering the very systems of thought whose schemata it also demands. By fixing his gaze on this origin, Galli argues, Schmitt realized that modern political thought (and consequently, too, the liberal democratic institutions and practices whose modes of self-justification it grounds and sustains) is divided against itself in a nondialectical manner. At the same time that it emerges from and even implicitly feeds on a crisis it is incapable of resolving, modern political thought also accounts for this incapacity by suppressing the symptoms of that crisis, compensating for its own incoherence with ever more moralistic reaffirmations of the unquestionable necessity of its own explicit goals (peace, security, liberty, equality for all). The core problematic of Schmittian thought, Galli thus argued, must not be confused with any one of the themes of Schmitt’s various texts (the distinction between exception and norm, theology and politics, decision and discussion, friend and enemy, constituting power and constituted power, land and sea, limited and unlimited warfare, European center and colonial frontier, and so on). It is Schmitt’s discovery that all of the forms of modern politics share a common trait, a birthmark that, in turn, attests to their common origin; despite the many and various differences between modern political thinkers – indeed as the silent but generative core of those differences – the epochal unity of modern political thought derives

27

Ibid., xvi; emphasis original.

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from its distinctive doubleness, its simultaneous impossibility and necessity, or, in short, its “tragicity.”28 Destituent power, as Laudani describes it, is political in this precise sense of the word. Even though it is an exclusively modern energy (casting doubt, it should be said in passing, on any reference to Antigonean or Socratic disobedience), destituent power is, exactly like the Schmittian political as interpreted by Galli, present within modern politics only in the mode of a contradictory, conflictual energy that undermines the very juridical forms it simultaneously calls into being. Also like the political, destituent power manifests itself not in this or that determinate concept (up to and including disobedience itself) but only as an indeterminate foundering that troubles all of the fundamental concepts of modern politics (most especially obedience, that essential precondition for any and all law). And finally, just as the political can only be understood genealogically, as the belated appearance within modern politics of a void, the silent energy of which originates in the collapse of medieval politics, so, too, does destituent power express itself in modern politics in the form of a medieval vocabulary that has outlived its own epochal horizon (within which, to be clear, there was no disobedience). For all these reasons, destituent power is, again like the political, quite difficult to interpret. We have seen how conventional studies of disobedience tend to respond to this difficulty: in their attempt to comprehend the various metonyms for disobedience, they taxonomize those metonyms and, in the process, depoliticize the dynamic that produces those metonyms in the first place, divvying up its divisive energy into fifty shades of gray. The purpose of Laudani’s destituent power, by contrast, is to repoliticize precisely this energy and, in so doing, to establish an interpretive 28

For a more extended account of Galli’s thought, and in particular on the exact sense in which Galli’s interpretation of Schmitt is “non-Schmittian,” see Adam Sitze, introduction to Carlo Galli, Political Spaces and Global War, trans. Elisabeth Fay, ed. Adam Sitze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xi–lxxxv; Adam Sitze, “A Farewell to Schmitt: Notes on the Work of Carlo Galli,” New Centennial Review 10, no. 2 (2010): 27–72; Adam Sitze, “The Tragicity of the Political: A Note on Carlo Galli’s Reading of Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba,” in Political Theology and Early Modernity, ed. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Graham Hammill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 48–59.

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horizon within which the various metonyms it produces may be comprehended with reference to the common void they each in their own way activate – and where, as such, they may appear in the light of their otherwise concealed epochal compossibility. The significance of this interpretive shift is profound. Whereas the conventional lexicon of disobedience results in highly technical classificatory schemata, setting the table for debates over disobedience that feed on hair-splitting legalistic details, Laudani’s intervention allows us to take a step back from those taxonomies as well as from the debates they generate, understanding both as symptoms, signs each of an anxious desire to avoid posing a deceptively simple question: what really do we mean when we say that disobedience is political? Once posed, this question certainly does allow us to clarify the experiences of disobedience that define our present. Laudani’s answer to this question, after all, allows him not only to respond to the unasked question that troubles Mason’s text (in Laudani’s terms, the “it” that’s “kicking off everywhere” is precisely destituent power) but also to put his finger on the nonidentity at work in Harcourt’s political disobedience (for Laudani, disobedience would only be political so long as it partakes of destituent power). But this same answer raises its own questions. Is it really possible to think disobedience on its own terms, without either taxonomizing its metonymy or interpreting it from the standpoint of its antithesis (which, ultimately, is the effect of moral, ethical, and legal discourses that define disobedience, in medieval terms, as “obedience to the second degree”)? If so, what new or different form of hermeneutic openness might we need to adopt to trace the play of its signature energy within the pages of the paradigmatic texts of political thought? How might our understanding of the history of political thought change once we reread it from the perspective of this strange negative potential, this power not to obey that is at once opposed to and inscribed within the power to obey itself? Last but not least, how might this same labor cause us to rethink our relation to the present? In the last analysis, it is perhaps these questions, in all their novelty and importance, that constitute the most provocative element of this book. In response, Laudani will offer a concise set of readings of familiar texts in the history of modern political philosophy (ranging

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from Sophocles, Plato, Cicero, and Augustine to Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, and Arendt), which he brings into reciprocally illuminating conversation with equally familiar but nonphilosophical texts written in connection with nineteenth- and twentieth-century struggles against slavery, colonialism, racism, capitalism, and imperialism (most notably in the radical tradition of civil disobedience beginning with Thoreau, Gandhi, and King).29 For readers who come to this inquiry from a background in the history of political philosophy, Laudani’s readings of canonical texts may seem unfamiliar. The way in which Laudani reads these texts bears little resemblance to the sort of textual interpretation we’ve come to associate with the history of political thought, most especially the Cambridge school of John Dunn, J. G. A. Pocock, and Quentin Skinner.30 Instead of a detailed, complex study of the linguistic contexts in contrast to which specific philosophers developed their concepts of disobedience, Laudani offers an analysis of the concept of disobedience on its own terms – with all of its contradictions and ambiguities, its controversies and contestations, its blindnesses and insights. Although Laudani certainly does not neglect the intricacies of philosophic texts, Disobedience in Western Political Thought remains the history of a single concept: Laudani’s focus throughout is on the innovations and variations, the ambiguities and residues, the uses and reuses, that mark, often in very subtle ways, the concept of “disobedience” itself. The attentive reader will understand this difference not as the absence of Cambridge school rigor but rather as the presence 29

30

The distinction between political philosophy and political nonphilosophy is to be taken neither descriptively nor normatively, but symptomatically, as a sign of the inability of political philosophy to think disobedience on its own terms. One finds no mention of Thoreau, Gandhi, or King in either The History of Political Philosophy, 3rd ed., ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) or Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Goodin and Philip Pettit (Malden, MA: Blackwell-Wiley, 2003). On the “slow philosophical response” to problems of disobedience, see Hugo Bedau, introduction to Civil Disobedience in Focus, 3. See, by contrast, the accounts of Thoreau, Gandhi, or King in Carlo Galli, Edoardo Greblo, and Sandro Mezzadra, Il pensiero politico del Novecento, ed. Carlo Galli (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005). Laudani’s divergence from Straussian history of political philosophy seems plain and not in need of much elaboration.

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of a different approach to the history of political concepts. First developed by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck, the style of conceptual history (or Begriffsgeschichte) that Laudani deploys in his book is notable for the emphasis it places on the peculiar characteristics exhibited by “basic concepts” during periods of epochal transition.31 Although Koselleck’s own historical research focused mainly on the transition that occurred in Germany between 1750 and 1850, the same is not true of the conceptual history that has been practiced at the Italian universities of Milan, Padua, and Trento,32 where Begriffsgeschichte has merged with the more general task of the critique of modern politics (whether from the side of the Frankfurt school, in the immanent critique of Theodor Adorno, or from the French side, in the tradition of Derridean

31

32

See, generally, Melvin Richter and Michaela W. Richter, “Introduction: Translation of Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘Krise,’ in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 67, no. 2 (2006): 343–56; Keith Tribe, introduction to Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), vii–xx. For examples of “conceptual history,” see Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History – Timing History: Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). For Koselleck’s Schmittian discourse on the pathogenesis of the modern “conscience,” which in many ways is an important precursor for this book, see Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, vii–xx (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), esp. chapters 2–4. This is not the place to revive disputes over the respective qualities of the Cambridge school and Begriffsgeschichte, not least because the work published in Filosofia politica does not seem overly committed to this distinction; even though the journal may be justly described as tending toward Begriffsgeschichte, Skinner and Pocock both sit on its editorial board. The interested reader may consult Melvin Richter, “Conceptual History (Begriffsgeschichte) and Political Theory,” Political Theory 14, no. 4 (1986): 604–37; Melvin Richter, “Reconstructing the History of Political Languages: Pocock, Skinner, and the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” History and Theory 29, no. 1 (1990): 38–70; Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 124–42; and the contributions by Richter, Pocock, and Koselleck in The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies in Begriffsgeschichte, Occasional Paper No. 15 (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1996). See, more generally, Sandro Chignola, “History of Political Thought and the History of Political Concepts: Koselleck’s Proposal and Italian Research,” History of Political Thought 23, no. 3 (2003), 531–41.

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deconstruction or Foucaultian genealogy).33 Especially at the University of Bologna, where Koselleck’s thought has been brought into contact with the critique of modern politics developed by postcolonial studies,34 Begriffsgeschichte has yielded a history of political thought that is unusually attentive to the question of basic concepts in the present, in this period of transition from the modern age to the global age. Laudani’s Disobedience in Western Political Thought is a splendid example of this particular iteration of the Koselleckian program.35 Laudani treats disobedience as neither a practice to be justified nor a philosophical use of language to be clarified with reference to its nonphilosophical context but rather as a concept whose contemporary crisis of intelligibility can and should serve as the occasion for a critique of modern politics as such, and as a chance to make sense of the transition from the modern age to the global age. Extending an argument set forth by Galli in Political Spaces and Global War, Laudani understands the modern age as an epoch whose political thought was underwritten and determined by the spatial distinction between metropole and colony.36 As distinct from most historians of modern political thought, who operate on the presupposition that modern politics is essentially reducible to the emergence and experience of the State, Laudani thinks modern politics beyond the State. In Laudani’s view, the true laboratory of modern political thought is located not in Europe but in the space in between the metropole and the colony. For Laudani, therefore, 33

34 35

36

See, on this point, Carlo Galli, “Editoriale. La pensabilita` della politica. Vent’anni dopo,” Filosofia politica 21, no. 1 (April 2007), 3–10. See, in particular, the work of Sandro Mezzadra. Laudani’s research was first published in essay form in the Bologna journal Filosofia politica, which includes a special section called “Materialia per un lessico politico Europeo” (“Materials for a European Political Lexicon”) that is devoted to the critical and systematic rethinking of basic concepts in modern political thought. See, on this topic, Nicola Matteucci, “Alla ricerca della filosofia Politica,” Filosofia politica 3, no. 1 (June 1989). The Il Mulino book series under whose rubric Laudani’s text was published, meanwhile (“Lessico della politica”/“Lexicon of Politics”), is similarly focused: each book in the series concentrates on the rethinking of a key basic concept of modern political thought (authority, community, constitution, democracy, justice, freedom, nation, revolution, state, tolerance, utopia, etc.). Galli, Political Spaces and Global War, 17–20. Compare to pages 55–66 herein.

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all modern political concepts derive in some way from the political space of the Atlantic (up to and including the concept of State, as Laudani shows in his analysis of Locke). What follows from this focus on “the Atlantic” is an understanding of the political as a form of movement, and on modern political theory as a theoretical attempt to stabilize the inner fluidity of modern politics (through, precisely, the concept of the State). In this sense, Laudani’s Atlanticism may be considered a critical theory of modernity itself, a new and different way to grasp the spatial aporias stirring within modern political thought. In the case of the concept of disobedience, Laudani’s attentiveness to the space of the Atlantic allows him an important and intriguing claim. Under conditions of modern political space, disobedience was not simply neutralized and incorporated into the interior of politics (by means of the theory of contract); it also was banished to the exterior of politics (by means of the practice of colonization). Under pressure from the definitive events of the late twentieth century – ranging from the completion of decolonization to the end of the Cold War to the emergence of economic globalization and the domination in some areas of new teletechnical modes of communication – the modern spatial distinction between colony and metropole collapsed, resulting in very new (although by no means less hierarchical) arrangements of space and population (such as the French banlieues). For Galli, shifts in political space are a sure sign that shifts in political theory are not long behind,37 and so indeed it would seem in the case of the concept of disobedience. With the emergence of the global age, not only is disobedience no longer neutralized and incorporated into the social contract (as many theorists have argued); it also can no longer be banished to the colony (as fewer scholars have noted). As a result, the present is a moment that Koselleck once would have called a Sattelzeit, a “saddle-time” or “in-between” time that is stretched between the familiar paradigms of modern political thought, on one hand, and the realities of global politics, on the other. Stranded between its highly theorized, by today largely ineffective modern paradigm, on one hand, and, on the other hand, its 37

Galli, Political Spaces and Global War, 6–8.

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undertheorized but increasingly important place and function within global politics, the concept of “disobedience” is today at a turning point. If we try to grasp contemporary disobedience using modern categories, we will damage our capacity to think and act in the present, gaining the reassuring feeling of a familiar paradigm but at the cost of losing the chance to experiment with various new political forms. But if we undertake these experiments without first taking stock of the genealogy that structures our most basic unstated assumptions and desires about disobedience, we will risk unthinkingly repeating the very paradigms from which we seek to free our thought.38 Laudani offers a similar teaching to another set of readers, who arrive at this text having studied canonical theories of disobedience or having been trained or engaged in activist politics, and who may find this book unfamiliar in a very different way. It is difficult to deny the appeal of, even the need for, disobedience today. Disobedience seems to promise a concrete and practical technique for responding to the daily outrages we encounter in and through the hypermediated milieu of contemporary teletechnics. It seems natural, therefore, that we should want to experience disobedience less as a theory than as a practice, less as a concept than as a mere technique, less as a problem than as a solution. However understandable this desire is, it contains a paradoxical risk that tends to intensify the more urgent our relation to disobedience becomes. The more immediately we seek to enact disobedience, the more we risk unwittingly damaging disobedience itself, converting it from a political concept now into a mere moralism, into nothing more than a symptomatic “ought” that compensates for the weakness of its theoretical analysis and its political ineffectiveness with ever more theatrical displays of the authenticity of its militant commitment (which more often than not takes the form of a “return of the medieval repressed,” a redoubled version of Thomism, a new asceticism, a purist refusal of complicity with this or that species 38

Exemplary in this regard is Laudani’s analysis of “the politics of indignation” as it has recently manifested itself in political spaces like Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park. See Raffaele Laudani, “Politica dell’indignazione. Note sul rapporto attuale tra movimenti sociali e crisi della democrazia,” Parole chiave 47 (2012), 149–60.

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of “corruption”). In America, which provides the political space for the writing of this foreword, the stakes that attend this risk seem higher today than ever. At a moment when both of America’s political parties have failed to address some of the most distressing crises of American politics, ranging from increasing debt and failed financial reform to endemic poverty and an increasingly racist prison–industrial complex to climate change and increasingly precarious labor conditions, and in which disobedience seems more necessary than ever as a mode of political expression, concepts of “disobedience” have become reified (often interpreted with clich´ed readings of Thoreau, Gandhi, and King), moralistic (sometimes aimed less at effective political intervention than, in a barely secularized iteration of Thomism, at symbolic acts designed merely to preserve the “beautiful soul” or “clean conscience” of the one who disobeys), masochistic (aimed at provoking police violence, which then in turn may serve as a source of publicity and as retroactive confirmation of the justice of one’s cause), and instrumentalist (limited to discussions of the best means or most effective techniques for achieving successful direct action). Laudani’s book will both explain and challenge these habits of thought, particularly as they govern the assumptions of the American reader. Working in the tradition of the “foreigner” or “stranger” who is capable of teaching the United States what it is unable to teach itself (think of Alexis de Tocqueville), and composed within the political space of a city whose own important experiments in contemporary politics, from 1977 to the disobedienti of the present,39 are themselves worthy of sustained study, Laudani’s book will challenge the American reader to rethink the counterintuitive strain of American exceptionalism that underwrites American discourse on civil disobedience. For some, this challenge will – on top of everything else that weighs on our conscience today – seem like a particularly bitter pill to swallow. But the point 39

For a detailed account of the place and function of Bologna in the genealogy of contemporary politics, see Franco Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation, trans. Arianna Bove et al., ed. Erik Empson and Stevphen Shukaitis (London: Minor Composition, 2009), 15–30. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 264–67.

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of the philosophy of history is not to explain the rationality that silently justifies reality as we experience it. It is to gain freedom from history, to liberate ourselves from the received concepts that constrain our sense of the possible and that assert their grip on our thought nowhere more forcefully than when they hide in plain sight, presenting themselves not as concepts but as immediate experience itself. If it is true that disobedience has become second nature for our conscience, then nothing could be more salutary than a reflection that renders this concept unnatural, giving us distance from its excessive proximity, and opening up the space we need to think it anew. Adam Sitze Amherst College

Introduction

Western civilization has always had a difficult relationship with disobedience; it has been both fascinated and dismayed by it at the same time. As Eric Fromm wrote quite a few years ago, the main founding myths of Western culture put disobedience at the origin of civilization.1 Jewish and Christian traditions, for example, begin History with Adam and Eve’s refusal to obey the divine command not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Even if this beginning is certainly a “fall,” the loss of the harmony that characterized existence in Eden and an ineluctable destiny of toil and suffering to which human beings are condemned until the end of time to atone for the original sin of that primordial disobedience, it is only with that act of disobedience that man really became man, different and superior to the other creatures in Paradise, not through the Creator’s will but by virtue of a free choice. In addition, the promise of happiness, the possibility for man to create a new Eden, a new harmony with nature – entirely human – is also contained in that disobedience, especially in its prophetic interpretation. Similar is the Hellenic tradition: without the disobedience of Prometheus, the rebel who, for the love of man, prefers “to be chained to this rock than be the obedient servant of the Gods,”2 there would be no human progress. 1

2

E. Fromm, “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem,” in On Disobedience and Other Essays (New York, NY: Seabury, 1981), 10–19. Ibid., 11.

1

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Disobedience in Western Political Thought

In both cases, the development of humanity is made possible by refusal, by the capacity to say no to power in the name of autonomy and the desire to freely choose one’s own destiny. However, at the same time, Western culture – and particularly Western politics – makes obedience the keystone to human existence, the necessary condition to guarantee the organization and the production of human activities and the fundamental “virtue” of the human race. Without it, there would be no orderly cohabitation among men and, therefore, even in this case, “civilization.” Exalted in literary circles as the tragic expression of a radical desire for autonomy – for example, in Schiller’s The Bandits, where disobedience works like a dream of liberation that, in the end, “would disrupt the whole structure of civilization” – from a political point of view, disobedience thus remains a taboo, a prohibited and scabrous activity. Obedience’s primacy – which is also manifested from a lexical point of view in the inability to name the acts normally identified with disobedience, if not in the form of its negation and deprivation, precisely as dis-obedience – makes any political discourse on disobedience paradoxical. This is especially true for Modernity: the refusal of existent authority – political or ecclesiastic authority but also the authority of traditions – is the starting point of the modern Subject, the act that allows an individual to leave the state of “minority” in which he has lived until that moment and to finally live an adult, free, and rational existence. However, at the same time, modern politics is built as a will for order that, in the absence of a transcendent objective foundation, must artificially construct obedience. This is only possible drawing from these same principles of liberty, autonomy, and self-determination that motivate disobedience, which thus rests in the background as an irresolvable political problem, a necessary assumption that is shunned at the same time. Explicitly assuming the paradoxical nature of disobedience, this volume attempts to reconstruct the historical–intellectual path that led to the emergence of disobedience as a specifically political problem at the beginning of the modern age and the theoretical strategies that were in turn adopted to neutralize it. Its specificity will

Introduction

3

be shown in respect to the traditional concepts of “resistance” or “revolution” and the relationship of opposition, overlapping, or alterity that, depending on the circumstances, disobedience has held with them. More generally, with an image that is as Freudian as it is heir of Frankfurt school critical theory – and through an “Atlantic” perspective, which observes in Modernity both its state and colonial dimension – disobedience will be discussed as Modernity’s “return of the repressed” that demonstrates its aporetic foundations in its periodic reappearance on the political scene as a collective and mass phenomenon. In other words, disobedience will work as a mirror for Modernity’s incapacity to understand liberty and life’s mobility without continually posing constraints and limitations on them, taking advantage of this failure to understand authority, if not as the spontaneous acknowledgment of political obligation and renouncing unconditional liberty. A clarification, both theoretical and methodological, is necessary at this point. Despite being an integral part of Western political vocabulary, as a specific object of study, disobedience escapes the ways that the history of political thought is traditionally done. Disobedience cannot be considered a political “idea,” an entity with a permanent theoretical nucleus that changes over the course of history, because it is only in Modernity that the conditions to politically conceive disobedience are created, that is, understanding it as an act of agency expressing a clear political intention. Strictly speaking, however, disobedience is not a political concept either, a stratification of the ways with which politics were understood in Modernity, because the dimension of practical experience, of disobedience’s concrete historical manifestation, is decidedly predominant. With a certain degree of approximation and in the absence of a fully exhaustive term, disobedience could be at most defined as a political practice that acquires sense and theoretical depth in relation to the way the agents that practiced it assumed, reelaborated, and criticized the fundamental concepts of modern politics. In other words, from a theoretical point of view, disobedience should be seen both as a space of intersection of the main concepts of modern politics and, through a series of semantic shifts that occurred over the course of its history, as a place where the

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sedimentation of an alternative way of articulating them could take place. This alternative articulation is here presented under the (maybe provocative) name destituent power:3 starting with the French Revolution, Modernity has prevalently understood political conflict in terms of constituent power, as the activation of a creative energy that gives rise, ex nihilo, to a (new) institutional order where human relations are disciplined and organized (constituted power). However, at the same time, another (minority) modality of understanding conflict as a process of continual and generally open-ended withdrawal from the legal, political, economic, social, and cultural stumbling blocks developed little by little, interposing the full articulation of that same political energy. Both modalities are an expression of a potency, a power (and will) to be something new and different from what already exists. In the first case, this potency is the answer to an “absence,” a manque a` eˆ tre that the subject must bridge with political struggle and the acquisition of rights, freedom, and better living conditions that, to be guaranteed, should necessarily be established in an institutional framework. Contrarily, in the other case, potency is the immanent movement of an excess, an “essential superabundance” that should not be conquered – because it already exists, even if in the form of potentiality – but rather freed from the institutional chains that limit its full expression. Another preliminary clarification might be useful here: this destituent way of understanding the relationship between political conflict and institutions also marks a conceptual difference to anarchism (and also simultaneously explains the merely occasional reference to anarchic thought in this volume). Despite carrying clear libertarian instances, destituent power is not anti-institutional per se, because, on the contrary, it makes the assumption of the nonartificial and ineradicable presence of power and its institutions. 3

The expression “destituent power” has been taken from the Colectivo situaciones’ pamphlet on the Argentinian revolt of 2002 titled Argentina piquetera, available online at http://www.situaciones.org/. The expression was later used with a different meaning in AA.VV., Potere destituente: Le rivolte metropolitane (Rome: Mimesis, 2008), in reference to the Parisian banlieues revolts of 2005.

Introduction

5

Its action is instead extrainstitutional, in the sense that unlike revolution and other forms of modern political action inspired by constituent power, it is not primarily motivated by an institutionalizing end. In this case, the African American struggle against slavery in the United States can serve as an example and can be considered a prototype for destituent conflict: the flight from and the refusal of a subaltern condition that the plantation regime imposed on slaves profoundly modified the “material constitution” of American society, even producing normative effects on its formal constitution despite its not having systemic change as an objective. Rather, it had a more prosaic desire for freedom that, without a genuine theoretical or practical discontinuity, was then reelaborated as a struggle against racial segregation, that is, against the new institutional configuration assumed by racism in America. Hence a conceptual history of disobedience – in the impure and sui generis meaning that its articulation as destituent power4 implies – is the history of its absence (Antiquity and Middle Ages), of its spectral presence (Modernity), and of its progressive and contradictory self-dissolution (Globalization). If premodern political thought was incapable of understanding disobedience, negating any political intention for fear of changing the cosmic order whose laws no one really knew (Greece), or that is necessarily subsumed as an internal function of obedience and tool for stabilizing an immutable order (Rome and the Christian world), Modern political logic is, in large part, an answer to the discovery of the undisciplined nature of men and the absence of an objective foundation for obedience; which, despite remaining the goal of politics, now appears logically dependent on disobedience (in the sense that the nonactivation of disobedience is the proof of its legitimacy) and therefore in need of being constructed and artificially fed. Unable to absolutely negate disobedience, because that would mean negating the very assumptions of Modern subjectivity, modern political thought – and

4

On conceptual history, see S. Chignola, “Storia dei concetti e storiografia del discorso politico,” Filosofia politica 1 (1997): 99–122, and Chignola, “History of Political Thought and the History of Political Concepts,” History of Political Thought 3 (2002): 517–41.

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more precisely the main rationalist stream – thus tried to reduce its most subversive effects through two neutralizing strategies: the contract, with which the instances of freedom, autonomy, and selfdetermination that fuel disobedience are transformed into a “voluntary servitude” under the state, and, a necessary correlate of the first, the invention of the colony as a qualitatively different political space of the state, in which disobedience is physically and theoretically externalized. With the full affirmation of state logic in Modernity, disobedience – considered as a specific way of understanding conflict – thus almost exclusively found a place in colonial and postcolonial contexts, particularly in the United States, where it became the mythopoeic image of “American” liberty. It is only with the affirmation of so-called globalization – that is, when the Modern distinction between state and colony gave way to a new unitary political space where state and colonial logics overlap and are continually blurred – that disobedience once again became the object of reflection in Europe too. Just as the results of Modernity were marked by the incessant repetition of episodes of disobedience – religious civil wars, popular resistance to the first processes of capitalist accumulation, mutiny and sabotage of colonial expeditions – its transfiguration in the global age happens, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the protests of the new global movements against neoliberal policy, under the sign of disobedience. Its progressively becoming the form par excellence of global dissent, however, has been accompanied by the daily affirmation of ever more effective machines of coercion to obedience that seem to make any attempt to modify the actual state of things vain; this is, from a theoretical point of view, expressed in a growing difficulty in producing new theories of disobedience and in the ever more distinct awareness of the necessity of going beyond its “Modern” form. Naturally, this way of conceiving and discussing disobedience is quite different from a liberal perspective that, based on the model of “civil disobedience” practiced by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in the last century, “justifies” disobedience in virtue of its higher moderation in respect to other, more radical forms of practicing conflict such as revolution or rebellion. More than its promoters are ready to admit, this justification for disobedience – “civil”

Introduction

7

in the measure in which it does not put the existing order in discussion – appears, in the perspective delineated here, wholly internal to the strategies that modern political thought used to neutralize the more perturbing aspects of disobedience. In this sense, this volume is simultaneously the genealogical reconstruction of an alternative stream within Modernity and the critical deconstruction of this still largely dominant image of disobedience. This volume is the fruit of many years of research, beginning in 2003 with a postdoctorate scholarship awarded to me by the Department of Politics, Institutions, and History at the University of Bologna and continued at the Department of History, Anthropology, and Geography of the same university, parallel to new research inquiries that ended up significantly changing the initial project. Among these, my journey through Atlantic history and postcolonial studies was particularly important, allowing for the possibility to give a geographical perspective to the study of disobedience, which I believe, together with its articulation as destituent power, is the most original contribution of this volume. The first results of this research were published in an article titled “Lo spazio atlantico della disobbedienza; Modernita` e potere destituente,” published in Filosofia politica, 1, 2008, pp. 37–60, whose traces can be found above all in the second chapter of this volume. However, its guiding lines were previously “tested” on the students attending my course on Theories of Disobedience, held in fall 2005 at Colombia University in New York and, the following semester, in Bologna in my class on History of Political Thought. As often happens, those lessons were not exclusively a moment of expressing an already completed research but a genuine laboratory where the theses of this book were tested and redefined based on the reactions and solicitations coming from students. Thus I owe them a particularly heartfelt thank you. In addition, I would like to thank all those who were able to read and comment on the manuscript or its parts, who gave me bibliographic suggestions or with whom I simply exchanged reflections that were later useful to me: Bruno Accarino, Raffaella Baritono, Tiziano Bonazzi, Adriana Cavarero, Sandro Chignola, Jean Cohen,

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Angela De Benedictis, Furio Ferraresi, Eric Foner, Simona Forti, David Graeber, Andreas Kalyvas, Robin D. G. Kelley, Sandro Mezzadra, Paola Rudan, Steven Shukaitis, Nadia Urbinati, Richard Wolin, and Howard Zinn. Along with them, I’d like to thank Prof. Carlo Galli, whose teachings are present in the text more than they are explicitly noted.

1 Before Disobedience Antiquity and the Middle Ages

1.1. The Tragedy and Mockery of Greek Disobedience With Sophocles’ Antigone, Greek culture leaves us the most discussed case of disobedience in Western political thought.1 Creon, the new ruler of Thebes, at the end of a civil war that had torn the city to pieces after the death of Oedipus, emanates an edict that denies burial rites to Polyneices, one of Antigone’s brothers, guilty of trying “to consume utterly with fire the city of his fathers” and of having “sought to taste of kindred blood, and to lead the remnant into slavery.”2 Disobeying the edict, the Greek heroine refuses to conform to a “masculine” conception of politics whereby, as her sister Ismene reminds her, women must obey men because they hold political power in virtue of their superior physical strength. As a woman, Antigone asserts her adhesion to the genos value system, to familial duties of blood relations and aiding loved ones that require, among other things, rescuing her deceased brother from the forces of nature to allow him, through a proper burial, to enter 1

2

G. Steiner, Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996): AA.VV., Antigone e la filosofia, ed. P. Montani (Rome: Donzelli, 2001). Sophocles, Antigone, trans. R. C. Jebb (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html.

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Hades.3 Following the city’s public laws would mean denying the preeminence of philia, making Antigone responsible for the extinction of genos in the anonymous and indistinct generality of demos, which would be unacceptable for a woman.4 In his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel saw in Antigone’s stance the constitutive tragedy of all Western culture:5 what Creon considers a case of unacceptable “obstinacy and disobedience,” incomprehensible for those responsible for guaranteeing the fate of the polis, from Antigone’s point of view is an inevitable answer to the “sheer violence” implied in the indiscriminate extension of that edict to the entire community. Even though Antigone is right, she is still guilty, in Hegel’s opinion, because she sees her rights from “a point of view which is merely particular” and is therefore lacking “self-consciousness from the essential nature [Wesen]” in the other law, too; she is unable to grasp the essential unity of the universal, reducing her individuality to a mere means through which ethical law must be realized. However, thus conceived and realized, it loses its universal character of law and is transformed into control, into an arbitrary assumption of a particular point of view.6 In recent years, Antigone’s modernity – which Hegel considered both prodromal and crepuscular – has been pushed until making it the “Greek prototype of civil disobedience.”7 If we stick to an exclusively literal reading of the work, free from any attempt to frame it in the overall sense of the Greek world, Antigone’s disobedience would perfectly coincide with the definition of civil disobedience that has been established since the 1970s: along with that, her disobedience is described and motivated as a conscientious act, as dike, that is, the respect of a superior justice and “the unwritten 3

4

5

6 7

For a feminist interpretation of Antigone’s disobedience, see A. Cavarero, Corpo in figure (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1995); J. Butler, Antigone’s Claim (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). G. Carrillo, “‘Bia(i) politon’: Sulla disobbedienza di Antigone,” in Filosofia politica 1 (2008): 5–19. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind (1807), trans. J. B. Baillie (Moscow: University of Idaho), http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/Phil%20310/ToC/ Hegel%20Phen%20ToC.htm. Ibid., section 484. D. Daube, Civil Disobedience in Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972), 5.

Before Disobedience

11

and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of today or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth,” and therefore, they are decidedly more binding than any law proclaimed by a mortal.8 At the same time, there is no trace or intention of violence nor the will to forcefully answer the suffered injustice, even as she proudly admits responsibility (“Yes, it was me, I do not deny it”) and her willingness to accept the penal consequences of her “just” decision, even if this means risking her own life (“So for me to meet this doom is trifling grief”). For these characteristics, contemporary interpretations have juxtaposed the figure of Antigone with Socrates in Plato’s The Apology of Socrates. This juxtaposition is not entirely arbitrary: as much as Plato’s dialogue is mainly motivated by what Foucault defined as “care of the self,”9 which is absent in the arguments of Antigone, the opus can effectively be considered the philosophic corollary of Sophocles’ tragedy. Accused of impiety for his philosophy, Socrates, too, called to the superiority of divine law over any human law, refusing to abjure and thus serenely predisposing himself to an inevitable death sentence: Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet after my manner, and convincing him.10

Nevertheless, it is precisely the parallel to Socrates that should demonstrate the unsustainability of any attempt to overly modernize Antigone’s disobedience. In another of Plato’s dialogues, Crito, in hearing his friend’s pleas to flee from prison to escape an unjust sentence, Socrates himself maintains (as Creon does) the need to obey every law of the polis: “Country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding . . . also to be soothed, and gently and reverently entreated 8 9

10

Sophocles, Antigone. M. Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 377–78. Plato, Apology (Cambridge, MA: MIT), http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology .html.

12

Disobedience in Western Political Thought

when angry.”11 A person can try to persuade it to do the right thing, but always “he must do what his city and his country order him.”12 Instead, in choosing to flee the city, Socrates would offend and disobey those superior laws that in his trial defense he declared he would always follow, even if it cost him his life – superior laws that impose obedience to those who govern the city, even when they err. Socrates’ two positions are only apparently in contradiction to one another: in both cases, it is not disobedience that is really being discussed but rather parrhesia, the obligation for the philosopher to “speak-truth,” even if doing so means risking the philosopher’s life, and at the same time demonstrating to all citizens with exemplary behavior that to correctly govern the city, they “should govern themselves.”13 In other words, these two dialogues express, from different points of view (the philosopher exercising his ability to persuade his fellow citizens to pursue the truth, aligning public law to divine law, and the philosopher concretely exercising those same principles as a citizen himself), the same need to incessantly obey the eternal, unwritten laws that Antigone cites and on which, according to Socrates, the polis is founded. In the Greek perspective, there is no place for a true, subjective claim to disobedience, which always acts, even when it is in the right, as a mortal virus for the overall health of the community. The very possibility of conceiving a subjective will to disobey any political order is impeded by the endless search for understanding the content of the truth of the polis’s laws of functioning to follow them, and this search, when transcending a purely contemplative interest, can at most produce a tragic conflict between different instances of obedience, for example, between those invoking the respect of the “public laws of the state” and others who avail 11

12

13

Similarly, Creon says, “Whomsoever the city may appoint, that man must be obeyed, in little things and great, in just things and unjust. . . . Disobedience is the worst of evils. This it is that ruins cities; this makes homes desolate; by this, the ranks of allies are broken into head-long rout.” Sophocles, Antigone. Plato, Crito, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Cambridge, MA: MIT), http://classics .mit.edu/Plato/crito.html. Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 303.

Before Disobedience

13

themselves of familial laws of “kindred blood,” those who cite the laws of “the underworld of Hades” and those who instead call for the laws of the state and civil life.14 So, just like the Socrates in the two platonic dialogues is always the same person, Antigone is not that qualitatively different from Creon. Both are expressions of the same illness – hybris – and, not incidentally, both share the same fate of death. Creon, too, is right to demand absolute obedience as the legitimate holder of the city’s political power. However, sheltering the idea that only what he said was right, he sinned in pride and impiety against the gods and was therefore guilty and accomplice to the deadly atmosphere that had fallen over the city. Like Antigone, his subjective will is an “excess” that changes the ever-precarious equilibrium of the polis, with consequences that can only be catastrophic: “Blest are they whose days have not tasted of evil. For when a house hath once been shaken from heaven, there the curse fails nevermore, passing from life to life of the race.”15 It shouldn’t be surprising that, just as she openly takes responsibility for her act of disobedience, Antigone contextually negates its intrinsically political nature of challenging authority, instead circumscribing it to the emotive and prepolitical dimension of parental piety.16 She herself could not accept it as disobedience to political authority, if not deviating from the divine principles that she instead says to uphold. Indeed, it is precisely her ability to act publicly while simultaneously denying herself as a political agent that makes her, more so than Creon, the perfect tragic heroine. To find a truly political handling of disobedience, tragedy and philosophy must be abandoned for comedy, where the events in the polis are discussed in a commonplace and deliberately caricatured way. Even in this case, we find a disobedient heroine, Lysistrata, or “she who disbands armies,” leading a group of women and wives who, through the peaceful occupation of the Acropolis and an innovative sex strike, force the men to put down their arms and 14 15 16

Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Sophocles, Antigone. “Behold me, princes of Thebes, the last daughter of the house of your kings – see what I suffer, and from whom, because I feared to cast away the fear of Heaven!” Sophocles, Antigone.

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Disobedience in Western Political Thought

end the “fratricidal” Peloponnesian War.17 Unlike in Sophocles’ tragedy, the protagonist explicitly states her political intention as disobedience itself, without shame. In fact, she proposes nothing less than “saving Greece” and determining an overall reorientation of foreign policy, starting with a truce between all contenders, a first step toward the political unity of the peninsula’s cities (related by the same religious beliefs) necessary to better oppose their common “barbarian” enemy.18 However, in the end, this is only an extemporaneous occasion to reach an even more ambitious goal merely touched on by Sophocles’ tragedy because it is at the limit of the unthinkable: Greek men’s acknowledgment of the political role of women, who are excluded from the public management of the polis and confined to the domestic role of mother and wife because they are considered lacking in rationality. Disobedience therefore serves to affirm, beyond all else, the need to include another, alternative form of rationality in the public sphere, a rationality rooted in women’s natural affection and in the loving care of what is held dear, a rationality that treats war with the same logic that unravels a tangled skein of wool at home. In the eyes of the Greek women, this is ever more necessary when facing the repeated failures of the “violent or self-willed” masculine rationality that is plunging Greece into ruin.19 To reach this goal, the women resort to the very element that, more than any other, exemplifies their subaltern status at the heart of the household: sex, which is transformed into a catalyst of power, into a tool of political struggle. The natural sympathy that the work conveys toward the protagonist shouldn’t, however, mislead. The success of Lysistrata and her struggling companions’ disobedience is performed under the sign of mockery: all her efforts to prove herself lucid and rational and as able as any other (male) philosopher to give “useful counsel” to the polis and to give her country the “best advice”20 clash with the unbreakable deafness of the men, who, at the complete mercy

17

18 19 20

Aristophanes, Lysistrata (Moscow: Iowa State University), http://drama.eserver .org/plays/classical/aristophanes/lysistrata.txt. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

Before Disobedience

15

of their unfulfilled desires, are able to interact with her perfectly serious arguments with only apolitical, derogatory, and vulgar sexual allusions. This goes on until the point when they are finally so physically and psychologically exhausted by their prolonged abstinence that they decide to suspend the conflict and start a joyous truce. Rather than acknowledging the feminine contribution, they prefer to renounce their masculine prerogative of being rational, declaring to have come to this wise decision in virtue of an exceptional state of drunkenness.21 So, even in this case, disobedience is denied its own political status. In fact, as in the case of Antigone, the comedy ends significantly in the absence of its protagonist, who silently vanishes from the stage without any real reason. The political triumph of disobedience is accomplished in a void of subjectivity. 1.2. Disobeying in Concordia Roman political thought also gives divine law (divine because it is both natura and ratio) superiority over any human law. As Cicero explains: There exists one true law, one right reason – conformable to nature, universal, immutable, eternal. . . . This law cannot be contradicted by any other law properly so called, nor be violated in any part, nor be abrogated altogether. Neither the senate nor the people can deliver us from obedience to this law . . . man cannot transgress [this law] without counteracting himself – without abjuring his own nature; and by this alone, without subjecting himself to the severest expiations, can he always avoid what is called suffering.22

Roman ius finds its extrajuridical foundations in the supreme law that, like in ancient Greece, is considered “eternal and universal” and “whose origin precedes the immeasurable course of ages, before legislative enactments were in being, or political governments 21

22

“It’s only natural, to be sure, for sober, we’re all fools. Take my advice, my fellow-countrymen, our envoys should always be drunk.” Ibid. Cicero, Treatise on the Commonwealth (54 b.c.), in The Political Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero: Comprising His Treatise on the Commonwealth; and His Treatise on the Laws, trans. Francis Barham, Esq. (London: Edmund Spettigue, 1841–42), vol. 1, http://oll.libertyfund.org/simple.php?id=546.

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Disobedience in Western Political Thought

constituted.”23 What’s more, in a strict sense, only what is able to distinguish between right and wrong based on the model of the law of nature can be defined as (positive) “law.” In all other cases, even if a law is founded on a “convention” – and therefore accepted by the people – we can, at most, talk of a “disposition” that, even when oriented to “punish the guilty or protect the innocent,” is not qualitatively different than “the mutual engagements of robbers.”24 The Roman citizen, too, is thought to be part of a rational cosmic universe, a civitas communis to the gods and men in which everyone is “obedient to the same rule, the same authority and denomination.”25 Unlike in the Greek world, where this understanding triggered the terror of any alteration in divine order, to the point of imposing the prohibition against assigning disobedience its own political nature or of provoking a political paralysis in a tragic clash between different instances of obedience, Roman political thought considered dissentions as integral and ineradicable parts of the res publica and the cyclical alternation of its forms, which the politically virtuous man must know how to deal with pragmatically. Political virtue does not consist in the contemplative knowledge of an ideal order but rather in the active exercising of prudentia iuris, the science of human and divine things that is the guardian of tradition, customs, and Roman institutions, that must be availed of if the social order and associative life are to be conserved and nourished. It is this very tradition that teaches that the most important laws and institutions that distinguish the greatness, the superiority, and the stability of Rome – for example, the Plebeian Tribunes or the Law of the Twelve Tables – were the result of popular disobedience that, thanks to the pragmatic ability of the Roman boni viri, was channeled and integrated into the glorious self-narration of Rome’s expansion.26 23

24 25 26

Cicero, Treatise on the Laws (51 b.c.), in Political Works, vol. 2, http://oll .libertyfund.org/simple.php?id=545. Ibid. Ibid. Livius, The History of Rome, vol. I, ed. Ernest Rhys, trans. Rev. Canon Roberts (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1912) sec. 31–35, http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/ modeng/public/Liv1His.html.

Before Disobedience

17

The Roman political order is founded on a “balanced” and mobile distribution of control and obedience. Justice is the harmony born from the concord between social classes, “the fullest and most perfect collection of the general rules of natural reason and equity” of the res publica.27 To maintain this equilibrium between different elements, the best men, “the wisest and most just men,” must be above the weaker ones, who should obey their superiors, but also, “he who obeys may hope that some day he will be capacitated for command, and that he who commands should bear in mind that ere long he may be called to the duty of submission.”28 In other words, Rome’s historical secular experience demonstrates that its “tempered political constitution” is undoubtedly founded on obedience, without which the principle of authority and hierarchical order on which the res public is based would be overwhelmed by an “unbridled license” that the naive could interpret as freedom but that, in reality, is only the prelude to tyranny. More precisely, it is based on the obedience to the “magistrate” who finds himself between the people and (natural) law because his specific job is to govern the people, prescribing what is right and useful in conformity with the Law. However, if it is true that all citizens must show “submission and obedience towards their magistrates” and “enjoin them by all means to honour and love their rulers,” to the point that those who rebel are like “the race of the apostate Titans” who dared rebel against the gods, it is also true that “he who acts as a comptroller of civil abuses, shall be considered as a good citizen.”29 A magistrate can only be considered “guardian of civil jurisprudence” when he acts justly.30 Therefore, even if citizens must obey the “supreme command” conferred according to legal prescriptions “without protest” – being punished “by fine, imprisonment, and corporal chastisement” if they disobey – given that a discrepancy between civil law and natural law can be imagined (in particular, when the reason is abandoned in favor of egoistical

27 28 29 30

Cicero, Treatise on the Commonwealth. Cicero, Treatise on the Laws. Ibid. Cicero, Treatise on the Commonwealth.

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Disobedience in Western Political Thought

passions), another form of control over magistrates needs to be foreseen. It would be a control exercised by other magistrates of the same or higher level but also, and above all, a control exercised by the people (one on which citizens can always call, with the exception of wartime situations, when they are judged guilty of disobedience31 ) through institutional representatives or, in extreme cases, even under the form of popular unrest, if the responsibility of such unrest is placed on those who provoked it through unfair behavior (e.g., example when a magistrate forgets to treat the people through the observance of and obedience to the “public auspices”). So, despite that disobedience doesn’t prove to be any problem whatsoever and is even written into the very history of Rome and its auctoritas, Roman political vocabulary still doesn’t have a specific term to name it, while having many expressions to indicate obedience (parere, obtemperare, and, much more rarely, oboedire).32 The characteristics of disobedience are assumed in the concept of sedition (seditio), used to describe the insubordination of a multitude to a magistrate33 but, more generally, a “discord among citizens” that is expressed with “separation,” “going away,” or “departure.”34 Not coincidentally, it has historically found its main variant and expressive form in the “secession,” practiced on more than one occasion by the Roman plebe to limit excessive concentration of power in the hands of the aristocracy (secessio plebis). Unlike its modern meaning, this has no specific relation to territory but rather is closer to what we associate with our image of a general strike through the mass abandoning of the city and the consequent 31

32

33

34

“The voyager and the invalid implore the aid of some one competent director, as soon as the sea grows stormy, and the disease alarming, so our nation in peace and security, commanded, threatened, annulled, repealed, and insulted their magistrates, but in war obeyed them as strictly as they had done their kings, for public safety is after all rather more valuable than popular license.” Ibid. See Livius, History of Rome, sec. 27, 44, 59. Cicero instead only uses the verb parere (Treatise on the Commonwealth, I). ¨ T. Mommsen, Romisches Strafrecht (Leipzig, 1899), 562, http://www.archive .org/details/rmischesstrafre00mommgoog. Cicero, Treatise on the Commonwealth. See also Daube, Civil Disobedience in Antiquity, 28–29.

Before Disobedience

19

interruption of all commercial and productive activities or through the refusal to take up arms against the enemy in war.35 Even if it is an extreme form of protest (maxima pertubatio) used when the courts are not able to guarantee their function of “moderating” popular violence,36 and which can provoke serious damage to life in the res publica, secession is never a subversive political action, that is, an action that aims at a total commutatio of the political system. In fact, a solemn protest against the sociopolitical organism of belonging is contained in this idea of separation, but with the goal of reinsertion after the acknowledgment of new rights or the reestablishment of those violated.37 It therefore operates as a reequilibrator of the concordia ordinum in many senses, as an indicator – for those who decide the fate of the public domain – of the existence of a now intolerable imbalance in the distribution of the ius among different social classes. In fact, “if there exists not in the state a just distribution and subordination of rights, offices, and prerogatives, so as to give sufficient domination to the chiefs, sufficient authority to the counsel of the senators, and sufficient liberty to the people, the form of the government cannot be durable.”38 Secession is therefore qualitatively different from defection (defectio) – a term that is used almost exclusively in a military setting – because unlike defection, it does not include the most serious and ignoble of betrayals, leaving the civitas to join the enemy (deficere ad hostem), but is limited only to threatening it.39 Secession goes to the external limits of citizenship but does not transcend them. In other words, it constitutes the maximum degree of perturbation allowed by the concordia ordinum on which the res publica is grounded. When, like in the case of Catiline and his co-conspirators, sedition is a holder of political measures (such as agrarian reform or debt relief) that openly challenge the supremacy of higher classes inside the proportional equality through which 35

36 37 38 39

Livius, History of Rome, 36–54. For a general theoretical framework on the concept of secession, see C. Margiotta, L’ultimo diritto: Profili teorici e storici della secessione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005). Cicero, Treatise on the Laws. Margiotta, L’ultimo diritto, 23–24. Cicero, Treatise on the Commonwealth. Daube, Civil Disobedience in Antiquity, 143.

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the res is distributed, that is, when it is the expression of a motum that subverts the dynamic stability of political order, Roman political thought rediscovers all those fears of change that gripped the Greeks. In this case, sedition is a scourge (pestis patriae), a danger that seriously threatens the death of the urbe. In this type of sedition, we are not faced with the habitual conflictual dialectic between the people and those in power, nor with the normal struggles for power among the leading elites, but with a revolt that incites “desperate men” – “altogether abandoned, not only by Fortune but even by Hope” – against the boni,40 putting into discussion their superior dignity, and that, in case of secession, could only lead to the irreparable ruin of Rome. Those who promote it do not stop merely at “breaking the law and justice”;41 they want to subvert them, annihilate them, without realizing, however, that they are aspiring to a power that, if obtained, would be ephemeral because it would inevitably succumb “to some mere slave or gladiator.”42 Against such sedition, Roman political thought is silent; it doesn’t possess political categories to deal with it: despite constantly experiencing civil war, Rome was unable to actually face internal enemies, against and separated by the “honest” but an integral part of the Roman civitas. The Catiline conspiracy thus could only be described as madness (furor) and effrenata audacia. To purify the res publica of such a mortal illness, the physical elimination of the seditious was not enough, as in the case of previous dissentions. All these struggles, including those led by Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who “[attempted] some not very revolutionary changes in the constitution of the state,”43 did not aim to subvert the Republic but to change it: “There was only a disposition to make some sort of distribution then prevalent at Rome, and a certain amount of competition between parties.”44 To be able to effectively meet such a dangerous threat like that personified in the Catiline conspiracy, 40

41 42 43 44

Cicero, Against Catiline, in The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. C. D. Yonge and B. A. London (Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, 1856), http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02. 0019%3Atext%3DCatil.%3Aspeech%3D1%3Achapter%3D1%3Asection %3D1. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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its ambiguous nature had to be preventively modified, transforming it into a bellum iustum, something Rome had always known how to deal with, putting aside internal divisions and finding cohesion and unity. This can only happen through the forceful separation of the seditious, that is, through their physical expulsion from the city and the construction of a “solid wall” that will unequivocally distinguish justice from robbery, honest from seditious, being hence forced to give up the ambiguity of their disobedience to be more clearly identifiable as hostes.45 1.3. Horror Vacui: At the Origins of the Christian Negation of Disobedience The affirmation of Christianity changed the framework in which the ancient world (Greek and Roman) discussed disobedience, though confirming the incapacity to acknowledge it in its full political dimension. Also in this case, a peremptory superiority over any civil law is attributed to divine right: “We must obey god rather than men” (Apostles 5:29). However, the potential conflict between the two sources of obligation loses its original tragedy: divine Chrisˆ nomina, the tian laws are no longer the agrapa kasphalˆe theon uncontrollable eternal laws that no one knows when will come to light, but a Truth that clearly and incontrovertibly shows both the legitimate source of power (God) and the limits of obedience to secular authority. The cosmic unity of Greek and Roman politics is now split into two civitates – one celestial, one terrestrial – that although “mixed up with the very substance of people’s souls” (even in the soul of a single individual) are hierarchically ordered. Consequently, the good Christian is (or should be) able to discern “the things that are Ceasar’s” from “the things that are God’s” (Mathieu 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25) in any circumstance. Even the appeal to Roman prudentia becomes pointless: the order “which allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place”46

45 46

Ibid. St. Augustine, City of God, in Philip Schaff, St. Augustine’s City of God and Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1980), XIX, chapter 13, 656 (but also XIX, chapter 21, 664–65), http://www. ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102.html.

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that Rome had to continually construct and defend against the threat of disobedience is already a given for the Christian, who is simply held to respect it. Christians therefore know that all secular authority is “established” by God and His “servants”; anyone who disobeys it is consequently opposing “what God has instituted,” subjecting himself or herself to the legitimate repression of the “sword,” itself established by God to condemn and defeat any attempt to alter this order (Romans 13:1–7). Based on this order, even when it has (frequently) vindicated the lawfulness of disobedience to political authority, all Christian political thought – from the Synoptic Gospels to the most recent American antiabortionist movements – has claimed to be a catechesis of obedience.47 The same is true for the first Christian communities, which were still not associated with earthly power: “He who fears to suffer, cannot belong to Him who suffered,” commented Tertullian in De Fuga when facing Roman persecution. The refusal to comply with orders that obliged Christians to honor “simple men” who were emperors as if they were God48 is along the exact same lines as the continual reassurance of the absence of any political velleity: “But to us who are dead to all the zeal for fame and position, there is no need for meeting together, nor is there anything more foreign to us than affairs of state.”49 Their 47

48

49

On this subject, see, among others L. Buzzard and P. Campbell, Holy Disobedience: When Christians Must Resist the State (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books 1984). On antiabortion disobedience, the main references are F. A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1981); R. A. Terry, Operation Rescue (Binghamton, NY: Whitaker House, 1988). But see also B. Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelic America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eardmans, 2008). “De fuga in Persecutione,” in Q. S. F. Tertulliani, Apologeticus Adversus Gentes pro Christianis, ed. T. H. Bindly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890), http://www .tertullian.org/articles/bindley_apol/bindley_apol.htm. Ibid., XXXVIIII, 3. But, in a certain sense, this also goes for the anonymous author of the Letter to Diognetus, where Christians “live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They have a share in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their fatherland, and yet for them every fatherland is a foreign land. They marry, like everyone else, and they beget children, but they do not cast out their offspring. They share their board with each other, but not their marriage bed. They busy themselves on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws, but in their own lives they go far beyond what the laws require” (5.5–5.10).

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disobedience expresses a spiritual need that is radically different from the forms with which the Roman world was used to understanding disobedience: We might have fought against you, not in arms nor in rebellion, but merely in disunion, by the ill-will of separation only. For had so great a force of men torn themselves away from you to some corner of the remote earth, the loss of so many citizens and of such a kind would surely have brought shame upon your rule; nay, the punishment would have lain in the very desertion itself. You would undoubtedly have quaked with fear at your desolation, at the silence of things, . . . you would have had to seek for subjects to govern. More enemies than citizens would have remained with you.50

They preferred martyrdom to secession: “as we are stretching forth our hands to God, let your claws dig into us, your crosses suspend us, your fires burn us, your swords decapitate us, your wild beasts spring upon us: the very posture of a praying Christian is ready prepared for every kind of punishment.”51 The Roman political authorities thus had nothing to fear from the Christians. In their determined but passive disobedience, they could find a contribution for “salvation” and the “continuity of the Roman Empire,” the only thing holding back the future catastrophe of the world: “In the emperors we look up to the judgment of God, Who sets them over the nations. We recognize in them this fact only, what God wills; and therefore we wish that to be safe which He wills, and we regard their safety as a great oath.”52 The obedience and faithfulness owed to the emperor should not, however, be measured in public “homages” but through a moral conduct that the “God of the living” orders to be observed toward the emperor with the same sincerity as toward all other human beings. And this sincerity is the best guarantee of political power: “Whatever is unlawful in the case of the emperor, is also unlawful in the case of any man; and what is unlawful in the case of any man, is of course still more so in the case of him, who, by God’s appointment, is 50 51 52

Tertulliani, Apologeticus, XXXVII, 1–7. Ibid., XXX, 7. Ibid., XXXII, 2–3.

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Disobedience in Western Political Thought

so great a man.”53 The same applies to the refusal to obey a law that purports having the “conviction of its own justice” in itself and that does not allow those who should respect it to verify its conformity to the veritas: “they who observe orderly quietness out of respect for Caesar desert it on Caesar’s account.” Instead, the Christians – “men of true religion” – “celebrate their solemn festivals rather with mental rejoicing than with wanton gaiety.” From the sacred Scriptures, they have learned the obligation to “pray to God” even for their enemies and to pray “for blessings upon our persecutors.” Emphasizing the emperor’s subjection to God, even at the cost of the extreme sacrifice of human life, therefore serves to reinforce its “supreme command” on Earth, reminding us of the “spirit that gives breath to all souls” and that gives ground to their unchallengeable superiority “before all”: “He who calls him a god denies that he is an emperor. Unless he be a man he is not an emperor.”54 In other words, although this understanding could be found only in the most advanced points of Christian thought of those times (such as in Tertullian) – and certainly not among the pagan emperors, who felt no need for an external legitimation of their power – it was in the emperor’s interest to acknowledge God’s superiority: only subjecting himself to God, in fact, could the imperial potestas legitimate itself with the auctoritas that justified the necessary obedience of his subjects.55 From its beginnings, Christianity has thus claimed to be the true realization of the Roman ideal of civitas as pax domus, the “well-ordered concord of domestic obedience and domestic rule.”56 Nevertheless, paradoxically, never before had this political order depended so much on disobedience, which is its implicit presupposition, the negative precondition that allows it even to be conceived. More so than Judaism, Christian doctrine sees disobedience as “the origin of every sin,” the act through which man is made what he is, a fleeting life that aspires to eternity and a never fully 53 54 55

56

Ibid., XXXVI, 4. Ibid., XXX–XXXV. On the relation between religious auctoritas and political potestas, which will enter into Christian political thought only later, see G. Preterossi, Autorita` (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 25–44. St. Augustine, City of God, XIX, chapter 16, 660.

Before Disobedience

25

reached happiness in the world.57 Saint Augustine explains, “The members of the [human] race should not have died, had not the two first . . . merited this by their disobedience.” With disobedience, man wanted to make himself, “for his own sake,” an autonomous and independent subject from God’s authority, thus committing “so great a sin . . . that by it the human nature was altered for the worse, and was transmitted also to their posterity, liable to sin and subject to death.”58 Without this original act of defection from God, the fall into time would not have taken place, the fall that made the terrestrial existence of every human being an unhappy consciousness who “not being willing to do what he could do, he now wills to do what he cannot.”59 So it would not even be possible to conceive of the existence of two “cities,” that is, the reason that justifies the image of an order of being founded on hierarchy and obedience. But there is more: “disobedience . . . is the punishment of the first disobedience.”60 For Saint Augustine, disobedience is not only the origin of all terrestrial things but also its distressing destiny, whose constant representation in the world “approaches” the Christian to the edge of a nihilistic abyss: “that it is a nature, this is because it is made by God; but that it falls away from Him, this is because it is made out of nothing.”61 This means that disobedience pits the Christian against the unacceptable truth that nonbeing is at least coeval with creation: “For though God formed man of the dust of the earth, yet the earth itself, and every earthly material, is absolutely created out of nothing; and man’s soul, too, God created out of nothing.”62 It is precisely to escape this nihilistic horror vacui that Christian metaphysics constantly risks falling into that Christians must make their lives a mission, transforming life into an endless struggle against disobedience. This struggle becomes ever more necessary as the irremediably sinful character of the world is confirmed, that is, as Christians gain a deeper understanding 57

58 59 60 61 62

E. Coccia, “‘Inobedientia’. Il peccato di Adamo e l’antropologia giudaicocristiana,” Filosofia politica 1 (2008): 21–36 [our translation]. St. Augustine, City of God, XIV, chapter 1, 420. Ibid., XII, chapter 15, 442. Ibid., XV, chapter 6, 461. Ibid., XV, chapter 13, 439–40. Ibid., XV, chapter 11, 437.

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of obedience’s precarious character in this world, of its always being a relative and contingent point clearly destined to fail if not inserted into an economy of (ultraterrestrial) salvation. If it is true that Christ released us from the yoke of slavery to make us free from the observance of Mosaic law and Pharisaic legalism, the Christian is really only free to be a “servant” of His word, obeying evangelical teachings. The (formal) nature of external control that Judaism still gave the Torah and its function of fundamental mediation between the divine and the earthly thus trades places with a daily practice of “obedience” and “subjection” to authority with which every believer tries to make himself or herself Christ, who demonstrated how the merciful power of removing sin from the world (Titus 3:1–5) is inseparable from the love and absolute devotion to God, of being “obedient even ‘unto death.’”63 1.4. Disobedience without Sedition: Medieval and Late Medieval Resistance In the Middle Ages, parallel to the affirmation of the Church as a worldly power, the spiritual necessity to deny any specific political role to disobedience leaves an image of inoboedientia that, though remaining “the most grievous of sins” from an ontological point of view,64 acts in reality as a function of order. This process of rationalization, culminating in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, affects even the most radical forms of disobedience so that they can find political legitimacy without questioning the hierarchical structure of the respublica christiana and without contradicting the principle of obedience on which it rested. The concepts of “justice” and “tyranny,” recovered from the Aristotelian tradition,65 become central: “Man is bound to obey secular princes in so far as this is required by order of justice. Wherefore if the prince’s authority is not just but usurped, or if he commands what is unjust, his subjects are not bound to obey him, except perhaps accidentally, in 63 64

65

Ibid., XIV, chapter 15, 442. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II, II, q. 105, 1, http://www.sacredtexts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/index.htm. M. Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide de l’Antiquit´e a` nos jours (Paris: Puf, 2001), 267–74.

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27

order to avoid scandal or danger.”66 As Lactantius had already clarified,67 for a law to be considered “just” and not a mere abuse of authority, it is necessary that its contents conform to divine law and, more precisely, to the “revealed law” that God has given man to guide him in the search for eternal salvation. Laws that are not made for the well-being of its subjects and to protect the “common good” and only in the personal interest of those who hold political authority are therefore “tyrannical” and consequently do not have to be followed in any case.68 In similar cases, disobedience is not comparable to “sedition” – which should instead always be considered an illicit action because it compromises the union of law (unitas juris) and the utilitas communis among the members of a collectivity. The perturbatio caused by disobedience does not undermine the “peace” and unity of the people. On the contrary, it is a reaction against the “discord” created by the tyrant, which is, from this point of view, the truly seditious one against which it is just and legitimate for the subjects to rebel.69 Strictly speaking, in similar circumstances, disobedience should not even be mentioned: in fact, “a person is said to be disobedient when he does not fulfill a superior’s command”; but when he or she does not obey a tyrant, a Christian is following God’s will, to which every political authority is “subject.” This action can thus be defined as derived disobedience or (which is really the same thing) as a second-level obedience that is legitimized through the obedience of an authority superior to the one the Christian has revolted against. As such, even man “should take every care to obey each superior, yet it is a greater duty to obey a higher than a lower authority.”70 It is under this conception of legitimate disobedience as a secondlevel obedience that the medieval idea of “the right to resistance” is developed.71 Even before Thomas Aquinas, amid the Investiture 66 67

68 69 70 71

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II, II, q. 104, 6. Lactantius, Lactantius: Divine Institutes, trans. A. Bowen and P. Garnsey (Liverpool, UK: University Press, Liverpool, 2004), VI, 6. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, II, q. 92, 1, 3–4, and q. 96, 4. Ibid., II, II, q. 42, 1–2. Ibid., II, II, q. 105, 1–2. On medieval “right” of resistance, see Le Droit de r´esistance. XII–XX si`ecle, ´ ed. J.-C. Zancarini (Lyon, France: Editions, 2001).

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Controversy, the German canon Manegold of Lautenbach maintained that “loyalty and respect must be paid to the emperors and kings who protect the kingdom” but also that “if they turn to tyranny then all obedience and respect is to be removed.”72 As much as sovereigns’ power was indisputably divine in nature, being sovereign did not constitute a natural quality (nomen naturae) but an officium: the defense of the people against tyranny and wickedness. Consequently, “when he who was chosen to punish the wicked becomes wicked himself and cruelly exercises the tyranny that he had the responsibility of keeping out of the kingdom against his own subjects, it is evident that he must fall from his office and that the people have the right to free themselves from his rule.”73 This right to deposition has no limits and can be extended to extreme disobedience – tyrannicide – without entailing the questioning of the principle of order on which even Christian disobedience avows: “it is a lawful and glorious act to slay public tyrants,”74 affirms John of Salisbury, for example. In following his private interest instead of the public good, the tyrant renders himself rex iniquus, a “public enemy” that has violated the aequitas and justice itself, disrupting the iusta dispositio of God’s order.75 Resisting this inobeodientia Deo is therefore not, in any way, creating disorder; on the contrary, it is the only way to restore the order broken by the tyrant’s superbia. The Christian – whose soul “receives its impulses from God” and “obeys him with complete devotion” – cannot escape this “duty” without himself falling into disobedience: “Truly there will be no one to avenge a public enemy, and he who does not prosecute him sins against himself and against the whole body of the secular state.”76 Like Christian disobedience, medieval resistance thus responds to a sacral and descending logic. The acknowledgment of its active, organized, and collective character does not entail putting the 72

73 74

75

76

Manegold von Lautenbach, Liber ad Gebehardum, XXX, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Hannover: Hahn, 1851) vol. XI, 365 [our translation]. Ibid. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, trans. J. B. P. (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), VIII, 20, http://www.constitution.org/salisbury/. G. Cosi, Saggio sulla disobbedienza civile. Storia e critica del dissenso in democrazia (Milan: Giuffr`e, 1984), 160–61. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III, 15.

Before Disobedience

29

political and social hierarchy of the respublica christiana into question, for any reason. In fact, what a tyrant offends is not (if not indirectly) the rights of the community but the “sacred order of the world.”77 To be legitimate, resistance must always be “sanctioned” and authorized by an ecclesiastic instance that ascertains the sovereign’s failure to fulfill his obligations toward the community; only then can it be said to be free from the duty to obey. The same goes for when the sovereign is explicitly considered “a minister of the priestly power . . . who exercises that side of the sacred offices which seems unworthy of the hands of the priesthood,”78 but also when his authority is derived from the pact of subjection with which the people delegate the management of the community. This same “mystique of disobedience” also governs any would-be “Ghibelline” resistance:79 the resizing of papal authority, above all starting in the fourteenth century, when its function as executor iustitiae was seriously challenged by newly emerging powers, did not change the nature of resistance and its being (an essentially legal) tool for the ordinary management of sedition. What changed were what we could call its “procedural aspects,” the definition of who could resist and how resistance could be legally exercised, together with the increasing breakdown of tyranny into a substantially endless series of categories by jurisconsults. Thus, for example, explicitly referring to Thomas Aquinas, Bartolus de Saxoferrato could stress the legitimacy of resistance – and consequently its ontological difference from sedition – even when it is explicitly sectarian and the expression of a political party or faction: when it is legitimate – that is, when the impossibility of appealing to a higher authority is evident and the presence of a iusta causa (in a tyrannicum et pessimum regime) is clear – the nonobedience that resistance carries with it is always motivated by a recta intentio that is aimed at obtaining or defending the peace.80 Otherwise, independent of its forms of action, militancy in a 77

78 79

80

P. Costa, Iurisdictio. Semantica del potere politico nella pubblicistica medievale (1100–1433) (Milan: Giuffr`e, 1969), 369 [our translation]. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, IV, 3. M. Sbriccoli, Crimen laesae maiestatis. Il problema del reato politico alle soglie della scienza penalistica moderna (Milan: Giuffr`e, 1974), 27. Bartolus de Saxoferrato, De Guelphis et Gebellinis, III, in D. Quaglioni, Politica e diritto nel Trecento italiano (Florence: Olschki, 1983), 137–40.

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faction is simpliciter illicitum and therefore rightly subject to the penal sanctions of the superior like any other form of disobedience and rebellion.81 This superior can certainly be the emperor, as in Bartolus, but can also be, like in the case of Marsilius of Padua, the people’s valentior pars functioning as legislator and guarantor of the respect of divine law.82 Really, the same logic is applied when, in William of Ockham, the right to deposition of the princeps is explicitly taken from both the Pope and the emperor to be directly entrusted to the subjects in virtue of their “natural liberty.”83 In this case, too, the concrete exercising of that liberty and that right is restricted by being necessarily the obliged reflex of God’s will so that, to escape the limits of obedience, the prince has to order things that are objectively held as illicit or unjust (in illeciti et injustis nullus debet obedire).84 Consequently, this leaves the need for resistance to find an authoritative external source that sanctions its legitimacy unchanged. Instead, the disobedience of heretical movements is much different, not incidentally treated as tyranny by Bartolus.85 In fact, in the case of radical heresy like the Cathars and, above all, the case of Fra Dolcino and his Apostles, the spiritual call to unconditioned respect of the evangelical principle that establishes the supremacy of obedience to God above any other terrestrial power is interpreted as a total disavowal of any obligation to obey in society: “Men must not be obeyed, only God. Only He should be feared and respected.”86 The Church of Rome, governed by Popes and Cardinals, friends of power and tyrants, is “unable to bring any fruit.” 81

82

83

84

85

86

Bartolus de Saxoferrato, Super const. Qui sint rebelles, glossary “rebellando” (f. 289); “rebellis” (f. 286), http://irnerio.cirsfid.unibo.it/. See also Quaglioni, Politica e diritto, 29–38. Marsilius of Padua, Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace, ed. Annabel Brett (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2006) I, 12, 3. William of Ockham, Octo questiones de potestate papae, II, 9; and Breviloquium de potestate papae, VI, 2. William of Ockham, Dialogus inter magistrum et discipulum de imperatorum et pontificum potestate, pars III, tract. II, II, 20. Bartolus de Saxoferrato, De Tyranno, in Quaglioni, Politica e diritto; Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide, 296. Fra Dolcino e gli Apostolici tra eresia, rivolta e roghi, ed. C. Mornese and G. Buratti (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2004), 34 [our translation].

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The authority that was originally conferred by Christ is “completely nullified” in favor of a community of equals, unbound by any restriction of “exterior” disobedience (but also within the community itself); therefore its members “are not held to obey anyone, neither the supreme Pontiff nor others, because their principle – directly derived from Christ – is their absolutely perfect life,” equal to the pure and humble life of the first catacomb Christians, free and opponents of power and institutions, made of a religiousness without fetishes, temples, or monuments.87 However, it was not only ecclesiastical institutions that were the target of Dolcinian controversy but also the hierarchical structure of medieval society in general, manifested in its unwillingness to tithe, its engagement in armed struggle and guerrilla practices as self-defense against the repressive violence of wicked institutions, and, above all, its outright refusal to take oaths (the true legal basis of the feudal pyramid of power). Medieval society considered oaths an “exterior obligation” and the restriction “that strikes the intimate, thus individual, freedom of thought.”88 The spiritual regeneratio at which those movements prophetically spoke thus implied a radical reformatio of the social order from below, the construction of a “perfect” state of life that, although coinciding with a “return to the origins” of the evangelical spirit, was not posed as an ultraterrestrial goal, nor was it configurable as the restoration of an order broken by the private interests of tyrants, but as the immanent construction of an egalitarian novus ordo on earth. This suggestive opening toward the future, the not only spiritual but also material overcoming of feudal oppressio, is exactly what the medieval legal and political order wanted to protect itself from through its recourse to resistance.

87 88

Ibid., 195 [our translation]. Ibid., 196 [our translation].

2 The Modernity of Disobedience

2.1. Disobedient Humanism The emergence of the state as a new institution able to positively respond to the crisis of respublica christiana brought about a radical transformation in the way of conceiving and discussing disobedience. “I should like merely to understand,” asks Etienne de La Bo´etie in his Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1548), “how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him.”1 This seemly banal question instead implied a conception of politics that was unthinkable up until that time. On one hand, it revealed an unsettling attitude in each individual to voluntarily serve the established power – even desiring it in certain cases. However, on the other hand, in a context in which the king was still considered by most as quidem corporalis Deus,2 it also exposed sovereign power to a new structural 1

2

E. de La Bo´etie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Solitude (1548), trans. Harry Kurz (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), http://mises.org/rothbard/boetie.pdf. E.g., see the influential C. de Grassaille, Regalium Franciae libri duo, iura omnia & dignitates christianiss (Paris: Le Preux, 1538).

33

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fragility since its authority was totally dependent on the consent that – sometimes – its subjects decided to give it. Obedience, until that time thought of as a natural correlation to the extraordinary qualities of the Monarch or of his control function in an order of Being willed by God, now became a “mystery,”3 the artificial result of a “fascination” and “habit,” of man’s inclination to “take the form that education gives him.” Obedience, therefore, had to be continually fostered and nourished in the soul of each individual. Written in conjunction with the peasant revolt in Guyenne against the gabelle, but noted only a few years later in Huguenot and revolutionary publications under the more militant title Contr’Un, La Bo´etie’s Discours interpreted the widespread popular resistance that accompanied the affirmation of the state in France.4 Lacking any transcendental foundation, the intrinsically coercive dimension of the institution of the state is underlined: “like a thief” it forces its subjects to “kill themselves with fatigue,” then to pillage and devastate the harvested fields; through forced fiscal levy, it takes their “best” income, so that no one can claim any property that is “really” his or hers; beyond this, it sends people “to be butchered” fighting “its wars,” making them the “instruments of its greed” and the “executors of its vengeance.”5 From a rhetorical point of view, using a discursive strategy that Guy D´ebord and the Situationists would define as d´etournement, the Aristotelian distinction between hereditary, elective, and military monarchy (Politics, III, 14–17) was transformed into a tripartition of types of tyranny, each with different origins (“popular investiture,” “in virtue of armed force” and the “right of succession”) but whose reign “is almost identical,” always able to “become wicked.” The same goes for the elective form that, even if theoretically considered “more tolerable,” always ends up treating its subjects “like a bull to be dominated.”6 Hence “tyranny” is neither a degenerative form of politics nor a departure from divine order but the modus operandi 3

4

5 6

M. R. Rothbard, “The Political Thought of Etienne de La Bo´etie,” in La Bo´etie, Politic, 13. H. Heller, Iron and Blood: Civil Wars in Sixteenth-Century France (Montr´eal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). La Bo´etie, 8–9. Ibid., 12.

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of every political power founded on the logic of “One” (that for historical and geographical reasons La Bo´etie identifies in the figure of the king), a power that becomes stronger and stronger the more it is able to “tighten the reins” on its subjects. However, this tendency to reduce political relations to a single common denominator is countered by the multiple subjective instances where these relations are naturally articulated. The “voluntary servitude” or the desire of political identification in the “static and deadly” unity of sovereignty (which are the same thing), in fact functions like a “second nature,” like an “artificial nature” that “molds” and “integrally modifies” man’s natural inclination to live together.7 The reference to the cities and villages called upon to free themselves from the yoke of tyranny should be interpreted in this perspective, not as a call to specific prerogatives of ordered bodies that are expected to protect a “good order” but as the identification of one of the possible dimensions with which the “many” relate and “defend” their liberty from the coercive logic of the “One.” Along the lines of Renaissance humanism, La Bo´etie in fact considers the “love for liberty” as a natural attribute of all men that finds its expression in political struggle: “since freedom is our natural state, we are not only in possession of it but have the urge to defend it.”8 Inside this interpretative shift, disobedience finds its natural collocation as a civil form of human action. As adverse as he was to sixteenth-century French Machiavellism, La Bo´etie’s position seems to present more than an assonance with Machiavelli’s theory of popular “mood,” in which the “guard of liberty” is held above all because it is constitutively undisciplined and recalcitrant from being dominated by “the powerful.”9 Place on one side fifty thousand armed men and on the other the same number; let them join in battle, one side fighting to retain its liberty, the other to take it away; to which would you, at a guess, promise victory? 7

8 9

S. Visentin, Potere del nome e potenza del linguaggio. Il Discorso sulla servitu` ´ volontaria di Etienne de La Bo´etie, in “Isonomia,” 2007. Ibid., 51. N. Machiavelli, Discourses upon the First Ten Books of Titus Livy (1517), I, IV–V, 115–120, http://www.constitution.org/mac/disclivy .htm; La Bo´etie, Politics, 43.

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Which men do you think would march more gallantly to combat – those who anticipate as a reward for their suffering the maintenance of their freedom, or those who cannot expect any other prize for the blows exchanged than the enslavement of others?

For La Bo´etie, the answer is obvious, just as it was for Machiavelli: “it amazes us to hear accounts of the valor that liberty arouses in the hearts of those who defend it.” They, in fact, “have before [their] eyes the blessings of the past” and “the hope of similar joy in the future”; consequently, “their thoughts will dwell less on the comparatively brief pain of battle than on what they may have to endure forever.” On the contrary, the others have “nothing to inspire it with courage except the weak urge of greed, which fades before danger.”10 However, if this mood had to find an institutional or organized outlet – modeled after the Roman Tribune of the Plebeians – to prevent social conflict from assuming self-destructive characteristics that would undermine the future of the republic in Machiavelli’s Discorsi, in La Bo´etie’s Discourse, this mood/love for liberty assumes an irremediably extrainstitutional form precisely because the worst threat to liberty, the will to dominate that is typical of the powerful and that alters the cooperative and egalitarian spirit that governs human relations, lurks in the logic of unitary command implied in the institution. In nature, men “behold in one another companions, or rather brothers,” because they are “cast of the same mold” and are “made of the same clay.” The different “distribution of gifts” in “body or spirit” that enables some to “give help” and others to receive it does not establish a political hierarchy but only the expression of the plurality of inclinations that constitute “the common duties of human relationship” that “occupy a great part of the course of our life.” Since who “dominates” has “only two eyes, only two hands, only one body,” and consequently “no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities,”11 every attempt to break this state of perfect equality therefore seems to be an “attack on the weaker” 10 11

La Bo´etie, Politics, 44. Ibid., 46.

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and transforms the natural social cooperation between men into “a field of battle” where the strongest act like “armed brigands in a forest.”12 Disobedience is the extrainstitutional way in which the “many” rightly express themselves “with dignity” as subjects called upon to defend – through an “act of will” – their liberty in a political space marked by the prevaricating and arbitrary logic of unitary command: “resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.”13 We would do well to specify that for La Bo´etie, this is a wholly political act, one that responds to a logic that is different from the one that regulates private behavior (e.g., in the domestic realm) and that only on the terrain of political struggle finds its proper ratio. There is, in fact, a natural and “instinctive” tendency (“each one admitting himself to be a model”) to obey our parents that accompanies our growth and that can be seen (in the sense of being acknowledged) serving the function of a guide in the development of our lives as autonomous subjects. Instead, in the political sphere, it enacts an opposite instinct that, however, is just as natural: “if we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature and the lessons taught by her, we should be intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody.”14 Voluntarly accepting a condition of servitude, man gives up his dignity, contradicting his free and rational nature. Disobedience is thus the specific way that men act politically, expressing their natural desire to be free. Understood as a conscious refusal to acknowledge the authority of those who hold political power and to passively serve it, disobedience has the same negative potency that was behind the civil tribune’s power of veto in Machiavelli. Disobedience cannot in fact be explained as a direct clash with power but rather as the voluntary withdrawal of support from the sovereign’s–tyrant’s policy, in the explicit negation (“without offering any more resistance than a stone or a tree stump”) of its legitimacy: “I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant 12 13 14

Ibid., 50. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 49.

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to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”15 The invitation to avoid clashing with power should not be understood as a lack of “courage,” and even less so as escaping from danger and conflict, but rather as a way of conceiving political conflict expressed in a destituent form. In fact, “the people” are the ones who are “servants” and who “consent” to their own demise, “since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude.” Therefore there is no need to fight the One, nor is there a need to “deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing.” Indeed, “if not one thing is yielded to them . . . they [tyrants] become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies.”16 2.2. The Duty to Resist and the Negation of Disobedience So, in La Bo´etie, disobedience is emancipated from its traditional place as a particular argument within a more ample and weighty discussion on the limits of obedience (which, on the contrary, appears as a subordinate function in this case, as the lack of activating disobedience) at the heart of a conception of politics (and of the individual at its base) as a terrain of conflict between opposed forces and desires. Disobedience is now an immanent possibility in politics; what is more, it is a mode of liberty, the kat’exochen form of expression of human agency and of its multiple desire for freedom. Despite the fact that his successive fortune amply depended on the often piratelike use of his work by the Huguenot publications,17 La Bo´etie should not be confused with the monarcomach theses on the lawfulness of resistance to tyranny.18 The monarcomach use of La Bo´etie’s theses was in fact done inverting his destituent 15 16 17

18

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 44. On this argument, see M. Abensour and M. Gauchet, Les lec¸ons de la servitude ´ de La Bo´etie, Le discours de la servitude volontaire (Paris: et leur destin, in E. Payot, 1993), vii–xxix. On the right to resistance in early modernity, see A. De Benedictis, Resistenza: nello stato di diritto, secondo il diritto “antico,” nell’Europa del “diritto al

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logic, which becomes a tool for neutralizing dissent by sovereign power: “will you take their swords out of their hands? Abstain you only then from striking, seeing they are not the assailants, but the defendants; sheathe your sword, and they will presently cast their buckler on the ground.”19 In addition, in an monarcomach perspective, dissent is conceived of as an extraordinary event – motivated on historical-legal bases or, as in the case of Vindiciae contra tyrannos (from which the previous citation is taken), in the name of the violation of the fiduciary pact stipulated between the king and the people – aiming to reestablish the order willed by God and violated by the sovereign–tyrant. The theological conception of politics that is behind these positions make kings the “vassal of God,” who, as such, “are worthy” of being deprived of the benefits of obedience if they commit “felony,” giving “orders against God’s law.” In this case, obeying these kings would make the people “rebels against God, no more or less than we would call rebel a peasant who, for want of an old and wealthy vassal, took up arms against the sovereign prince, or who preferred obeying the orders of an inferior judge rather than those of a superior one.”20 Moreover, La Bo´etie’s reflection was in large part a reflection on the unfounded nature of political power, whereas the Reform, inspiring monarcomach positions, was a theological refounding of the world and its natural order, hence in contradiction to the secularization of life and the primacy of free will promoted by Renaissance humanism. In particular, with the Reform, the concept of liberty – which, as we have seen, is at the heart of La Bo´etie’s disobedient humanism as well as being its driving force – was radically redefined in an intimate sense, detached from every civil inclination. Indeed, for Luther, “Christian liberty” can never be the result of a conscious political act aiming to satisfy – not to mention defend – man’s “earthly” needs, because what counts is the freedom of the

19

20

presente,” in “Quaderni fiorentini per la storia del pensiero giuridico moderno,” XXXI, 2002, 273–321; Wissen, Gewissen und Wissenschaft im Widerstandsrecht (16–18. Jh.), ed. A. De Benedictis and K.-H. Lingens (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2003). J. Brutus, Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (London: G. Bell, 1924), http://www .constitution.org/vct/vind.htm [our translation]. Ibid. [our translation].

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“soul,” which is separate from and independent of the “external misery” of the world. “No external thing” can therefore “render free and pious” a Christian, because it is unable to reach the soul or “of freeing it or imprisoning it.” At the same time, the terrestrial order, irremediably marked by guilt and sin, is described as a system of subordination to “authority” and “offices” that, like “cops” of God, operate under the sign of the “sword” and to which absolute obedience is due, as sanctified in Paul’s Letter to the Romans.21 So, whereas a Christian is a “free man of all things and not subject to anyone” in his intimate sphere, in the public dimension, he is instead “servant of all things, and is subject to all” his superiors. Even when Luther and the other protestant theologians had to review – not without a certain reluctance – their theory of authority, under the pressure of territorial German princes, and acknowledge that “the law concedes the right to resistance,” this resistance was never configured as man’s natural liberty but rather as a duty to which each good Christian is held.22 In this sense, for example, Bucero clarifies in his Enarrationes that if all government authority is fundamentally ordered to ensure the support of divine law, and therefore all subjects are held to “put all things to their superiors,” this obligation is limited (in particular, for the magistrati inferiores) to “not permitting any action against the Omnipotent.” So, if superior powers do not respect their “office,” falling into an impious and tyrannical government, inferior powers – who have equally accepted the divine duty of “defending the innocent” – cannot “abandon the people to the greed of a godless tyrant” and “must try to remove him with armed force.”23 This resistance is, however, substantially different from inoboedientia. As Luther himself explains, the latter is still a social sin “worse than murder, lust, stealing or lying” because, while those other “bad” actions only touch a part of the secular order and do not offend the head, who can punish those who committed them, 21

22

23

M. Luther, Concerning Christian Liberty (1520), http://www.iclnet.org/pub/ resources/text/wittenberg/luther/web/cclib-1.html. Q. Skinner, Le origini del pensiero politico moderno, 2 vols. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989), II: 285–87. M. Bucero, In sacra quattuor evangelica enarrationes, fo. 54–55 [author’s emphasis, our translation].

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disobedience “attacks punishment itself,” the principle of order on which society stands.24 Legitimate resistance, instead, has a stabilizing function. In a narrow sense, those who really disobey are the people incarnate of the power of resistance, because they refuse to “submit to the government of law” and are therefore “much closer to the name and the quality that is defined rebellion” of those inferior powers that resist them.25 The same reasoning goes for Calvinist political thought. Here, setting aside the Lutheran dualism between the reign of the interior and that of the exterior, only God stands in contrast to an absolutely sinful world. Christians must therefore live to honor and glorify the divine majesty, whereas while secular order is organized according to a system of subjectio and superioritas that starts from the family and goes up to the highest political authorities. Hence any form of disobedience is comparable to a “crime of harmed majesty” because God has “communicated” his name to every authority. Calvin warns, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, but let us at the same time guard most carefully against spurning or violating the venerable and majestic authority of rulers, an authority which God has sanctioned by the surest edicts, although those invested with it should be most unworthy of it, and, as far as in them lies, pollute it by their iniquity. Although the Lord takes vengeance on unbridled domination, let us not therefore suppose that that vengeance is committed to us, to whom no command has been given but to obey and suffer.26

Even in the case of the clearest transgressio legis, that is, when the obedience to worldly authority would unequivocally lead to disobedience toward God, to “privates,” only “passive resistance” is conceded, whereas active opposition is the job of lower magistrates, who also have powers ordered by God. However, this is only a rare occurrence; normally everyone is held to obedience. It is true that in the last paragraph of the 1559 edition of Calvin’s Institutes, he seems to leave space to political disobedience when he positively comments on Daniel’s denial “that he had sinned in 24 25 26

M. Luther, An Open Letter on the Harsh Book against the Peasants (1525). M. Luther, Warning to His Dear German people (1531). J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), V, chapter 20, section 31, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.

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any respect against the king when he refused to obey his impious decree.” In this case, in fact, the king “had exceeded his limits,” committing an “excess” not only against men but also against God, and thus had “virtually abrogated his own power.”27 Nonetheless, this was only a false acknowledgment. In similar circumstances, disobedience is, just like for Bucero, dutiful: “so it is not only lawful for the faithful at this day to shake off from their shoulders the Pope’s yoke, but they must do it of necessity, seeing they cannot obey his laws unless they forsake God.”28 The obedience due to superiors “is not incompatible with obedience to Him to whose will the wishes of all kings should be subject, to whose decrees their commands must yield, to whose majesty their scepters must bow. . . . The Lord, therefore, is King of kings. When he opens his sacred mouth, he alone is to be heard, instead of all and above all.”29 Also in this case, then, disobedience is withheld from any connection with the free exercise of liberty, having the “free” subjection to law as its only real positive determination, “so that [men] spontaneously obey the will of God for the same yoke of law” and are therefore, properly speaking, in liberty to obey.30 2.3. The Atlantic Space of Disobedience Monarcomach disobedience is therefore perfectly in line with the premodern Christian tradition. When it is legitimate, contrary to “sedition,” it is always – even in the case of John Knox, in whose writings radical tones are used and there is a hint toward the possibility that resorting to disobedience is a prerogative of the entire political body and not only of its lower magistrates31 – a form of

27 28

29 30

31

Ibid. J. Calvin, Commentary upon the Acts of Apostles (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1999), v1.0, http://www.biblestudyguide.org/ comment/calvin/comm vol37/htm/xi.htm. J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. H. Marcuse, “A Study on Authority” (1936), in H. Marcuse, From Luther to Popper (London: Verso, 1972), 71. See J. Knox, On Rebellion, ed. R. A. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), viii–xxiv.

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second-level obedience: those who legitimately exercise resistance “seem no ways accusable of the crime of revolt,” because “they do in no sort refuse to obey, provided that they be commanded that which they may lawfully do, and that it be not against the honour of God,” because “God must be obeyed simply and absolutely, and kings with this exception, that they command not that which is repugnant to the law of God.”32 What changes in respect to premodern Christianity is the context: in an epoch of religious civil wars, in which there was no longer agreement on Christian precepts and religion was no longer the unitary foundation for politics but rather an element of discord and conflict, a multiplicity of theories of obedience to God produced an objective condition of political disobedience in society. More so than in the monarcomach tradition, the heredity of La Bo´etie’s disobedient humanism should be located in the “libertarian utopia” of commoners, sailors, radical activists, escaped slaves, and other “marginalized” – the “many-headed hydra” that terrorized the author of the Vindiciae33 – that crossed the Atlantic in the first years of the capitalist economy and colonial expansion.34 In this context, the theological argument lost all of its founding contents, becoming a meta-language of protest politics against the “invasions” of freedom by a “usurping” political power and promoting an alternative lifestyle founded on the refusal of sovereignty and labor. In The Tempest, inspired by the 1609 shipwreck–mutiny of the colonial ship Sea-Venture, Shakespeare, for example, has Gonzalo say, I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries / Execute all things; for no kind of traffic / Would I admit; no name of magistrate; / Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, / And use of service, none; contract, succession, / Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; / No use of metal,

32 33 34

Brutus, Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos. Ibid. On this “libertarian utopia” of Atlantic modernity, see the extraordinary contribution of M. Rediker and P. Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).

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corn, or wine, or oil; / No occupation; all men idle, all; / And women too, but innocent and pure; / No sovereignty.35

In the England of the Tudors, this utopia founded “on disloyalty and disobedience” nurtured a vision of politics in the most radical wings of Leveller thought36 (and, specifically, the relationship between authority and liberty), where the destituent instances of disobedient humanism were absorbed inside traditionally (reformed) religious reflections on resistance. Disobedience and resistance became two substantially coinciding ways to describe and sustain a plurality of conflictual practices such as strikes, mutinies, evasions, insurrections, and direct action against the enclosures. Popular social strata tried to use these practices to escape the growing “slavery” imposed by a political power that, as Thomas Rainborough maintained in the Putney debates, founded its authority exclusively on its capacity to unduly “appropriate” people’s liberty under the form of forced enlistment, forced labor in the colonies, and the slavery of Africans.37 This destituent mode of understanding legitimate resistance was already widely used in George Buchanan’s De iure regni apud Scotos (1567), which only in a merely nominal sense can be categorized in the monarcomach tradition. Indeed, here with evidently humanistic themes that will later be typical in anticolonial rhetoric, too, the religious question is the backdrop for a more general argument against the violation of “natural rights” and the liberty of the Scottish “people,” who were mostly Calvinist but controlled despotically by an intransigent Catholic queen: for Buchanan, man is originally in a condition of absolute liberty and conducts a “nomadic life,” “without law or stable homes.” The construction of a political society is, consequently, the fruit of a decision of the “entire popular body,” which freely decides – without 35

36

37

W. Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611), Act II, Scene I, http://shakespeare.mit. edu/tempest/full.html. On the internal distinction of the Levellers of a radical current – the so-called true Levellers – as opposed to the majority “constitutional” current, see C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1984). On the Putney debates, see M. Revelli Putney, Alle radici della democrazia moderna (Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2007).

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any limitation of obedience to extraworldly laws – to “gather” and elect “someone who deliberates and busies himself with the affairs of each member of the collectivity.” In this way, however, the collectivity does not alienate its own original sovereignty: its components individually retain definitive control over the ius they have delegated. Who governs – be it a king or other political authority – is consequently only a minister to which the popular body prescribes the form of the Imperium so that it “watches over” individual rights. Subsequently, in any given moment, without any need to justify exceptional conditions that modify normal political proceedings, the people – “and even each single citizen” – can “free [themselves] from any Imperium” that is seen as an imposition and destitute he who holds the power, because “anything done by a determined power can be annulled by an equal power,” and “any right the people can have conferred to a person, can with equal justice abrogate it.”38 Also in the case of Levellers, such as Richard Overton, the legitimacy of political resistance is argued starting from a condition of absolute natural equality among men: originally, God implanted “in the created” – and therefore also in every human – a natural instinct of preservation from everything that is unpleasant and dangerous, an instinct that all individuals consider the “most reasonable, equal and just” thing and that is “fountain or root of all just power.” Differently from what the supporters of divine prerogatives of political power affirm, political power is not derived from God but is constituted through “mediation” with nature. Here every individual is free, endowed with an “individual property” that cannot “be invaded or usurped by anyone” without it being an evident violation of his or her rights.39 Therefore, because “every man by nature being a king, priest and prophet in his own natural circuit and compass,” “desires” more than anything else to remain free, political power can only be constituted through the

38

39

G. Buchanan, De iure regni apud Scotos (Edinburgh, 1579), http://www .contra-mundum.org/books/jure/jure-part2.pdf. R. Overton, An Arrow against All Tyrants and Tyranny, in The English Levellers, ed. A. Sharp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 54–72, http://www.constitution.org/lev/eng lev 05.htm.

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“deputation” and the “free consent” of all, although this is not to be understood as a transfer or concession of one’s own sovereignty to someone else – which would be impossible to do without contradicting the very being of human nature. In fact, ultra posse non est esse: what ontologically defines a man, what makes him a human “being,” is the power of being, his capacity to act and realize his desires. If he gives that up, he is no longer a man.40 The decision to “commission” the management of political affairs to a person or a group of people thus comes about exclusively to guarantee and defend the “safety of the people,” the true “sovereign law to which all must become subject,” which in the specific case of the Levellers means “the removal of two most insufferable evils daily encroaching and increasing upon us”: the “usurpations” of freedoms and the natural rights of the commons, among which there is the right to the common use of the lands “expropriated” by the enclosures and the “barbarous, inhuman, blood-thirsty desires and endeavours of the Presbyterian clergy.” If this task is not completed or if ulterior prerogatives are autonomously arrogated, the political institution becomes “unnatural,” “illegal,” “destructive to all human civil society,” and as such “resistible.” Certainly, in this case, it would be like an “invading” power, against which it would be absolutely legitimate for people to “arm themselves,” “fortify their house” and even “kill it,” because it would be “in their just necessary defense of their own persons, houses, goods, wives and families” and therefore they would “not be guilty of the least offence.” This is true not only for kings but for every other “arbitrary creature” in politics such as Lords or “representatives” of the House of Commons, to whom individuals decide to temporarily confer their trust.41 Any appeal to tradition or consuetudes that, from Bracton on, have juxtaposed the more specifically theological argument on the fundaments of political power are no 40

41

Ibid., 63. Also 55: “For every one, as he is himself, so he has a self-property, else could he not be himself; and of this no second may presume to deprive any of without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature and of the rules of equity and justice between man and man.” Ibid., p. 63. See also R. Overton and W. Walmyn, A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, in The English Levellers, 33–53, http://www.constitution .org/lev/eng_lev_04.htm.

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good here. Every generation is the offspring of its time and “ought to be absolutely free from all kinds of exorbitances, molestations or arbitrary power . . . without exception or limitation,” independently from “whatever our forefathers were, or whatever they did or suffered or were enforced to yield unto.”42 The call to the legitimacy of armed and mortal struggle should not mislead. As it was for La Bo´etie, this clash is thought of as the self-defense of freedom from a force that “invades” and “assaults” and is explained in the “refusal of subjection” and the “revoke” of trust that was previously agreed on.43 What counts most is that this withdrawal is always possible, any time obedience is no longer considered convenient. There is, in fact, no necessity to delegate one’s own individual sovereignty. This choice is exclusively motivated by reasons of organizational opportunity. If it would be more “useful,” individuals could “easily do without” and autonomously work for collective and individual well-being.44 So, even in this case, the authority of every “deputed” political power is valid up until its “principles” (the “individuals”) recognize it. In this sense, it is identical to a “school-master” to whom the education of children is entrusted: his mastership is ad bene placitum, dependent on the parents’ benevolence, and he “may be removed at the parents’ . . . pleasure.”45 2.4. Logics of Sovereignty and Disobedience Thomas Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty also dips into this reservoir of destituent ideas, which are even essential in overcoming the previous limits of the defense of sovereign power. At the dawn of 42 43

44 45

Ibid., 35. “And therefore (sir) as even by nature and by the law of the land I was bound, I denied subjection to these lords and their arbitrary creatures thus by open force invading and assaulting my house, person, etc.” (Overton, An Arrow against All Tyrants and Tyranny, 61). But also: “ye cannot forget that the cause of our choosing you to be parliament-men was to deliver us from all kind of bondage and to preserve the commonwealth in peace and happiness. . . . But ye are to remember this was only of us but a power of trust – which is ever revocable, and cannot be otherwise” (The English Levellers, 33). Ibid. Overton, An Arrow against All Tyrants and Tyranny, 56.

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the French Revolution in 1848, Pierre Leroux described La Bo´etie’s Discourse of Voluntary Servitude as an ante litteram critique of modern Hobbesian sovereignty.46 But obviously the line of reasoning is turned upside down: it is Hobbesian sovereignty that neutralizes the subversive instances of the Discourse through the incorporation of “voluntary servitude” in Leviathan mechanisms. The sovereignty instituted by the pact of association is in fact the positive explicitness of the tacit consent with which La Bo´etie’s and the Levellers’ perspective rendered power a fragile “colossus” ready to “break.” Here, under the form of the voluntary concession of natural individual rights to a third party, it becomes the possibility for pacific cohabitation. Motivated by fear, and more precisely by the conviction that obedience and subjection are the only solution to guarantee individual well-being and to preserve life (thus, in this sense, above all convenient), this concession is, however, in this case, an expression of the power of refusal that individuals have in nature because, Hobbes says, when man acts freely, “if he wants,” he can also “refuse to do it.”47 The importance of this de facto incorporation of destituent logic into the theory of sovereignty is fully seen when comparing it to Jean Bodin, who, in the context of the Huguenot controversy and with the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre as a backdrop, concentrated on the definition of a “convenient and decent order” foreign to the “confusion and tumult” where there was not space for the theses of “dangerous men” who encouraged peasants to “take arms against the princes” and called for disobedience, opening the way to the “wretched condition of anarchy which is the worst possible condition of any commonwealth.” Bodin was, however, unable to give any political explanation for the reasons that would push men to consider such a political order convenient, so his argument against disobedience remained an abstract expression of personal preference for obedience with no theoretical roots, therefore able to 46

47

P. Leroux, “De la science politique jusqu’a` nos jours. La Bo´etie, Hobbes, Montesquieu et Rousseau,” in “Revue sociale,” August–September 1847, now in La Bo´etie, Politics 41–56 [our translation]. T. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/ hobbes/leviathan-contents.html.

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contest contrasting theories in a purely ideological way. The only theoretical support for his theory of sovereignty was in fact the same one used by the supporters of those “dangerous” theories, the fathers of the Reform – which the Huguenots said they referred to and whose precepts they would have felt obligated to follow – who taught that kings are appointed “by divine order” and, consequently, that “in a true monarchy,” it is never “justifiable to kill or even resist a sovereign prince, unless by a special and indubitable commission from God.” Not surprisingly, the absolute obedience that Bodin strenuously defended found its internal limit in the traditional respect of the “true prerogatives of sovereign power,” the power to give the state positive laws in harmony with the laws of nature and God: “all the princes of the earth are subject to divine and natural law” and consequently “cannot contravene them without treason and rebellion against God.” When that did happen, for Bodin, like for those who warned against the “specter of tyranny,” disobedience was necessary because “when it is a question of the honour of God,” it “ought to be, of more moment to the subject than the goods, the life, the honour of all the princes of this world.”48 Now, Hobbes, too, is convinced that “there happeneth in no Commonwealth any great inconvenience but what proceeds from the subjects’ disobedience,” is a verifiable and undisputable fact. He is aware that disobedience resides within human nature itself, in the “recalcitrant attitude of the subjects” to accept anything that can hinder them from acting according to reason and judgment and, more specifically, in their reluctance to let the government “draw from them what they can in time of peace that they may have means on any emergent occasion, or sudden need, to resist or take advantage on their enemies.”49 Politics must therefore foresee disobedience and expel it. To make sovereignty work – transforming the undisciplined “many-headed hydra” into compelling state unity – men must be autonomously convinced of the absolute opportunity 48

49

J. Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth (1841), http://www.constitution. org/bodin/bodin .htm. Hobbes, Leviathan.

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of constant obedience that, for Hobbes, is fully evident in the face of the danger of death inherent in nature. The explicitness of voluntary servitude inside the refusal of selfgovernment allows Hobbes to speak of obedience and disobedience outside the traditional context of duty and beginning from a structural contradiction between obligation and liberty. Both become logical functions of the social pact, derived from the same assumptions that make every sovereign act our will for protection and preservation of life. The price paid is, obviously, the renunciation of effective exercise of natural liberty, that disobedient humanism and its derivations instead identified as essential to a life “worth” being lived and that Hobbes uses as una tantum in the act of political foundation. After the pact that generates sovereignty, freedom can only be exercised in the “silence of the law,” “in cases where the sovereign has prescribed no rule.”50 However, on closer examination, obedience is still an assumption for Hobbes, valid until proven otherwise, confirmed only in the fact that a state is able to fulfill its role in providing security: “the end of obedience is protection”; thus “the obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.”51 So, to circumvent the aporia of an argument that makes obedience both the end and the precondition of sovereignty, disobedience (logically not eliminated) is transformed into a figure of inconclusive dissent that can only be used momentarily and when it is incapable of producing subversive political effects, according to a formula that is just as simple as it is peremptory: “when therefore our refusal to obey frustrates the end for which the sovereignty was ordained, then there is no liberty to refuse; otherwise, there is.”52 Trapped inside these limits of compatibility, Hobbes can even allow for the “liberty to disobey,” specifically, when “the sovereign command a man, though justly condemned, to kill, wound, or maim himself,” and more precisely in war, when the subject “is commanded as a soldier 50 51 52

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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to fight against the enemy.” This is, however, a merely theoretical possibility, never really concrete since, in any case, the “sovereign [has] right enough to punish his refusal with death,” and there is no reason why a rational individual, who has self-preservation as his only scope, would do anything (in this case, desertion) that implies the same possibility of death that the person would have faced going to war. The same goes for “fleeing” from the battlefield, which, for Hobbes, “is not injustice, but cowardice,” but that is also subordinated to reasons that motivated the creation of Leviathan. In fact, “when the defence of the Commonwealth requireth at once the help of all that are able to bear arms, every one is obliged; because otherwise the institution of the Commonwealth . . . was in vain.”53 The same neutralizing logic is at work in John Locke’s liberalism. In his opinion, after the creation of society, disobedience can be used only in cases that are not the responsibility of civil authority, that is, “in the care and salvation of the soul,” where its exercise therefore does not damage “in this society relating to the possession of civil and worldly goods” (which are instead subject to the state).54 In the political sphere, where civil interests like “life, liberty, health, and indolency of body” are conserved and promoted, it has no right to exist, if not in manifestly tyrannical contexts, where those in power no longer administrate “in good faith” and their intentions are not “truly oriented towards the wellbeing of citizens,”55 thus absolving citizens from any type of obedience toward them. In this case, however, one should speak more of resistance, which, in Locke’s case, is structurally different from disobedience; it is no longer the political expression of being but a “right” that one can (not one must, as was the premodern or monarcomach case) use in exceptional situations, that is, facing a “long series of abuses” that demonstrate “unequivocally” that legislators have “breached” their trust.56 In similar circumstances – and only 53 54

55 56

Ibid. J. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), http://www.constitution.org/ jl/tolerati.htm. Ibid. J. Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), XIX, section 225, http://www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtreat.htm.

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in similar circumstances57 – the people “have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.”58 In addition, not being oriented toward the restoration of a metaphysical order but toward the revolutionary transformation of any political order unable to satisfy the need and the interests of its citizens, resistance has a predominately controlling function even in this case. It aims to end the “state of war” opened by those who hold tyrannical power – who, therefore, as in Christian theology, are really the rebels or disobedient. This is how the image of the “Appeal to Heaven” is explained: it no longer has the meaning of an extraworldly legitimation of political action, because religion no longer has any political value; in the measure that resistance is done in the name of a God that only serves to institute rational politics, appealing to heaven means that resistance is legitimated only ex post, based only on its effectiveness. If it was successful, it means that it was the expression of needs that the existent political order was not able to satisfy and, therefore, legitimate; otherwise, it was only one of many unjustified “seditions” that show up periodically in the state, worthy, therefore, of having been defeated. Thus understood, resistance is substantially compatible with Hobbesian obedience that, as we have seen, found its limit in the state’s ability to survive. This is the same controlling logic of the contract that makes sovereignty impose the exceptionality of resistance: if, in fact, one admitted that it can be used “every time a wrong is done,” or if one simply thought a magistrate “has not done right,” “this will unhinge and overturn all polities, and, instead of government and order, leave nothing but anarchy and confusion.”59 The right to reappropriate the original liberty that, according to Locke, is at the base of resistance is much different than what motivated humanistic

57

58 59

“Force is to be opposed to nothing, but to unjust and unlawful force; whoever makes any opposition in any other case, draws on himself a just condemnation both from God and man” (ibid., XVIII, section 204). Ibid., XIX, section 222. Ibid., XVIII, section 203.

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or Leveller disobedience. Its effective enjoyment is irremediably compromised by the irreversible act of the institution of civil society that can never be dissolved with resistance, but only with invasion and conquest by a foreign power.60 This right can consequently only be exercised in a transitory way – its “normal” exercise must necessarily be transferred to a new authority – and has an instituent vocation, because its last and determined end is the creation of a new political institution. Therefore, even if Locke gives resistance the capacity to “throw off the yoke that weighs on them,”61 this destituent potentiality is only a lexical occurrence, probably a residual echo of Leveller thought. Locke’s resistance always assumes the form of a military conflict to conquer rights and liberty that can only be exercised and enjoyed through political institution: how to resist force without striking again, or how to strike with reverence, will need some skill to make intelligible. He that shall oppose an assault only with a shield to receive the blows, or in any more respectful posture, without a sword in his hand, to abate the confidence and force of the assailant, will quickly be at an end of his resistance, and will find such a defence serves only to draw on himself the worse usage. . . . He therefore who may resist, must be allowed to strike. . . . But to resist force with force, being the state of war that levels the parties, cancels all former relation of reverence, respect, and superiority.62

60 61 62

Ibid., XIX, section 211. Ibid., XIX, section 224. Ibid., XIX, section 235.

3 Disobedience in the Age of Revolutions

3.1. Disobedience and Colonial Power With the affirmation of modern rationalism, disobedience stopped being discussed and criticized as a “sin” and became, after nearly a century of civil war and widespread social conflict, an intrinsically political problem. However, this also made disobedience a difficult “stumbling-block” for the full affirmation of the state and the need for order concentrated in it.1 In the refusal to follow orders, acknowledge authority, or respect the law (which are the main modalities of political expression in disobedience), this constitutive dimension of modern liberty is always alluded to – the absence of external impediments, Hobbes’s “no stop in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do”2 – and modern political theory must deactivate it so that an ordered cohabitation is possible within the state. However, the social contract is not able to completely eliminate it. Baruch Spinoza, an anomalous rationalist, pointed out in a contractual perspective that obedience is always the rational and necessary fruit of an “internal disposition of the soul,” of the “constant will to execute that, which by law is good, 1

2

J. Harrington, “The Stumbling-Block of Disobedience and Rebellion,” in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 567–77. T. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chapter XXI, http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/ phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-contents.html.

55

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and by the general decree ought to be done.”3 Consequently, an absolute sovereignty – in which everyone has to completely obey the supreme authority and absolutely follow all of its orders – would only be possible in the absence of the state, that is, without transferring natural individual rights to a third party, in a “democracy” where political society is the result of common participation and self-organization of individual potencies. It is only in this case that obedience is not an “abject slavery,”4 because “no one can ever so utterly transfer to another his power and, consequently, his rights, as to cease to be a man.”5 However, this “union of all men” only exists as “pure theory.” In reality, law is always the expression of force, in its capacity to obtain the consent of the majority of subjects until “the fear and respect” of sovereign power become “indignation.” For these same reasons, “resistance” can be applied to exceptional situations in purely abstract terms. Resistance is not, in fact, a question of civil law but of natural law (“law of war”); it is the liberty “of not being one’s own enemy” (i.e., defending and withdrawing oneself, by all means necessary), for a sovereign whose ambitions for domination tend to transcend the limit of what the subjects will tolerate (variable over time and according to the context). Outside the chimeric invention of pure contractual theory, resistance is therefore always disobedience, an integral and immanent part of democratic process, the collective body’s way of being virtuous and rational, and through which the permanent (and necessary – unless politics is to become a desert populated by sheep or automa) relation of tension between exercising sovereignty and the moltitudinis potentia’s instances of self-preservation is kept alive.6 3

4

5 6

B. Spinoza, Political Treatise (1677), section 19, http://www.constitution.org/bs/ poltr-00.htm. B. Spinoza, Theologico-political Treatise (1670), chapter XVII, http://www .fullbooks.com/A-Theologico-Political-Treatise-Part-I.html. Ibid., chapter XVII. On the theme of resistance in Spinoza, see L. Bove, La strategia del conatus. Affermazione e resistenza in Spinoza (Milan: Ghibli, 2002), esp. 259–321. See also A. Illuminati, Spinoza disobbediente, in Spinoza: individuo e moltitudine, ed. R. Caporali, V. Morfino and S. Visentin (Italy, Cesena: Il ponte vecchio, 2007), 203–13. Even though there are not enough elements to prove with certainty that Spinoza was familiar with La Bo´etie’s Discourse, there are doubtless many elements in common between the two arguments. On this, see S. Visentin, Potere

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To overcome this internal obstacle, modern political theory coupled the contract with another strategy for the neutralization of disobedience: externalizing it outside the confines of the state. Before Hobbes elaborated his theory of sovereignty and the transformation of internal conflict into war between sovereign states (which, in itself, is a form of externalization), English political authorities practiced the exportation of disobedience to the other side of the Atlantic through the forced service in colonial expeditions of criminals, dissidents, and other dissenting, “monstrous” figures as a necessary and privileged measure to sedate the proliferation of rebellion and protest at home. “The surest way to prevent seditions,” wrote Francis Bacon, among others, “is to take away the matter of them.”7 Beginning with the Beggar Act of 1597, the American colonies (as well as Ireland) became a political tool to “remove from the cities” this “seditious matter,” veritable “openair prisons” where England’s “faulty multitude” could be deported and forced to work.8 If, on a historical level, this externalization can be considered substantially realized in England with the Restoration of Charles II, on a theoretical level, its first clear formulation can be found in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government, in which the colonial dimension of politics – operating outside the law and according to the survival of the fittest – gives form to liberal sovereignty, like a mirror that reflects the intrinsic superiority of the state. Unlike Europe’s civil governments, Locke explains, order is always the result of a “conquest” in the colonial context; political power is therefore “purely despotic” and acts “arbitrarily.” Because it is not the fruit of the reciprocal consensus of those who constitute the community over which it exercises its authority, colonial power

7

8

´ del nome e potere del linguaggio. Il “Discorso sulla servitu` volontaria” di Etienne de La Bo´etie, in “Isonomia,” 2007. F. Bacon, Of Sedition and Troubles (1607), in The Essays or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. M. Kiernan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 45. A. R. Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). See also P. Linebaugh and M. Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000), 40–41.

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“has no title to the subjection and obedience,” even when it is exercised by a “legitimate conqueror.” Its power – exactly like that of the “winner of an unjust war” – is comparable to the “law of authority” of brigands or pirates, who “extort” binding promises from men using pure force and “punish little ones, to keep them in their obedience.” The only difference is that these “great robbers . . . are rewarded with laurels and triumphs, because they are too big for the weak hands of justice in this world, and have the power in their own possession, which should punish offenders.”9 For Hobbes, this specificity of colonial power was not yet so clear and evident. He, too, acknowledged the despotic nature of “sovereignty by acquisition” through conquest. However, he thought the “rights and consequences” of this kind of sovereignty were the same as in “sovereignty by institution.” Even in this case, it is fear that motivates obedience. The only difference is the fact that, here, one obeys for fear of those who subjugate, while in the first case, this happens “for fear of one another.”10 Hence colonial power is based on “voluntary servitude”: it is not victory that gives the right to the conqueror over the conquered but the “pact” following the conquest with which the vanquished consigns and submits to the vanquisher, acknowledging and authorizing anything he does to keep his life in return. “And in case the master [the sovereign by acquisition], if he refuse, kill him, or cast him into bonds, or otherwise punish him for his disobedience, he is himself the author of the same, and cannot accuse him of injury.”11 However, for Locke, this explanation is inconsistent: even if one admits that the conquered consensually submit, one would still have to consider “whether promises extorted by force, without right, can be thought consent, and how far they bind,” because “the law of nature . . . cannot oblige me by the violation of her rules: such is the extorting any thing from me by force.”12 Plus, it could also be added that, in this case, the scenario proposed by

9

10 11 12

J. Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), XVI, section 176, http://www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtreat.htm. Hobbes, Leviathan, XX. Ibid. Locke, Second Treaties, XVI, section 186.

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Hobbes assumes the sovereign’s participation in the pact, whereas in the case of institutional sovereignty, obedience and irresistibility were determined precisely by its extraneousness. “From all which it follows, that the government of a conqueror, imposed by force on the subdued, against whom he had no right of war . . . has no obligation upon them.”13 In the colonial context, one therefore cannot speak of an “appeal to heaven” if not in a purely nominal sense because, at least in potency, the appeal is always effective and does not need any specific justification. In fact, “whatsoever another gets from me by force, I still retain the right of, and he is obliged presently to restore.”14 Obedience depends exclusively on the conqueror’s ability to force, “with a sword at their breasts,” the conquered “to stoop to his conditions, and submit to such a government as he pleases to afford them.” Nevertheless, this “right of sovereignty” falls “as soon as God shall give those under their subjection courage and opportunity” to throw off their yoke.15 Recognizing this legitimate immanence of disobedience in colonial contexts was, for Locke, “the best fence against rebellion, and the probablest means to hinder it” in state contexts.16 In his opinion, historical evidence demonstrates that “the people generally ill treated, and contrary to right” and that “are made miserable” are ready “upon any occasion to ease themselves of a burden that sits heavy upon them,”17 because “the will of man [is] inwardly obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience.”18 To make men obedient and thus renounce their natural inclination to disobedience, that they “got out of their old forms [of government]” and only “hardly to be prevailed with to amend the acknowledged faults in the frame they have been accustomed to,”19 it is therefore necessary that they consider this new political structure – the state – a place where they are guaranteed exceptional conditions of security and protection. The invention of the colonial difference 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Ibid., XVI, section 187. Ibid., XVI, section 186. Ibid., XVI, section 196. Ibid., XIX, section 226. Ibid., XIX, section 224. Ibid., XI, section 135, note. Ibid., XIX, section 223.

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serves this goal: “in the beginning,” in fact, “all the world was America,”20 a colony, an undisciplined space bestride by domination and attempts to withdraw from it. The state is the way in which modern civilized (European) man tried to escape this destiny, to resist “so great a part of the history of mankind,”21 substituting the dangerous ideal of (natural) liberty with the protective reality of (civil) security. As an exception – fruit of an enormous effort of Reason to change the nature of power and political relations between people – the state can require exceptional conditions of obedience, the only circumstances that can guarantee citizens the certainty of property (which is the property of their own body in the first place) and security under the law. If in the colonial world a lack of obedience is a response to “usurpation” and the absence of law on which political power rests, under the state, it is necessary that “tyranny,” “private” governing of public questions and the abandonment of the collective will for order – the need to be ordered incarnated in “legislative power” – give life to state policy.22 It does not matter if the state effectively succeeds in its exceptional security function; as Max Weber would later clarify, to make it binding and “legitimate,” one simply has to believe in it.23 3.2. A Disobedient Revolution The main effect of the spatial differentiation introduced by Locke in his Second Treatise was the progressive semantic stiffening of the modern political lexicon that, originally able to indifferently contain all of the different modes of expressing and naming radical dissent under the category of resistance, was forced to disassemble it into geographical and conceptual forms irreducible to one another. Disobedience (understood as the spectral immanence of the natural liberty to refuse political authority) meant defining the conflictual and “wild” world of the colonies as something different

20 21 22 23

Ibid., V, section 49. Ibid., XVI, section 175. Ibid., XVIII, section 199. M. Weber, Economy and Society (1922), 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), I: 212–16.

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from “revolution” (understood as an exceptional and artificial shift of the existing order), to progressively rise to an adequate mode of articulating radical dissent under state order (i.e., in accordance with the same logic that governs modern sovereignty). The full affirmation of sovereign logic and the end of the period of civil war coincided with the growing marginalization of disobedience, its de facto disappearance from the great European intellectual debates, and its karst survival in the fluid space of the maritime routes of pirates and in the mutiny of the Atlantic naval proletariat. This all before finding its own theoretical dignity in the United States that, in virtue of its constitutive “two-ness,” being at once “Americans yet feeling European; of being provincial but yearning for British cosmopolitanism, of being at once incompletely civilized and naturally prosperous,” made disobedience the mythopoeic foundation of every political thought that aimed at being radical, starting with the Declaration of Independence.24 Conversely, American politics would have had difficulty functioning on the same principles of modern sovereignty. English colonial America was in fact a political space that was everything but pacified. Born from charters with which the king conceded territories through the “right of discovery” and “regal prerogative” to individuals or shareholding companies so that they could utilize them in monopolistic systems, while also conceding to property holders the right to emigrate British subjects and govern them respecting the liberty and traditional English rights, the colonies were both commercial ventures and self-governed political organisms that directly depended on the king. This sui generis nature made colonial North America a structurally polycentric construction where frequent tensions and conflicts arose both against the Crown (the most noted is certainly the 1676 revolt led by Nathaniel Bacon against the governor of Virginia)25 and, above all, after the 24

25

C. West, The Ignobile Paradox of Modernity, in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 58. The concept of “two-ness” is used by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to describe the fundamental characteristics of Afro-American culture, thus in his opinion it is the “truest” interpreter of the American “human spirit.” Narrative of the Insurrections 1675 to 1690, ed. C. Andrews (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915).

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end of the Glorious Revolution, against the British Parliament (such as in the case of the protests against the Stamp Act of 1765).26 Along with these so-called institutional conflicts, there were internal social tensions in the colonies (above all with the African American slave communities and the native populations), which often led to rebellion and acts of disobedience.27 From the point of view of theory, the progressive distancing from the English constitutional tradition can be observed in prerevolutionary America in favor of a public discourse that was ever more colonial, to the point that the Declaration of Independence can be reasonably considered the political manifesto of the first colonial revolt against a colonializing power.28 For example, at the time of the Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers, presented in 1750 by Jonathan Mayhew for the anniversary of the regicide of Charles I and considered by revolutionary Americans as the “preparation” of the “republican spirit” later merged into the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the (Puritan) Christian doctrine over the limits of political obedience still overlapped the Lockean theory of the right to resistance without contradictions:29 no civil government – Mayhew explains – must be obeyed when it benefits from things that are “inconsistent with the commands of god”; in these cases, disobedience is “lawful and glorious,” because the only rational terrain for the institution and the subjection to civil government is collective security and usefulness. In fact, authority is “originally a trust” and depends “on a great degree of implicit confidence.” When those

26

27

28 29

On this argument, see the classic contribution of P. Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Vintage Books, 1972). T. Bonazzi, Introduzione a La dichiarazione di indipendenza degli Stati Uniti d’America (1776) (Italy, Venezia: Marsilio, 1999), 34–40, and A. Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2002). Bonazzi, Introduzione, 34. J. Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers. With some Reflections on the Resistance Made to King Charles I and on the Anniversary of His Death: In Which the Mysterious Doctrine of That Prince’s Saintship and Martyrdom Is Unriddled (Boston: Fowle, 1750), http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi? article=1044&context=etas.

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who hold authority abuse this allegiance “to such a degree, that neither the law of reason, nor of religion” can justify subjection to them, they must then be “totally discarded” and their authority “transferred” to others who can better exercise the good intentions for which that trust was conferred. If Locke individuated the legitimacy of this act of resistance in its final success, here, instead, facing open conflict, it is given by the sole fact of existing as a collective and general political phenomenon: if it is true that, besides a few important exceptions, citizens do not have a “seditious character” but rather have a generally passive disposition and submissiveness toward their governors (“as it should be”), and that “till people find themselves greatly abused and oppressed by their governors,” they are not apt to rebel, then it is just as true that every mass resistance is consequently legitimate ex ante because the people are “its own judge.”30 For as much as themes that will later become typical of revolutionary rhetoric are effectively found (e.g., the appeal to “common sense”), Mayhew’s argument remains rather traditional. Rather traditional even when, just before the protest against the Stamp Act, he abandoned the invocation to obedience to the “rightful” King of England and instead called for mobilization against the usurpations of the “colony’s liberty” perpetrated by centralized power,31 he promotes this as “subjects of the British Crown” and therefore in the name of English liberty and constitutional rights. The claims of American revolutionaries instead found their particular radicalness in the Declaration of Independence precisely when they quit supporting their cause as English “colonies,” in the name of the principles established in the Magna Carta, and became “Americans,” a nation united as the colonialized native populations or as the African slave populations through the common experience of oppression by a “foreign power.”32 The assumption of this 30 31

32

Ibid., esp. 38–40. J. Mayhew, The Snare Broken, in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era: 1730–1805, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Found, 1998), I: 231–64. See, e.g., T. Paine, Common Sense (1776), http://www.ushistory.org/paine/ commonsense/singlehtml.htm: “Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new World hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from EVERY PART of Europe. Hither have they

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“colonial” perspective, symbolically established by the choice of the Boston Tea Party promoters’ act of sabotage disguised as Mohawk natives, deprives Lockean theory of its very foundation: the contract, which lost its original meaning as the foundational act of politics, while being immediately diluted in the figure of the allegiance that presupposed the citizens’ staunch identification in the ideals of liberty and pursuit of happiness of the American “nation” (to the point that, historically, anti-Americanism has been the most frequent accusation against internal political dissent by American authorities).33 But it also presupposes a more nuanced and less restrictive subordinate relation to political institutions and their representatives that is more subtle and less restrictive, compared not only to the social contract but also to the Lockean concept of trust. The difference is, and this was quite clear to Locke himself, that allegiance is “nothing but an obedience according to law” and that one can withdraw whenever the “public person vested with the power of law” is no longer its “representation,” as the “image, phantom, or representative of the common-wealth,” without therefore having to resort to the exceptional and “supreme power” to alter the legislative established in that trust.34 In line with the “dissident” positions of authors like Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, the idea that maintaining liberty can be the result of its original cession was considered by American revolutionaries as “folly,” because all individuals possess a “power of self-determination” that cannot be alienated without negating a qualifying element of human nature.35

33

34 35

fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster.” Or, “France and Spain never were, nor perhaps ever will be, our enemies as AMERICANS, but as our being the SUBJECTS OF GREAT BRITAIN.” The most noted case is the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947, which inaugurated the anti-Communist period of McCarthyism. More generally, see G. R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime. From the Sediction Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (London: Norton, 2004). Locke, Second Treaties, XIII, section 151. R. Price, Additional Observation on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty (London: 1777), 30, 36. In the same sense, Thomas Jefferson sustained that “the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right” or that “Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.” Letter to F. W. Gilmer of 7 June 1816, now in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 19 vols.

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The tie that binds citizens to political institutions can therefore be legitimately dissolved when it is considered opportune to do so, without necessarily implying a break from the past but simply the explicit decision to “go alone” in the pursuit of happiness. More generally, American political radicalism does not hold politics and power in terms of artifice. As Thomas Paine, who can be in many ways considered the father of American political radicalism, explains, a “great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government”; on the contrary, “society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.” By nature, every human being is social, endowed with a “system of social affections” that gives life to “that great chain of connection” that holds men together in a state of “mutual dependence and reciprocal interest” and that “positively” promotes collective happiness. Thus “all the great laws of society are laws of nature,” and “they are followed and obeyed, because it is the interest of the parties so to do, and not on account of any formal laws their governments may impose or interpose.” The “formality of government” instead operates “negatively,” as a “limit to our vices” (but, consequently, also to our liberty), and is needed only in those “few cases” where society considers delegation convenient or where it does not feel adequately competent.36 “Revolt and turmoil” are therefore always expressions of a “desire for happiness” trapped inside oppressive forms of government and do not depend on the “lack of a government” but rather on an excessive presence of it, by its functioning as a “conquering power” that can be geographically distant, like British power at the time of the American Revolution, but also an oppressive local government that, like a “band of thieves” and “ruffians,” unduly “appropriates” the natural rights and liberty of its citizens (thus contradicting the American “spirit” that should guide them).37

36

37

(Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907), X: 32 [our emphasis]. On the influence of seventeenth-century dissident English thought on American political radicalism, see S. Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). T. Paine, The Rights of Man (1791), II, http://www.ushistory.org/paine/rights/ singlehtml.htm. Ibid. The relationship with La Bo´etie’s disobedient humanism seems clear here, and there seems to be a textual confirmation of this. In fact, in Paine’s Rights

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Outside of contractual logic, the Lockean theory of the right of resistance that supports the denouncement of “a long train of abuses and usurpations” described in the Declaration of Independence is thus reduced to a mere rhetorical strategy. The “dissolution” of the political unity of the colonies and the British Crown that this resistance aims and aspires to identifies itself in a process of “separation.”38 Resistance is, in other words, a dropout, an act of defection with which, on the model of biblical Exodus, the American nation expresses its will to withdraw and “get out of” a situation held to be disadvantageous, with the goal of reappropriating the rights and liberty that it is not really allowed to exercise but that, as a natural right, does not need to be conquered or recognized by political institutions to be operated, but freed from its chains.39 However, this externality to the modern logic of disobedience does not mean that American resistance lacks a transformative ability or that it aims to restore the status quo antes, as in the case of medieval political thought. The political shift that is implied in it – the creation of the United States of America – is understood differently, as the removal of the specific circumstances that determine oppression and that serve as an obstacle to the full expression and free movement of the subjective instances that naturally animate society. 3.3. Revolution without Disobedience As much as Paine tried to interpret the American and French revolutionary experiences in the same way (and in a certain sense rightly so), as two moments of the most widespread Atlantic rebellion against the logic of the One incarnated by monarchical

38 39

of Man, he states, “The strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it, and that, in order ‘to be free, it is sufficient that he wills it,’ ” where the citation clearly seems to be taken from the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. At the same time, testifying to the ease with which this political conception finds room in nonstate contexts, we notice the significant assonance with which this way of describing the government keeps Locke’s description of colonial power. Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. On the concept of “exit,” see the classic contribution of A. O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

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power,40 at least as far as the question of disobedience is concerned, the political thought of the French Revolution followed a very different path than that of the United States, a path that even went in the opposite direction in many senses. Although the beginning of the revolutionary process can be historically located in an act of disobedience – the Tennis Court Oath with which the Third Estate refused to obey the king’s order for silence, meeting separately from the other two Estates to form a National Assembly that would deliberate and vote “for the whole nation without exception”41 – none of the people involved claimed to act in those terms. As Siey`es perfectly clarifies, only a minority can disobey, separating themselves and refusing to submit to the “will of the majority.” The Third Estate, on the contrary, claimed to represent this majority will, “that a majority cannot, as a matter of fact, separate itself from the whole,” because this would mean to “separate itself from itself,” which is conceptually impossible. For this same reason, in posing this will, the Third Estate does not need to preventatively consult the people for a hypothetical dissent because it could not be but “inexistent.”42 The distance between the two revolutionary experiences can be measured in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (both in its original 1789 version and in versions after 1793). Unlike in the American Declaration, disobedience is here considered a “guilty” form of political opposition, diverse and opposed to the “right of resistance to oppression,” which is instead codified among the fundamental and inalienable rights of the citizen. Because every form of oppression against a single citizen represents an oppression against the whole “social body,” for French revolutionaries, resistance can only be legitimately exercised by the people, understood in its unity or entirety or by the part or the party that acts in the name of and for the totality (which is the same thing), because sovereignty “rests in the people” and is “one and indivisible.” Because disobedience expresses the refusal to conform to the will

40 41

42

Paine, Rights of Man, II. E.-J. Siey`es, “What Is the Third Estate” (1789), in Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). Ibid.

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of the sovereign body, it always has a private and individual mold, even when it is exercised in a group. It “usurps” sovereignty and consequently must be punished with death by “free men.”43 This, by the way, was the great achievement of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract. Here, overturning the initial reasoning of the fathers of modern rationalism, the question of how to eliminate disobedience from politics is no longer posed. The question instead becomes how to understand the latter without having to obey anyone and, more precisely, on which bases to found and render effective “a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.”44 Just like for Spinoza, Rousseau, too, held that such a perfect association could not be the fruit of the alienation of natural liberty to a third party. At the most, this could produce an “aggregation” of men led by someone, who can be “safe on his throne” without “rebellions, wars, or conspirators to fear” only if, like Adam or Robinson Crusoe, he is “sovereign of a world,” where he is the only inhabitant. In such a context, in fact, disobedience is not a duty but an “act of necessity,” exclusively determined by the force of he who holds power, so that, “as soon as it is possible to disobey with impunity, disobedience is legitimate.”45 Under the “supreme direction” of the general will – the legitimate (because originating in the social contract), fair (because common to all), useful (because necessarily oriented toward the common good), and solid (because holding public force) pooling “without reserve” of each individual and all his or her power – disobedience ceases to be a political problem: until the subjects are put under such a convention, “they obey no-one but their own will.”46 In this case, it makes no sense to interrogate, like Mably did, the limits of sovereign power and citizens’ duty to

43

44

45 46

See L. Jaume, Les D´eclarations des droits de l’homme (du d´ebat de 1789–1793 au Pr´eambule de 1946) (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1989). J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract or The Politics of Right (1762), http://www. constitution.org/jjr/socon.txt. Ibid. Ibid.

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it,47 because that would mean asking “up to what point the latter can enter into undertakings with themselves,” annihilating the general will itself this way. Despite it being “impossible to be too careful to observe, in such cases, all the formalities necessary to distinguish a regular and legitimate act from a seditious tumult, and the will of a whole people from the clamour of a faction,”48 no limit to the people’s obedience to their government exists. If “the people promises simply to obey” someone, they would “bind itself for the future” to their will, consequently losing their quality as “the people” and dissolving themselves, since “the moment a master exists, there is no longer a Sovereign.”49 The people can thus “name” and “dispose of” their governments “at will,” without undermining the sovereignty of the state in any way or jeopardizing the social order (as Hobbes and Locke feared and, on different bases, as the defenders of the ancien r´egime did as well). In fact, the institution of government is not a contract but a “law,” an act through which the general will determines the “conditions of civil association” that therefore, like any other law – even the fundamental one that institutes society – can be revoked by the people. Though immanent to politics, this destituent action is, however, not disobedience. It is rather understood as an answer to the disobedience of the prince or magistrate: “the depositaries of the executive power are not the people’s masters, but its officers.” Hence “there is no question of contract” with the people, “but of obedience,” 47

48 49

“[W]e are convinced, as on an incontestable truth, that the citizen must obey the magistrate, and the magistrate the laws. . . . But since men have always tended toward tyranny or the service of their passions and since they are mean or stupid enough to make absurd and unjust laws, what other solution can we apply to that evil if not disobedience? Some troubles will be born; but why be afraid? These troubles are themselves proof that we love order and that we want to reestablish it. Blind obedience is, on the contrary, proof that the stupid citizen is indifferent to good and evil; from that moment, what do you think to hope for? The man who thinks, works to affirm the domination of reason; the man that obeys without thinking throws himself to servitude, because he favors the power of passions.” G. B. Mably, Des doits et devoirs du citoyen (1791) (Paris: Bureaux de la publication, 1791), 103–4 [our translation], http://www.archive.org/stream/desdroitsetdesd00mablgoog#page/n7/mode/ 2up. Rousseau, Social Contract. Ibid.

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since “in taking charge of the functions the State imposes on them they are doing no more than fulfilling their duty as citizens, without having the remotest right to argue about the conditions.”50 In the same way and for the same reasons, just as it is impossible “for the Sovereign to impose on itself a law which it cannot infringe,” nor is it possible to think that the single citizen (or a fraction of citizens) can legitimately disobey the general will. Tacitly provided in the social pact is the agreement that “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body.” This is the only way that this pact is not a vain formula: not being formed by the single elements that compose it, the sovereign body “neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs,” “is always what it should be,” and “need give no guarantee to its subjects.” Therefore, when an individual manifests a will contrary to or different from the general will, he quits being a citizen and acts as a private “man” that jeopardizes “the key to the working of the political machine” that “alone legitimises civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful abuses.” However, oppression can only be formally spoken of in this case, because “obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty” and “the essence of the body politic lies in the reconciliation of obedience and liberty.”51 As such, the disinterest of revolutionary France for the theme of disobedience comes at no surprise. Where the term is occasionally mentioned, such as in a few of the public speeches of Honor´e de Mirabeau, it is always in a relatively traditional way to describe the kings’ “criminal” behavior.52 When the struggle against oppression is proudly argued in terms of disobedience – as in Babeuf and his followers’ case, who refused to obey the 1795 Constitution, illegitimately imposed by the Directory, that had “robbed the people of the inalienable right to change their constitution and sanction laws” – the duty to absolute obedience to every constitution (like the precedent one in 1973 that was never applied) “freely accepted” 50 51 52

Ibid. Ibid. H. G. de Mirabeau, Discours et opinions de Mirabeau, I (Paris: Kleffer, 1820).

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by the people was, however, consensually and “with no doubt” reiterated.53 For the same reason, it is not surprising that after the affirmation of the “new order of things,” this disinterest in disobedience transformed into an explicit aversion to it. “Ending the revolution” meant essentially removing the persisting disobedience from the new republican political space. This could be done, according to Condorcet, through a legal regulation of the “resistance to oppression” that foresees the form of a “right to censure” and even the use of legal means to disobey laws held to be unjust,54 or, like the Jacobins who deviated from Rousseau’s contractualism and understood revolution as an open process with no clear end,55 encouraging politics “by the sword.” The job of the revolution – as Louis de Saint-Just explains during the work of the Public Health Committee – is to eliminate all “rebel parties” and “clean the state of the conspiracies that infest it.”56 Because it is an intrinsically political act (i.e., oriented toward defeating an enemy), the revolution aims at peace, the overcoming of the “political state” and the disjunctive logic that “alters” society’s natural harmony and the original homogeneity among men. It is therefore the bringer of a need for order against all “factions,” against every group or component of society that does not identify with it and does not fully conform to the unanimous and unitary manifestation of the French people’s revolutionary will. Consequently, “the government doesn’t have to be revolutionary only against the aristocracy, but also against those who steal from soldiers, who deprive the army with their insolence

53

54

55

56

P. Buonarroti, Conspiration pour l’´egalit´e, dite de Babeuf, 2 vols. (Bruxelles: Librairie Romantique, 1828), II: 181–85 [our translation]. L. Jaume, Condorcet: droit de r´esistance ou censure du peuple?, in Le droit de r´esistance a` l’oppression, ed. D. Gros and O. Camy (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 59–71. “The social state is in no way derived from a convention, and the art of founding . . . a society through a pact or with the modifications of force is instead the best way to destroy society.” L. A. de Saint-Just, De la nature, in Oeuvres compl`etes, ed. A. Kupiec and M. Abensour (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 1043 [our translation]. L. A. de Saint-Just, Rapport sur le gouvernement and Rapport sur les personnes incarc´er´es, in Oeuvres compl`etes, 629 and 670 [our translation].

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and who, wasting public funds, throw the people back to slavery and the empire to its dissolution and unhappiness.”57 Hence it does not matter if they are “indulgent” or “enraged”; those who disobey are “conspirators” and, as such, comparable to the king – “rebel and usurper,” “guilty of the last class of humanity, that of oppressors.” Like the latter, a disobedient, too, cannot therefore be “judged” as a citizen, according to the measure of civil law, but as a “foreigner” and an “enemy of the revolution” (and of humankind), to be condemned to death and destroyed according to the principles of the Law of Nations.58 To lighten the negative effects of the Reign of Terror, which soon appeared evident to Saint-Just himself,59 it was necessary to couple (and progressively substitute) repressive strategy with a “revolutionary system” articulated in “institutions” that have the job of profoundly and perfectly “moralizing” society, forging the “virtue” and “habit” of the people for the respect of republican principles. The weakening of the revolutionary momentum demonstrated, in fact, that the Terror could be useful to “get rid of the monarchy and the aristocracy,” but along with obedience, it also brought the people’s “indifference and disaffection.”60 Conversely, “it isn’t clear what it means to obey laws”: “the law is almost always nothing but the will of those who wish to impose it” to “punish despotism” and “exercis[e] a will over the people that is external to them.” Instead, obedience should be constructed, intervening in all aspects of the citizen’s life, from domestic life and sexual relations to religion and public celebrations. In fact, “where man obeys without being convinced that it is good to do so, there is no liberty nor patriotism.”61 57 58

59

60

61

Saint-Just, Rapport sur le gouvernement, 641 [our translation]. L. A. de Saint-Just, Discours sur le jugement de Louis XIV, in Oeuvres compl`etes, 475–500 [our translation]. L. A. de Saint-Just, Discours du 9 thermidor an II, in Oeuvres compl`etes, 769– 85 [our translation]. A. Soboul, Les san-culottes parisiens en l’an II. Mouvement populaire et gouvernement r´evolutionnaire (Paris: Clavreuil, 1962), 863. Also, D. Gu´erin, La lutte de classe sous la Premi`ere R´epublique (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 329 [our translation]. L. A. de Saint-Just, Fragments sur les institutions r´epublicaines, in Oeuvres compl`etes, 1136 [our translation].

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3.4. Disobedience after the Revolution In Germany, where the French Revolution stimulated a long reflection on the right to resistance that continued up until the constitutional debates of the Weimar period,62 the need to find an “institutional” solution for the lasting disobedience even after the end of the revolution coincided with the definition of the Rechtsstaat.63 The most attentive commentators of the time were quite clear that the “violent changes,” the “serious tremors,” and the “social upheavals” in neighboring France had transformed the principles of disobedient modernity into an irreversible historical reality. As a young Fichte explained, those events were an “evident example” – before which the princes of Europe were “still trembling” – of the end of “barbarous times,” when some dared to maintain, in the name of God, that the people were a “flock of sheep” put on earth to faithfully serve the paternalistic authority of the sovereign “like beasts of burden” and “cannon fodder.” After the French Revolution, no people believed that they had to naturally obey their masters anymore or that political association depended on necessary controls to obtain peace that would otherwise be unreachable. Instead, they believed that political association depended on the free will of those who obey and therefore on “culture,” on the constant work of all individuals to favor reciprocal relations. They learned that the force of the power holders lay in their “arms,” hence “if they decide to let them fall, they stay there, miserable and without aid.”64 62

63

64

An example is the formulation of an “ethical” law of resistance proposed by H. Heller in his Staatslehre (Berlin: Mohr, 1983). G. Tonella, Il problema del diritto di resistenza. Saggio sullo Staatsrecht Tedesco della fine Settecento (Napoli: Esi, 2007). J. G. Fichte, Rivendicazione della liberta` di pensiero dai principi dell’Europa che l’hanno finora calpestata, in Sulla rivoluzione francese (Bari: Laterza, 1966), 11 [our translation]. [Translator’s note: Very few translations of J. G. Fichte’s works are available in English. Here we have translated from the Italian versions noted. In English, see J. H. Fichte, 3 vols., Bonn, 1834; complete works, ed. J. H. Fichte, 8 vols., 1845–46. Fichte’s Popular Works, trans. W. Smith, 4th ed., London, 1889. A. F. Kroeger, The Science of Knowledge (translations of the ¨ Grundlage der gesammien Wissenschaftslehre, Grundriss des Eigenthumlichen der Wissenschaftslehre, etc.), London, 1889; The Science of Rights (trans. of Naturrecht), 1889. See also the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. On Fichte,

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However, the point was to understand how to create this “culture of liberty,” the highest end of any political association, the only thing that can guarantee lasting obedience: though seemingly secure owing to its ability to change society from above and without disorder, a reformist strategy – a “gradual proceeding . . . toward improving the political constitution” practiced by the illuminated German sovereigns – is not a plausible solution. “The dignity of liberty,” in fact, “must come from the bottom up.” As the recently published texts from the Prussian government against the liberty of expression demonstrate, the advances made through reform always depend on the will of who is in power and therefore risk a return to the “ancient castles of brigands” as soon as the needs of power demand it. Conversly, the revolution is “an audacious shot for humanity” that, if successful, “fully compensates the inconvenience caused” but that, if unsuccessful, precipitates society into “worse and worse misery.”65 But above all, for Fichte, the revolution is closer to disobedience than the French revolutionaries wanted to admit, because the “constituent” capacity that it was justly attributed to found its foundation of legitimacy in a principle that is instead destituent: the “right to leave the state” that every individual possesses and can exercise “when he wishes” and for “as long as he wishes” without the state having “any right to complain about the violation of a contract or speak of ingratitude.”66 For Fichte, in essence, revolution is not anything but the collective and contextual exercise of this individual right to withdraw from state authority: if one person can withdraw from the state, so can many. Now, these people meet, one in relation to the other and in relation to the state that they left, under pure and simple natural right. If those that left want to come more

65

66

see J. H. Lowe, Die Philosophie Fichte’s, Stuttgart, 1862; Adamson, Fichte ¨ (Blackwood’s Philosophical Classics), London, 1881; C. C. Everett, Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (Griggs’ Philosophical Classics), Chicago, 1884; F. Zimmer, J. G. Fichte’s Religionsphilosophie, Berlin, 1878; and especially the fifth volume of K. Fischer’s History of Philosophy.] J. G. Fichte, Rivendicazione della liberta` di pensiero dai principi dell’Europa che l’hanno finora calpestata, 6 [our translation]. J. G. Fichte, Contributi per rettificare il giudizio del pubblico sulla rivoluzione francese, in Sulla rivoluzione francese, 161 [our translation].

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closely together among themselves and draw up a new social contract for the conditions that please them, they have the full right to do so, with the force of the natural law that they are under. Thus a new state has been born. . . . Lastly, if the ancient union doesn’t have any more adherents and everyone has voluntarily turned to the new, then the whole revolution has been legitimately accomplished.67

So, the only terrain on which the free will to favor reciprocal cohabitation can grow and flourish in a lasting way, safe from the uncertainties of popular rebellion and the mixed moods of the powerful, is the definition of a legal–institutional framework where the “ordinary” exercise of the right to resistance can be collocated, thus depriving its destituent dimension of any subversive implication. At least for a certain period, for Fichte, this legal– institutional framework coincided with the recovery of the ephor system within the modern tradition of natural law, where ephor is intended as a “negative” power (right to veto) to defend the community (Germeine).68 In doing so, he thought he had expunged any semblance of rebellion against the state from disobedience: “the people are never rebellious, and using the term rebellion is nonsense.”69 Rebels and disobedient subjects can only be the executive, those who unsuccessfully conduct subjects to reestablish a violated right, or possibly the ephors themselves when they do not adequately exercise their control function. Because the people are the maximum political instance, with no one else above them, when they rise up, it is always right, because this is the word of the legitimate sovereign. However, the people exist as such in their constitutional representation, that is, when the community transfers its power to a representative. Therefore, in every case, it is an “uprising for law” that can exclusively express itself in the election of a new representative or new ephors.70 During the same period, Paul Johann Anselm Feuerbach, father of the author of The Essence of Christianity and the main protagonist of the 1813 Bavarian Penal Code, posed the same question 67 68 69 70

Ibid., 162 and 168 [our translation]. The Science of Rights, 1889. Ibid., 161. M. Ricciardi, Rivoluzione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), 117–18.

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on other bases, maintaining the necessity to abandon the “moral” and “philosophical” terrain of rights, which had been the basis for the discussion of disobedience up until that time, and adopt a “scientific” and “rigorous” concept of law, thus emancipating it from the philosophers who, “seduced by the voice of the people,” had identified the foundation of the legitimacy of resistance and disobedience to the sovereign in “hard and strong concentrations of happiness.” Because the “increase in taxes or duties,” the “introduction of stamp duties,” or even “edicts against long beards or against the introduction of raised brimmed hats” (as in the case of the Spanish rebellion against Charles III) were historically “the usual causes that pushed the people to disobedience and resistance against their legitimate sovereigns,” the principle of happiness is, in his opinion, “the least adept to justify the disobedience of subjects and the overturning of the state,” because “civil consensus” is not obtained for the love of happiness – the pursuit of which is a particular goal of each single individual – but to “live peacefully and freely.” At the same time, it is not possible to determine when a limitation over happiness is acceptable, either generally or specifically, and therefore “when the subject is authorized to disobedience and resistance against the sovereign, and when he is not,” because once again, this evaluation is absolutely personal and, from a “civil” point of view, always arbitrary.71 To prevent a community from continually oscillating between despotism and rebellion, disobedience must instead be discussed along the lines of a “constitutional pact” (pactum ordinationis civilis) with which civil society is “organized” and effectively transformed into the “complete guarantee of reciprocal liberty” identified in the state.72 The “civil pact” (pactum unionis civilis) that generates sovereignty and the “contract of subjugation” (pactum subjectionis) that confers the right to guide the popular will of all individuals toward the common end of a civil society to a physical or moral person only acquire real cogency when an 71

72

P. J. A. Feuerbach, Anti-Hobbes (1798) (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2009), 51– 53 [our translation]. Ibid., 32–33 [our translation].

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“organizational will” that interprets the social contract is present. Observed and discussed from this angle, the determination of the legitimacy of disobedience is taken from the individual and entirely depends on the “self-decision,” founded “in immutable legal principle” that establishes which sovereign actions must be recognized and obeyed as the decisions common to all citizens and how to protect society from those that are not.73 The theoretical opposition between those who, like Immanuel Kant, considered the recognition of the people’s right to resistance inside a constitution that held the people as the supreme authority as contradictory and those who, like Ludwig Heinrich Jakob, considered the unconditional disobedience to the sovereign and the moral system elaborated by Kant himself as contradictory was also overcome.74 The contract of subjugation gave the sovereign “the right to unconditional choice, fully valid, [and] the means to reach the goal of the state,” including the right of coercion to obedience. In virtue of such a contract, subjects are therefore obliged to obey the sovereign without any exception and, if they want to “withdraw from its commands and dispositions or resist them with the force of arms,” the sovereign can make them obey and punish them as rebels.75 However, this does not mean giving the sovereign unlimited power. The sovereign is, in fact, “the exercise of supreme power in a way that conforms to the general will.” Even if present in a specific physical or moral figure, the sovereign is the organizing will of the state, “by means of which the legal situation is founded.” So, it does not have body or form. Subjects are only held to absolutely obey this impersonal force. The sovereign’s “visible” figure (which can only be improperly defined as such) is “beyond any responsibility” only when it acts in accordance with the “invisible will of society”; instead, when it acts contrarily, such as in the case of an operation to destroy the state, “it cannot expect neither obedience nor inviolability in relation to 73 74

75

Ibid., 118 [our translation]. ¨ I. Kant, Uber den Gemeinspruch: das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt ¨ die Praxis (1793), in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VIII, 273–313; aber nicht fur ¨ ¨ L. H. Jakob, Antimachiavel oder uber die Grenzen des burgerlichen Gehorsams (Halco: Halle, 1794). Feuerbach, Anti-Hobbes, 44–45 [our translation].

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the constituent act.” In this case, it acts as a person and private citizen: therefore when a nation rises because of the violation of fundamental pacts, it doesn’t offend the sovereign majesty, nor is it rebel to the supreme power. . . . In fact, fundamental pacts and the social objective are the limits of sovereign power established by the general will, and beyond them there are neither sovereigns nor subjects, neither the right to command nor the duty to obey.76

But if the subject is not held to obey a sovereign that does not operate as an organ of the general will, he can also legitimately resist with force: every right, and therefore also the right of not obeying, is connected to a coercive right. A right that I can’t affirm through force is not a right. . . . Facing every offender is the coercive right of the offense. Thus he is facing the sovereign, when he offends his own people.77

With this reformulation of disobedience as a “coercive right,” Feuerbach – who had also moved against Hobbes – completed the Hobbesian transformation of disobedience into a mere question of public order, inside a theoretical framework that, although fully secularized, claimed to be objectively normative. He explains that, when expressed through the exercise of this particular right, disobedience must be considered a (legitimate) way to articulate the “coercive power of the state”; it is an impersonal function of sovereignty, therefore, that participates in its preservation against the private will of its subjects (in this case, against the subject that is the private person of the sovereign), in that it keeps the objective through which society becomes the state: the reciprocal liberty of all. In this case, the disobedience of the subjects is so little in contradiction with the sovereign’s coercive power – toward which “no disobedience and no insurrection can take place” – that even the right to punish the sovereign, the right to impose penalties on him, can be recognized.78 In all other cases, when manifested in the 76 77 78

Ibid., 73–74 [our translation]. Ibid., 81 [our translation]. Ibid., 102, 126 [our translation].

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form of “treachery,” “conspiracy,” “rebellion,” or “uprising,” disobedience is a criminal act subject to the same coercive and judicial power of the state. So, at the end of a long, internal process of revision, just as the contract has become a superfluous fact (in Feuerbach, it is still present but is totally dissolved into the conciliatory force of the rule of law), modern political theory seems to have finally reached its objective, definitively depriving disobedience of any intrinsically political element and confining it as a specific material object of criminal and judicial law. Dialectic thought does not even have to discuss it critically anymore (but the same thing could be said, on different grounds, for decisionistic thought, too). If it is true, as Hegel explains, that “a reality is the realization of the free will, this is what is meant by a right” in the state, and that when this doesn’t occur, an individual “is not obliged” and “no right or duty exists,” it is also true that when there are similar circumstances – that is, when the development of the spirit is objectively contradictory to existent institutions or when it faces a figure that, owing to its social condition, is totally external to the material constitution of the state (like when the plebe rebels against the order that takes the indispensable minimum from it to guarantee its existence) – a “revolution of the constitution” is usually seen. However, this revolution has nothing to do with disobedience, not even indirectly, because it coincides with the empirical indication of the dissolution of the political body and with the institution of a new order.79 The only exception to this dialectical oblivion of disobedience is provided, in a certain sense, by Marx. In the last chapter of Book I of Capital, where he talks about the capitalist processes in the colonizing of the United States and the “social function” that the “frontier” played in them before the Civil War in 1861, he sees the widespread tendency of North American immigrants to leave the factory after a short period to become “free” cultivators in the western territories as an extraordinary phenomenon of labor 79

¨ G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen uber die Rechtsphilosophie (Stuttgart-BadCannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1973) I: 197–99. Thus we cannot support the position of M. Tunick (“Hegel on Justified Disobedience,” Political Theory 4 (1998): 514–35), where it is possible to dig out a justification for legitimate disobedience in Hegelian legal philosophy.

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struggles founded both on the circumvention of the roles established by the logic of capital and the continuous withdrawal from the reigns of wage labor: in the colonies . . . the law of supply and demand of labour falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and – abstinence; on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage labourer as wage labourer comes into collision with impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of wage labourers into independent producers, who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the capitalist gentry, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions of the labour-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage labourer remain indecently low. The wage labourer loses into the bargain, along with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious capitalist.80

However, even in Marx, this feverish and systematic form of the “desertion” of labor market rules is never explicitly described as disobedience – remaining a disorganized (and therefore weak) form of struggle throughout Marxist thought – but quite “scientifically” as a revolutionary change in power relations between classes.81 3.5. Postcolonial Disobedience Marx’s use of the United States as a specific and determined place of forms of workers’ struggle that, without being named as such, are clear expressions of disobedience is not by chance. The problem of how to “end the revolution” and bring order back to society was also posed in the United States. For instance, answering his wife, Abigail, who, after the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, invited him to “remember the ladies,” otherwise “determined to foment a rebellion,” John Adams affirmed, “Our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; the children and apprentices were disobedient, the school and colleges 80

81

K. Marx, Capital (1867), Book I, XXXIII, http://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf, 539. P. Virno, Esercizi di esodo. Linguaggio e azione politica (Verona: Ombre corte, 2002), 177–82.

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grown turbulent, that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters.”82 Unlike postrevolutionary Europe, the United States adopted a strategy to normalize disobedience that was deliberately noninstitutional and “discursive,” through positively inserting it into the grand narrative of the exceptionalism of American liberty. As Thomas Jefferson explained in 1787 during the famers’ rebellion in Massachusetts, led by Daniel Shays,83 The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere. . . . Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietam servitutem. (I prefer adventurous liberty to quiet servitude).84

If, on one hand, this approach exposed American disobedient movements to the constant risk of selective integration into the “American” machine of consensus,85 while at the same time cynically throwing them to the repressive practices of a substantially unlimited coercive power, on the other hand, this approach also made political struggle in the United States a symbolic struggle for the appropriation of its rich revolutionary patrimony and its founding principles. Hence, just after the revolution, many people, who having actively participated in the revolutionary process, but excluded from the benefits of the new republican government,86 turned 82

83

84

85

86

Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963–1993), I: 369–71. On Shay’s Rebellion, see D. D. Szatmary, Shay’s Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); L. L. Richards, Shay’s Rebellion (Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 2002). T. Jefferson, Letter to A. Adams and J. Madison of 1787, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. P. T. Boyd et al., 33 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), XI: 92–93. On this argument, see the classic contributions of S. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), and The Rites of the Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (London: Routledge, 1993). On this subject, see Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 245–46.

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to the evocative force of the Declaration (sometimes used against the Constitution)87 to justify their social claims, using a language and political rhetoric (still used in the United States today) that made disobedience the “form” of political action that, more than any other, best interpreted the “American” spirit:88 We – affirmed for instance in 1833 Seth Luther on behalf of Rhode Island disfranchised freeholders and poor people – deny the justice of all laws made without the consent of ourselves, the majority of the people. We deny the right of the Congress, to lay any tax, duty or impost of any kind on the disfranchised citizens of this State . . . no freeholder is bound to military duty, or pay taxes, because he is not represented. It is the duty of all men to resist tyranny, if needed be, sword in hand.

Facing a government that, in practice, denied the “self-evident truth” that “all men were created equal,” disobedience seemed like the only road consistent with the spirit of the revolution: Suppose you resist or refuse to obey? . . . would not the United States send troops to quell such resistance ? Never ! – The general government cannot lift its arm against its own Constitution. It would be impossible for them, to fight against the Declaration of Independence, and by doing so prevent

87

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On the use of the Declaration of Independence as a model of struggle and political claims in the United States, see We, the Other People: Alternative Declarations of Independence by Labor Groups, Farmers, Woman’s Rights Advocates, Socialists, and Blacks 1829–1975, ed. P. S. Foner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976). The examples of movements and American authors that support their disobedient practices through the founding experience of the revolutionary period are quite numerous, to the point that it has been said that disobedience is “as American as apple pie.” Among the most noted cases, Martin Luther King Jr. was the one who stated that “in a certain sense our nation was born from an act of mass civil disobedience” and that the struggles of the black people incarnated in the civil rights movement were a continuation of this very disobedient spirit (M. L. King Jr., “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” in New South 16 (1961): 4–11). For a panorama of the multiple theories of disobedience that have marked the history of the United States at each moment, see Civil Disobedience in America: A Documentary History, ed. D. R. Weber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), which however, tends to consider only nonviolent forms disobedience, manifested in Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

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us from obtaining the acknowledgement of rights, pronounced by our fathers unalienable.89

As little as this produced new political theories of disobedience, adopting this same political rhetoric and this argumentative architecture served as the foundation and justification of specific ways of practicing disobedience – in certain cases even in opposition to one another. It is sufficient to remember the two main political movements of nineteenth-century America: the abolitionist movement and the women’s movement. It is no coincidence that American abolitionism found full theoretical development right in the middle of the great national debate over disobedience that led to the approval of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which declared the mandatory arrest of all colored people suspected having escaped and severe punishments for those who directly or indirectly aided in their flight.90 “Every man,” stated William Lloyd Garrison, the director of The Liberator, the first abolitionist newspaper, “is bound to understand the laws of the country in which he lives, but he is not bound to obey any of them, if it conflict with his allegiance to his Maker – and he alone is to judge in this matter, according to the monitions of his conscience and the dictates of his understanding.”91 As much as these positions can be interpreted at first glance as the mere application of Christian political theory to the specific case of slavery, in reality, the authoritative force of the biblical message is (just like in English abolitionism, which in many senses paved the way for the Americans)92 replaced, de facto, by the 89

90

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S. Luther, An Address on the Right of Free Suffrage, Delivered by the Request of Freeholders and Others of the City of Providence (Providence, RI: R. Weeden, 1833), 21, 23. On the Underground Railroad, see H. Buckmaster, Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolition Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), and D. W. Blight, Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004). W. L. Garrison, Trial of Rev. Mr. Cheever, now in Civil Disobedience in America, 60. On English abolitionism, see the profound work of C. L. Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

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affirmation of the liberty of individual conscience since you cannot “make the rights of man depend upon a text.” “It matters not what the Bible may say,” these rights are in fact “in the nature of man himself, written upon the human faculties and powers by the finger of God.”93 In addition, in open contrast to the Lockean separation between the private sphere of conscience and the public sphere of politics, the autonomy of conscience is not exclusively understood as the freedom of thought and expression but above all as the freedom of political action, based on the sincere and direct personal engagement for the abolition of slavery. This movement found its raison d’ˆetre in the advancement of the Underground Railroad, the clandestine organization created to aid slaves escaping to Canada and the free states of the North. The Fugitive Slave Act was thus taken as an unsupportable moral imposition, as a legal barrier that prevented individuals from following their own moral dictates. For example, transcendentalist Theodor Parker said, I am not a man who loves violence. I respect the sacredness of human life. But this I say, solemnly, that I will do all in my power to rescue any fugitive slave from the hands of any officer who attempts to return him to bondage. I will resist him as gently as I know how, but with such strength as I can command; I will ring the bells, and alarm the town; I will serve as head, as foot, or as hand to any body of serious and earnest men, who will go with me, with no weapons but their hands, in this work. I will do it as readily as I would lift a man out of the water, or pluck him from the teeth of a wolf, or snatch him from the hands of a murderer. What is a fine of a thousand dollars, and jailing for six months, to the liberty of a man?94

The refusal to obey the Fugitive Slave Act was only part of a wider practice of disobedience founded on the principle of “noncooperation” with the federal government, identified with “evil” for its direct or indirect support for slavery, finding concrete expression in individual citizens boycotting elections, mass resignations of public officials, and all the way to demanding the secession of the free states of the North from the Southern slave states on an 93

94

On the relationship between English Christian abolitionism and its American derivative, see Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, 100–30, from which the last citation of W. Garrison is taken (109–10). T. Parker, The Function and Place of Conscience in Relation to the Laws of Men (Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1850), 25.

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institutional level. For abolitionists, it was better to “come out” of the Union rather than “to covenant with slaveholders, to fellowship with them as co-partners in government.” For these abolitionists, “government is only an association of individuals” that, “like any other association of individuals” (e.g., a church, a bank, or a temperance society), can be abandoned by individuals at any given moment, especially when participation in it means “a voluntary act,” such as in the case of voting or holding public office.95 This strong ethical accent in disobedience, which nearly always implied the adoption of nonviolence as an exemplary element in the strategy of moral suasion,96 left room for more direct political motivations, such as in the case of African American abolitionism that, during those same years, gained its own subjective autonomy: “Depart if you can, – if you have time and means,” stated the radical white abolitionist Wendell Phillips, acknowledging the specificity and the autonomy of black abolitionism. “No one has a right to ask that you stay, and, if arrested, submit, in order that your case may convert men to antislavery principles. . . . You have a perfect right to live where you choose.”97 Relegated by the legal “conventions” and moral “customs” of American society in a structurally subaltern position, the “black people” did not need to “justify” disobedience, even if only in the name of conscience and its higher laws.98 Even in its extreme forms, like in the case of armed rebellions, it was justified in itself as the expression of a vital need, the 95

96

97

98

W. Phillips, Can Abolitionists Vote or Take Office under the United States Constitution? (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1945). “If ‘the laws and constituted authorities of the land’ require me thus to aid the tyrant – stated for instance William Garrison, expressing the position of the majority of the abolitionist movement, at least before the proclamation of the Fugitive Slave Act – then I will not obey them – then I will strenuously endeavor to bring them ‘into contempt’ – then I will resist them, not by physical violence, but by Christian boldness and by moral endurance.” Review of Gerrit Smith’s Letters, in Civil Disobedience in America, 59. W. Phillips, Speech at the Melodeon, on the First Anniversary of the Rendition of Thomas Sims, in Speeches, Lectures and Letters (Boston: Redpath, 1863), 76–82. See, e.g., J. W. Loguen, I Won’t Obey the Fugitive Slave Law, and C. H. Langston, Should Colored Men Be Subject to the Penalties of the Fugitive Slave Law?, in The Voice of Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes in the United States, 1791–1971, ed. P. S. Foner (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), esp. 98–100 and 208–15.

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desire for freedom that was constantly negated or put in danger by white society. Like in any other action that aims for liberation from the shackles of slavery or racial discrimination, taking violent disobedient action is totally contingent and depends on the unwillingness of white slaveholders to recognize the equal humanity of blacks.99 This perspective is exemplified in Frederick Douglass’s, The Heroic Slave (1853). Here, interrogated by a white who takes up the slave’s cause, the fugitive slave Madison Washington says, Your moral code may differ from mine, as your customs and usages are different. The fact is, sir, during my flight, I felt myself robbed by society of all my just rights; that I was in an enemy’s land, who sought both my life and my liberty. They had transformed me into a brute; made merchandise of my body, and, for all the purposes of my flight, turned day into night, – and guided by my own necessities, and in contempt of their conventionalities, I did not scruple to take bread where I could get it.100

Nevertheless, black abolitionist disobedience did not have the characteristics of a complete political theory. Forged in the concrete experience of life on slave plantations where the master’s asymmetric power was continually challenged by the slaves’ forms of “daily resistance,” like property sabotage, theft, and forms of work-torule,101 it took the form of a narration in the great oral tradition of spirituals and in the autobiographic stories of its most noted activists. Its image of reference is the “flight,” the practical decision to abandon “by all means necessary” the condition of slavery, assuming the paradigmatic value of the refusal of white supremacy and a “servile” and “whip-obeying” identity, the act that erases the “color line” and that introduces the African American into 99

100

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“The struggle [for the emancipation of black people] may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.” F. Douglass. West India Emancipation (1857), in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. P. S. Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 220–47, 367. F. Douglass: The Heroic Slave, in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, 220–47. J. H. Franklin and L. Schweniger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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the reign of liberty.102 Usually viewed with suspicion, trapped between opportunism, cowardice, and fear and dangerously close to betrayal, flight in the African American imagination (or emigration, its postslavery variation) is instead the expression of “a voluntary form of black resistance,” the exercising of a “right” to free movement that cannot be guided from above such as in the case of the “colonization plans” for Africa often seen by white America as the solution to slavery and racial integration, but that should be desegregated from the oppressive bridle of white power and therefore liberated from legal, political, or social barriers that impede the “black people” from obtaining a full and equal citizenship.103 Dialoguing within and polemicizing with abolitionism after the end of the American Civil War, the feminist movement also developed a precise political strategy of disobedience, culminating with picketing the White House in 1917, that opened the way, after three years, to the approval of women’s right to vote.104 In particular, with militant abolitionism, women appropriated a theoretical and argumentative apparatus that – centered around the active articulation of the principle of absolute equality among all humans as “moral beings” – allowed them to conduct a struggle that was both for the slave emancipation and for the liberation of women from male dominance (working in both philanthropic and anti-slavery groups). For example, Angelina Grimk´e wrote in her Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States in 1836, The denial of our duty to act, is a bold denial of our right to act, and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed “the white slaves of the North” – for, like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.105

102

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104

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F. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Autobiographies (Washington, DC: The Library of America, 1994), 103–452. On escape and emigration as a “voluntary form of black resistance,” see D. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17154/17154-h/ 17154-h.htm. D. Stevens, Jailed for Freedom: American Women Win the Vote (1920) (New York: New Sage Press, 1996). A. Grimk´e, An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States, Issued by an Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women (New York: Dorr, 1837), now

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In virtue of these similar conditions, disobedience – a legitimate, and in a certain sense dutiful, abolitionist action106 – was practiced in the first phase of American feminism to claim women’s emancipation, because “whatever is morally right for a man to do, is morally right for a woman to do.”107 In this case, however, its exemplary figure was the exercise of illegal voting: inaugurating an argumentative modality that would become typical of the civil rights movement, this form of disobedience was simultaneously supported as an act of principle that, in the name of human rights, transcended any legal strategy but also second as the true application of the constitutional principles denied by the government’s unjust laws. So, for example, arrested for having voted without the legitimate right to do so, Susan B. Anthony refused to pay bail because she was “determined to not recognize” the legitimacy of a court that “interfered” with her right to vote and that, with her arrest, “stepped on every principle of so-called republican government.” However, at the same time, Anthony claimed the “constitutional” character of her disobedience, not only because “anything for human rights is constitutional, everything against human rights is unconstitutional,” but also because she considered it in line with the principles of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, in the federal Constitution, and in many state constitutions.108 In the original spirit of the abolitionist years, a congruous number of militant feminists of the period considered the immediate identification of women’s emancipation with the right to vote

106

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in K. Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1830–1870: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 2000), 102. One of the most noted and effective defenses of the “morality” of abolitionist disobedience is owed to L. M. Child, The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act (Boston: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860). S. Grimk´e, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, in The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimk´e: Selected Writings 1835–1839, ed. L. Ceplair (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 265. S. B. Anthony, Statement to the Court, in History of Woman Suffrage, ed. E. C. Stanton, S. B. Anthony, and M. J. Gage, 2 vols. (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881), II: 687–89, and Is It a Crime for a US Citizen to Vote?, in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. A. D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 554–83.

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as limited. They saw the suffragette movement as a noble but “parlor-room” movement unable to see “the chains hidden behind a right,”109 thus developing a different articulation of disobedience, conceived as liberation from the “tyranny of sex” and social conventions that imposed a feminine lifestyle subordinated to masculine power. Marriage, in this case, became the object of disobedience as a legal institution erroneously confused with “love” that instead condemned women to the “perpetual dependence” on the husband. As the feminist Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell protested on their wedding day,110 while acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage, as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess.111

Intercrossing the libertarian instances of “communalism” – the reform communities formed over the course of the nineteenth century in the United States that held, long before the hippy counterculture in the second half of the twentieth century, sexual liberty as an integral part of a social organization that aimed at being separate from and alternative to the dominant bourgeois–capitalist system – the refusal to “voluntarily obey the current laws on marriage” politically organized the Free Love Movement,112 an organized promotion of “free love,” a love freed from the legal chains of matrimony 109

110 111

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E. Goldman, Woman Suffrage, in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), 198, 203. E. Goldman, Marriage and Love, in Anarchism and Other Essays, 227–28. L. Stone and H. B. Blackwell, Marriage Protest, in Voices of a People’s History of the United States, ed. H. Zinn and A. Arnove (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 129. On the Free Love Movement, see J. C. Spurlock, Free Love. Marriage and Middle Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860 (New York: New York University Press, 1988); Free Love in America: A Documentary History, ed. T. Stoehr (New York: Ams Press, 1979); H. D. Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977). On its relation to nineteenth-century communalism, see R. De Maria, Communal

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and a conception of feminine sexuality mainly focused on procreation and not happiness and personal gratification. Refusing to conform to a conception of love circumscribed by the legal union of a man and a women “’till death do us part,” refusing to obey a legal determination of the form and the length of a sentimental union, these militant feminists hoped to regain their right to “the pursuit of happiness” and the exclusive self-governing of their affects. Especially after the approval of the so-called Comstock Laws in 1873, obscenity laws that prohibited not only extramarital sexual relations but even merely promoting them, this meant rebelling against an unrighteous power that reduced women to the objective conditions of slavery. Even if there was no law that required marriage, American women felt forced by society to get married to guarantee material survival or to escape the condemnation and social marginalization created by a public morality in which every single but sexually active woman was comparable to a prostitute.113 Reaffirming the primacy of love over the law, a love that “doesn’t obey what law commands” when contrary to the “natural sentiment” that draws two human beings into a “mutual attraction,” was the first step for a “fundamental revolt against the sex servitude” and “social liberty.” This revolt would later find concrete expression at the beginning of the twentieth century in the movement for birth control (and, more specifically, in the illegal printing of texts and documents with information on contraceptives), with which women tried to affirm their right to a womanhood that is fully free and autonomous from an immediate identification with motherhood.114

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Love at Oneida: A Perfectionist Vision of Authority, Property, and Sexual Order (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1978). V. Woodhull, The Principles of Social Freedom, in The Victoria Woodhull Reader, ed. M. B. Stein (Weston, MA: M&S Press, 1974), 1–44. M. Sanger, Woman and the New Race (New York: Forgotten Books, 1998).

4 When Disobedience Is “Civil”

4.1. The Legacy of a Misunderstanding It is in this same American historical and political context that Henry David Thoreau’s reflection on Civil Disobedience (1849) takes place. In the wake of the radical American tradition, Thoreau, too, considers the government “at best” a mere “expedient” to which individuals have no obligation because they are “men first, and subjects afterward” and therefore have the “right . . . to do at any time what [they] think right.”1 Often classified as anarchist,2 Thoreau’s text should instead be interpreted as an attempt to restore 1

2

Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government, in Political Writings, ed. N. L. Rosenblum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–2. Thoreau’s presumed anarchism is founded on a superficial interpretation of the famous passage with which he opens his 1849 essay: “I heartily accept the motto, – ‘That government is best which governs least’. . . . Carried out, it finally amounts to this . . . ‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” However, Thoreau himself immediately clarifies that “unlike those who call themselves no-government men,” he is not asking for “at once no government” but that a “better government” is immediately realized, a government that, like for Paine, does not alter or obstacle the natural functioning of man’s cooperative relations (ibid., section 1.3). Describing Thoreau as an anarchic thinker is only acceptable if, as the American feminist Voltairine de Cleyre does, we describe the entire tradition of American political radicalism and every revolutionary theory that does not hold the creation of a “thing apart, a superior power to stand over the people with a whip” as its end as anarchic (V. de Cleyre, “Anarchism and American Traditions,” in Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine

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the original spirit of the Declaration of Independence from its postrevolutionary ritualization, grafting the emancipative instances of abolitionist struggle (including African American struggle) and the pacifism of the opponents of the Mexican War onto it:3 This American government – what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? . . . When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.4

A revolution that, in this “American” perspective, returns to be equivalent to disobedience and resistance: with a clear reference to what is written in the Declaration of Independence, Thoreau states that “all men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government.”5 More precisely, he speaks of a “peaceable revolution”; this does not, however, mean a “nonviolent” one because, in certain circumstances, we “suppose blood should flow,”6 because the radicalness of political action depends on the seriousness of what is at stake, on the degree of the authority’s unwillingness to recognize the reasons of those revolting, and, above all, on the force that is therefore necessary to break free from the chains of oppression. Thus, without contradicting the principles expressed in 1849, in his Plea for Captain John Brown, he writes, “A man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave . . . I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.”7 For Thoreau, therefore, peaceful revolution means

3

4 5 6 7

de Cleyre. Anarchist, Feminist, Genius, ed. S. Presley and C. Sartwell [Albany: SUNY Press, 2005], 89–102). The movement against the Mexican War, just like the abolitionist movement, produced a specific literature on disobedience. A typical example is F. Wayland, The Duty of Obedience to the Civil Magistrate (Boston: Little, Brown, 1847). Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government, 1 and 4. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 11. Henry David Thoreau, Plea for Captain John Brown (1849), section 57, http:// thoreau.eserver.org/plea.html.

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that the revolution has a disobedient soul operating in the form of a “withdrawal of consent.” In fact, “when the subject has refused allegiance . . . then the revolution is accomplished,” because “if the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.”8 This “withdrawal of consent,” undoubtedly echoing the American tradition of marronage and of flight into the wilderness as a strategy for defending individual liberty,9 can assume different forms and practices based on different circumstances. Along the lines of the practices of militant groups of that time, Thoreau identifies at least four of them: fiscal disobedience;10 secession (which Thoreau takes from his abolitionist activism but which, in his case, also means individual separation from the state);11 and noncooperation with political institutions by private citizens and those holding public office, which, like in the case of the struggle against the Mexican War, can also then lead to desertion.12 The missing acknowledgment of this “American” origin of Thoreau’s theory of disobedience is at the root of many of the misunderstandings that characterize the contemporary debate over civil disobedience and, in particular, the excessive stress on its 8 9

10

11

12

Thoreau, Resistance, 11. On this, see H. D. Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, ed. J. S. Cramer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.” Thoreau, Resistance, 11. “What should concern Massachusetts is not the Nebraska Bill, nor the Fugitive Slave Bill, but her own slaveholding and servility. Let the State dissolve her union with the slaveholder. She may wriggle and hesitate, and ask leave to read the Constitution once more; but she can find no respectable law or precedent which sanctions the continuance of such a union for an instant. Let each inhabitant of the State dissolve his union with her, as long as she delays to do her duty.” H. D. Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in Political Writings, ed. N. L. Rosenblum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133. “ I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them.” Thoreau, Resistance, 9. But also, “when the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.” Ibid., 11.

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ethical dimension, it being primarily a “conscientious” act in the double sense of being led by the reasons of conscience and being as respectful as possible of the existent political and judicial order. It is a misunderstanding due, in large part and in spite of himself, to the exemplary force of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who, after having read Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience, adopted that term to describe the philosophy and the forms of struggle that inspired the Indian anticolonial movements that he led first in South Africa and then in India. Like Gandhi, most people do not know that this title – like the oft-used alternative one On the Duty of Civil Disobedience – was never directly chosen by Thoreau himself but posthumously attributed by American Christian abolitionist activists who were close to him as a contribution to the wider debate on the relationship between political obligation and moral conscience. When it was originally published, Thoreau preferred the more classic title Resistance to Civil Government, which itself was a reworking of a conference on The Relation of the Individual to the State held the year before at the Concord Lyceum to explain the reasons that pushed him not to pay taxes in opposition to the recent political choices of the state of Massachusetts and, more generally, those of the American federal government.13 As the history of the title explains, Thoreau’s civil disobedience is a reformulation of the modern theory of resistance grounded on a certain conception of politics and, more precisely, on a specific interpretation of the relation between the individual and political institutions that, as was highlighted in previous chapters, is typical of American political radicalism. Its frequent calls to the disobedient’s moral superiority – one that does not accept conforming to a political majority that only reasons in terms of opportunity (or, better yet, opportunism) – thus have a quality that is quite different from the values that contemporary commentators usually 13

More precisely, it was the editor of the 1866 edition who chose the title, seemly inspired by the use of this expression by Thoreau himself in their personal correspondence over the years. See W. Harding, introduction to The Variorum Civil Disobedience, in H. D. Thoreau, The Variorum Walden and the Variorum Civil Disobedience, ed. W. Harding (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968), 330–31; M. Jos´e Falcon y Tella, La desobediencia civil (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2000), 19–20.

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give to civil disobedience. In this case, in fact, those calls are almost always used polemically against the theses expressed by William Paley in his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, one of the most influential texts of late British Enlightenment and an authoritative source for a great number of the ruling American classes educated, like Thoreau, at Harvard.14 Built on a sort of theological utilitarianism, Paley’s volume offered a political theory of (nearly) absolute obedience that did not need to base itself on the social contract, therefore being particularly suitable for the American context: “The only ground of the subject’s obligation” is “the will of God as collected from expediency.”15 So, as long as the government in office cannot be changed without causing public inconveniences, God wants that government obeyed. The legitimacy of every single case of resistance is consequently reduced to a calculation of “the grievance which is sustained or feared, but also upon the probable expense and event of the contest.” Even the American Revolution could be reinterpreted from these principles: if the separation from the motherland had produced beneficial effects only in the revolting colonies, it would not have been legitimate because, facing a conflict of interests, those on the numerically greater side must prevail. It is only when the numeric increase and the growth of wealth in the colonies reached “a considerable proportion to the entire interest of the community” that the colonial revolt became “just,” because, in those circumstances, “the whole happiness of the empire” was obstructed by their union.16 Thoreau opposed this utilitarian proposition of the majority principle using the right of a people, or even a single individual, to do the right thing, “cost what it may.”17 Even if he came from transcendentalist intellectual circles, where the refusal to obey a

14

15 16

17

W. Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002). Ibid., 298. Ibid., 303. Noteworthy are the strong similarities with Jeremy Bentham’s critique of Lockean resistance described by P. Rudan in “Governare la felicita. ` Riflessioni sulla rinuncia al contratto originario nel pensiero politico di Jeremy Bentham,” in Storia dei concetti, storia del pensiero politico. Saggi di ricerca, ed. S. Chignola and G. Duso (Naples: Esi, 2006), 63–117. Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government, 5.

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specific law of the state was described as an extreme attempt to defend the Law in general,18 and even if he had absorbed this rhetoric,19 Thoreau’s position went far beyond the defense of the preeminence of the conscience’s higher laws in respect to any civil order. In fact, elsewhere he will say he feels his own “connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient.”20 The defense of the “honest man,” who behaves following the dictates of his conscience, even when it means going against his own immediate interests, thus has the same demystifying value of the use of Christian religion that Frederick Douglass advanced during the same period to show the egoistic nature of the interests that were at the base of the “injustice” of slavery. In both cases, morality functioned as a critical “second sight” that brought to light and redefined the “true” meaning of American liberty, ever more crushed by the possessive egoism that guided the United States’ portentous economic development.21 Strictly speaking, then, in Thoreau’s case, we should not speak of civil disobedience, not because it has a purely individual nature – as some contemporary thinkers have maintained – but because we run the risk of falling into a cacophonic tautology in adopting the term. Far from being circumscribed to a mere affirmation of principle, Thoreau’s disobedience corresponds to what today is defined as an “act of citizenship,” an action through which a minority builds its own agency, “becoming political.”22 If there is something “civil” in Thoreau’s disobedience, it is precisely its wanting “to be political,” that is, being the concrete deployment of a civism that, through 18

19

20 21

22

E. H. Madden, Civil Disobedience and Moral Law in Nineteenth-Century American Philosophy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 85–102. Thoreau says, for example, “The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and order who observe the law when the government breaks it.” Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” section 22. H. D. Thoreau, “Life without Principles,” in Political Writings, 107. For more on this, see my “Introduzione” to La liberta` a ogni costo. Scritti abolizionisti afro-americani (Turin: La Rosa, 2007), li–lii. On the concept of “act of citizenship,” see E. F. Isin, Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), and Acts of Citizenship, ed. E. F. Isin and G. M. Nielsen (London: Zed Books, 2008).

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conflict, reveals the arbitrary character of dominant virtues and redefines the sense of belonging to a political community aspiring to be “democratic.” Even if it is not possible to affirm with certainty any direct knowledge on Thoreau’s part, there are many and important (even textual) assonances between Thoreau’s essay and the “civic” disobedience in La Bo´etie’s Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.23 It could even be interpreted as a reworking of those theses in a political context centered around the majority principle: Paine and the founding fathers of the United States considered representative government as the institutional form that expressed the republican “moral principle” of protecting and securing society’s natural, self-regulating capacity better than any other form. Alexis de Tocqueville had already warned of the “despotism” of the majority that coexists in modern democracies like the United States; “the almost invisible influence” of despotism, with a “moral authority and physical strength” that “penetrates into all the classes which compose it,” consequently able to obtain obedience without resorting to violence, through the “impersonal” force of administration and the spreading “customs” that favor a growing disinterest for politics and the lack of the “desire” to act: I am therefore of the opinion that social power superior to all others must always be placed somewhere; but I think that liberty is endangered when this power finds no obstacle which can retard its course and give it time to moderate its own vehemence. . . . A majority taken collectively is only an individual, whose opinions, and frequently whose interests, are opposed to those of another individual, who is styled a minority. If it be admitted that a man possessing absolute power may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should not a majority be liable to the same reproach? . . . A general law, which bears the name of justice, has been made and sanctioned, not only by a majority of this or that people, but by a majority of mankind. The rights of every people are therefore confined within the limits of what is just. . . . When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but 23

There is more than one clue that would support this position, not least the fact that La Bo´etie’s Discourse, available in English ever since 1735, was certainly well noted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had discussed it more than once with Thoreau in their frequent correspondence (see, e.g., “The Emerson–Thoreau Correspondence: The Dial Period,” ed. F. B. Sanborn, Atlantic Monthly, 1892).

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I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.24

This critique of the majority’s “omnipotence,” which de Tocqueville tried to maintain in a framework of liberal politics and which tried to contain its most disrupting effects on political freedom through the valorization of peculiar aspects of American democracy (such as associationism or administrative decentralization), was brought to its extreme consequences by Thoreau. In fact, in his opinion, the majority principle that supports modern institutions does not change the inherent tendency of political power to prevaricate the rights and liberty of its citizens since, ultimately, even the power of the majority is grounded on its being “physically stronger” than the minority. Against this majoritarian logic underpinning modern politics, an active minority therefore can only act extrainstitutionally, “immediately,” without passing through the mediation of voting and expecting that their claims obtain majoritarian recognition: “when the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.”25 Thoreau continues, saying that as soon as the minority “conforms to the majority,” it finds itself “powerless . . . [and] it is not even a minority then” since its particular will disappears precisely when the identification of a different majority in which the unitary and general will of the state is recognized.26 To escape this depoliticizing logic of the “political body” and to reaffirm one’s own liberty (and, in this way, the sense of what is just or unjust), one consequently must act as a “counter friction” that, clogging the function of the political “machine” with “its whole weight,” blocks its injustices and transforms it.

24

25 26

A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835–1840, chapter XV, http:// xroads.virginia.edu/∼HYPER/DETOC/toc indx.html. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, I, section 9. Ibid., II, section 9.

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4.2. Civil Disobedience as Direct Action Thus, in Thoreau’s critique of American republican institutions, the image of civil disobedience as direct action27 – affirmed in the twentieth century – is already implicitly present. “Anarchism,” says Emma Goldman, inspired by Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience, “therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. . . . Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.”28 Along the same lines, Voltairine de Cleyre distinguishes between political action and direct action: in the first case, it is believed that the wisest way to get what you want is “by the indirect method of voting,” with which someone is conferred the power to render legal what you want to obtain. Instead, in the case of direct action, that can be of “extreme violence, or it may be as peaceful as the waters of the Brook of Shiloa that go softly,” no “external authority” is entrusted, and one becomes the protagonist of one’s own destiny: “every person who ever thought he had a right to assert, and went boldly and asserted it, himself, or jointly with others that shared his convictions, was a direct actionist.” In this way, direct action is an integral part of the history of human progress, always used in the struggles of “those who feel oppressed by a situation.” This especially goes for the United States, where, according to Cleyre, direct action is given a “historical sanction”: from the Quaker refusal to pay religious taxes or to perform military service during colonial times to the destruction of English tea in the Boston Harbor up to the organization of the Underground Railroad and the armed revolt of John Brown – “all cases of direct action against legally constituted authority and property rights” – American history shows that acts of disobedience are always “the forerunners of social change.”29

27 28

29

A. Carter, Direct Action and Liberal Democracy (New York: Harper, 1973). E. Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), 65. V. de Cleyre, “Direct Action,” in Exquisite Rebel, 273–86.

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Born in working-class milieus, these reflections were thought of as a defense and as a theoretical legitimation of the forms of struggle practiced by the International Workers of the World (IWW), the revolutionary union organization founded in the United States in 1905 that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, without constructing any stable power structure, promoted a series of strikes and acts of rebellion (such as the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike and, a year later, the Paterson Silk Strike) that were widely participated in, especially by migrant workers, provoking fierce repression from government authorities.30 Unlike Engels – and, in some ways, unlike Lenin – who saw direct action as a primitive method of labor struggle that had to be substituted by the struggle for the control of state power31 – the so-called Wobblies put direct action at the theoretical and practical heart of an innovative working-class “culture of rebellion” that posed itself as an alternative to the “political reformist” strategy – the supporters of the political party as the tool of worker struggle both in its reformist and revolutionary versions – that considered the “conquest of political power” and the actions with this aim the prerequisite for altering or subverting the industrial power of the capitalist class. Though it could seem that this would be “the easiest way of resisting the cruel abuse of political power,” the method of “indirect actions” was, for the Wobblies, unable to produce concrete results without using “more direct” forms of worker struggle such as sabotage, “the conscious withdrawal of the worker’s industrial efficiency,” or strike, the conscious withdrawal of worker’s “producing power from the job” (both articulated in multiple forms according to the specific conditions of any given situation), that affect the interests of the ruling 30

31

On the Wobblies, see, among others, Fellow Workers and Friends: IWW Free-Speech Fights as Told by Participants, ed. P. S. Foner (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981); Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, ed. J. L. Kornbluh (Chicago: Kerr, 1998); F. Rosemont and Joe Hill, The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Chicago: Kerr, 2003); B. Watson, Bread and Roses. Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream (New York: Viking, 2005). F. Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17306/17306-h/17306-h.htm; V. I. Lenin, Certain Features of the Historical Development of Marxism (1910), http://www .marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1910/dec/23.htm.

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class where they are made: at the workplace. Political institutions serve to protect the “industrial power of the capitalist class” and guarantee its primacy through the “indirect methods” of legislation, institutions, and political repression. However, as much as labor in factories, mines, fields, and transportation is the “indispensable factor” of capitalist economic power – that is, what gives value to its economic resources – direct action, “the withdrawal from the job, the suspension of operation, the withdrawal of efficiency from that position of employment,” is the only thing that can break this economic power and, in this way, “reduc[e] the efficiency” of political institutions created to protect it or, like in the case of a “universal strike” (the withdrawal of “labor power from all the instruments of production in a given country”), subvert them.32 Unlike Georges Sorel, the Wobblies held that a general strike doesn’t have a “moral” value, nor any mythical or “sublime” one.33 Every form of direct action, peaceful or violent, “must be judged by the results [it] aims to achieve.”34 Along these same lines, starting in the 1920s, facing the decline of the propulsive capacity of the IWW and growing government repression, American union circles rethought disobedience and direct action in a structurally nonviolent key. “Nonviolent disobedience,” E. A. Ross writes in his introduction to C. M. Case’s volume on Nonviolent Coercion (1923), who introduced Gandhian “nonviolent resistance” into the United States, wins, if it wins, not so much by touching the conscience of the masters as by exciting the sympathy of disinterested onlookers. The spectacle of men suffering for a principle and not hitting back is a moving one. It obliges the power holders to condescend to explain, to justify themselves. The weak get a change of venue from the will of the stronger to the court of public opinion, perhaps of world opinion.35 32

33

34 35

W. E. Trautman, “Direct Action and Sabotage,” in Direct Action and Sabotage: Three Classic IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s, ed. S. Salerno (Chicago: Kerr, 1997), 25–27. In the same collection, see E. Gurley Flynn, “Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers’ Industrial Efficiency,” 91–121. G. Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Trautman, Direct Action and Sabotage, 30. E. A. Ross, introduction to C. M. Case, Non-Violent Coercion: A Study in Methods of Social Pressure (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1923), 2.

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In this perspective, the boycott – which the Wobblies considered a form of “indirect” action since it was external to production – acquired a new importance because, on one hand, it functions through a logic “similar” to that of direct action, that is, relying on an “economic power” (in this case regarding consumption) to reach specific goals,36 while, on the other hand, “producing powerful effects upon economic and political affairs, without entailing the bitter and irremediable after-effects that spring up in the paths of violence.”37 However, this new unionist strategy does not fully coincide with Gandhian “nonviolent resistance”: even if his theoretical production did not add any particularly original elements, if not for his ability to hybridize “Western” ethics of responsibility with the Hindi philosophical tradition, Gandhi managed to transform the guiding idea of disobedience – “that government of the people is possible only so long as they consent either consciously or unconsciously to be governed”38 – into an organized practice of nonviolence made up of working rules, principles of action, and techniques to employ in a rigorous and disciplined way.39 For Gandhi, disobedience is the nonviolent violation of one or all of the oppressive and immoral laws of a state. When it is “complete” and “civil,” it is therefore a “peaceful rebellion” that “never uses force and never resists force when it is used against” it and that “invites imprisonment and other uses of force against” it by political authority, because it finds the “bodily freedom [that it] seemingly enjoys to be an intolerable burden,” the expression of an “immoral barter” that the conscience and justice refuse. Thus understood, disobedience is an “inalienable right of every citizen” that cannot be given up,

36 37 38

39

Case, Non-Violent Coercion, 302–3. Ibid., 414. M. K. Gandhi, Selections from Gandhi: Encyclopedia of Gandhi’s Thoughts, ed. Nirmal Kumar Bose (Navajivan Mudranalaya, Navajivan, 1960), section 551, 218–20, http://www.mkgandhi.org/sfgbook/selectionsfromgandhi.htm. On this, see J. V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), spec. chapter III on the techniques and rules of satyagraha and chapter IV on the relationship with Hindu tradition, 36–104 and 105–45, respectively.

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lest they “cease to be men.” Repressing it would be like “trying to imprison consciousness.” For the same reason, it can be considered the “purest form of constitutional agitation”: never resorting to the use of arms, it can never harm a “state willing to listen to the voice of public opinion” while being extremely dangerous for an “autocratic” state for “he brings about its fall by engaging public opinion upon the matter for which he resists the State.”40 Moreover, unlike Leo Tolstoy and the Christian pacifist tradition,41 Gandhian nonviolent resistance is not based on the norm that prohibits killing, nor is it understood as a political practice that is alien to conflict. As a refusal of every form of injustice and exploitation, it instead constitutes a permanent dissent of the political order: “no man could be actively nonviolent and not rise against social injustice no matter where it occurred.”42 Hence, in nonviolent resistance, a clear element of coercion is implied; inverting Sorelian semantics, this coercion is defined as “force,” the exercise of power and influence to obtain change, purified of the conscious will to provoke physical damage to opposing people or groups, prohibiting any intention for revenge and foreseeing strict interior discipline and a high propensity for sufferance.43 Yet, what really distinguishes satyagraha (nonviolence as a conviction of the strong) from passive resistance (nonviolence as a tactic of the weak) is ultimately the element of truth (Satya) that it implies, that is, its conformity to Being and God (Sat). Nevertheless, this finalism is quite marginal in the American union debate, favoring the argument centered around the higher effectiveness and efficiency of the nonviolent method. For example, 40 41

42 43

Gandhi, Selections from Gandhi, section 578. L. Tolstoy, On Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence (New York: Bergman, 1967). For a parallel with Gandhi, see P. C. Bori and G. Sofri, Gandhi e Tolstoj. Un carteggio e dintorni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985). But also G. Pontara, “Introduzione a Gandhi,” in Teoria e pratica della non-violenza, ed. G. Pontara (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), xxviii–xxxiv. Gandhi, Selections from Gandhi, section 128. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence, 9–14. For Sorel, force and violence are instead qualitatively different: “the object of force is to impose a certain social order in which the minority governs, while violence tends to the destruction of that order.” Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 165.

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as Richard B. Gregg wrote in his influential The Power of NonViolence (1934), Violence may be somewhat efficient, just as Watt’s first engine was somewhat efficient, but non-violent resistance is more efficient, just as a modern steam turbine is more efficient. . . . Violence has been tried for thousands of years. Why not experiment with something new and scientific?44

In fact, nonviolent resistance creates, in his opinion, a system of value and produces a deeper and more permanent “trust” than violence can. Conversely, “to indulge” in violence as a tactic with which the proletariat aims to “create a better world” only ends in “ruined labor organizations.” It produces the counterviolence of the ruling classes and scares the middle classes. In addition, ruling classes are decidedly stronger than workers in the “game of violence.” The only effective arm that workers possess is nonviolent resistance: “Class divisions cannot be ended by violent strife, nor by destroying the material power of the class in control, but only by changing their ideology, their values, the assumptions upon which their class greed and pride are based.”45 4.3. From Direct Action to Civil Disobedience Implicitly assumed in the image of the “general strike” of the black worker – with which William E. B. Du Bois reinterpreted the experience of the American Civil War and its contradictory results that led to the period of racial segregation after the abolition of slavery46 – the African American civil rights movement emerged from this same unionist debate, contributing since the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and through the representative leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. to the affirmation of nonviolent direct action as the form par excellence for practicing civil disobedience.47 Already in 44

45 46

47

R. B. Gregg, The Power of Non-Violence (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1934), 138–39. Ibid., 137. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), chapter IV, 55–83. On the civil rights movement, see V. Harding, R. D. G. Kelley, and E. Lewis, “We Changed the World, 1945–1970,” in To Make Our World Anew: A History of

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1905, at the founding congress of the IWW, the African American activist Lucy Parsons – who, in 1888, had invited the oppressed of the industrial world to “learn the use of explosives!”48 – stated that the “conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out” but to “strike and remain in,” thus in many senses anticipating the organizational innovation of the important and victorious 1936–1937 strike against General Motors – the so-called Flint SitDown Strike – and the spread of sit-ins.49 A few years later, Hubert Harrison – considered by many as the “father of radicalism” of the Harlem Renaissance – identified direct action as a prime weapon to contrast the phenomenon of lynching in the segregated south: “But how can lynching be abolished? First by direct action: That is, action on the job” and, in particular, by migration, “a power absolutely within the control” of African Americans that, “without a single petition or appeal to the kindness, the Christianity, or the democracy of the white folk,” and “affecting the production of wealth, . . . has struck a body blow at the most powerful interests in the South.”50 Nevertheless, it was mainly through the figure of Asa Philip Randolph – founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the African American union that, in the 1920s and 1930s, distinguished

48 49

50

African Americans, ed. R. D. G. Kelley and E. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 445–542, which also contains an ample bibliography. L. Parsons, “To Tramps,” Alarm, October 4, 1888. L. Parsons, “Speeches at the Founding Convention of IWW,” in Freedom, Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches, 1878–1937, ed. G. Ahrens (Chicago: Kerr, 2004), 77–85. On the General Motors strikes, see S. Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969). For an ample reconstruction of the relationships between the African American movement and the American workers’ movement, see P. S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Workers, 1619–1981 (New York: International, 1982). H. Harrison, “How to End Lynching,” in A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. J. B. Perry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 270–71. On migratory phenomena as a form of black protest in early-twentieth-century America, see E. Arnesen, Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 2003). On the Harlem Renaissance, see N. I. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); D. Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997); G. Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996).

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itself through a long series of successful struggles against the Pullman Company, the private firm that managed the sleeping cars of the U.S. railways51 – that these working-class reflections on direct action (articulated in an exclusively nonviolent way) became patrimony of the “struggles of the Negro.” In the 1940s, together with other African American leaders, such as Bayard Rustin,52 Randolph led a movement against racial discrimination in the defense industry and for the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces, to then appear again, after World War II, as the founder of the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience, the organization at the origin of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 – considered by many to be the apex of the civil rights movement – where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. “Negroes,” explained Randolph in 1942, “are at the cross-roads,” facing problems requiring “a reorientation in program, strategy, method and technique” of political struggle. That crossroads was World War II and the struggle against Nazi–fascism, which had inaugurated a “period of social acceleration” and “revolutionary ferment” where the very foundations of “financial imperialism” and “colonialism” were exploding. To be “effective” in transforming the “cause of a minority” into the mainstream of national and international public opinion, the methodology and techniques of black people’s struggle therefore had to become “revolutionary, unusual, extraordinary, dramatic and drastic” themselves. Against the socioeconomic, political, and racial chauvinism that black Americans suffered, any action founded on a “politics of compromise and accommodation,” exemplified in the figure of Booker T. Washington, leader of the African American movement following Reconstruction (and target of Du Bois’s criticism),53 was in fact futile and unable to solve 51

52

53

B. Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). On Rustin, who had a great influence on Martin Luther King Jr.’s political upbringing, see Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, ed. D. W. Carbado and D. Weise (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003), spec. his “Civil Disobedience, Jim Crow, and the Armed Forces,” 28–31. For a general reconstruction of Du Bois, including his positions regarding B. T. Washington, see S. Mezzadra’s long introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois, Sulla linea del colore. Razza e democrazia negli Usa e nel mondo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010), 7–97.

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the “problem of race and the problem of jobs.” And what was true of the Negro people was also true of “labor, all minorities, all oppressed groups, and the champions of the liberal democratic tradition.” This new revolutionary method was “nonviolent civil disobedience” that developed through two “action techniques,” which would become typical of the civil rights movement: negotiation, provoked by the visit of a group of Negroes in a restaurant, a hotel, or any other “segregated” public place and conducted, when their entrance was refused, by a group of whites who called out the management for this “racial exclusion policy,” and civil action, which began when negotiations were unsuccessful in the form of a “sit-down strike of white and colored citizens who have been well trained with respect to technique of action and procedure.” This meant staying there even to the point of being physically removed by police without renouncing to “damages or physical injury” to anyone, because “some suffering and sacrifice must be made by Negroes if they expect to win their freedom.” Unlike Gandhi, who explicitly inspired this tactic,54 nonviolent civil disobedience did not aim to achieve “a transition of governmental power,” which, in the case of African Americans, would be “independence as a racial unit.” Instead, it aspired to end discrimination and segregation in America and therefore to reach “integration,” that is, attaining full freedom, justice, and equality for blacks in the United States. This is why it can be defined as “constitutional obedience” or as “nonviolent goodwill direct action,” because it aims at constructing a “common unity” of all people “by a process of reconditioning through word and deed.”55 Without this working-class cultural background, it would be difficult to understand the specificity of Martin Luther King Jr.’s idea of civil disobedience. There is certainly a strong evangelical 54

55

For a reconstruction of the civil movement’s use of Gandhian theory and practice, see S. Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). A. P. Randolph, Non-Violent Civil Disobedience: A Method for Attack upon Jim-Crow, unpublished speech, July 4, 1942, in Chicago and now archived at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of New York (A. Philip Randolph Collection, Box 2, Folder 26).

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component in it, collocated in the Christian tradition that sustains the duty to disobey the state in the name of the higher laws of the conscience.56 Retrospectively analyzing the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, King himself recognized his main source of inspiration in the Gospel, in the Christian doctrine of selfless love that is at work in Gandhian nonviolence: “Nonviolent resistance had emerged as the technique of the movement, while love stood as the regulating ideal. In other words, Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.”57 This “love in action” of Christian inspiration is, however, put to work by King according to a clear unionist logic: “nonviolent direct action,” writes King in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, “seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”58 Resorting to nonviolence is essential to reaching this goal: it “dramatizes” and brings “to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive” in society, thus “helping” men to convert to justice, to “rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism” to reach the “majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.” In fact, segregation “distorts the soul and damages the personality” because it makes the person an “object,” giving “the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.” This is why segregation “is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful.”59 To be effective and to move the dormant consciences of the “white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice,” those who practice direct action must therefore act “openly” and “lovingly,” ready to accept even the legal consequences of their actions, thus turning their own bodies into “means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community.” History teaches, he reminds us, that

56

57

58

59

For Martin Luther King Jr. in the Christian tradition of nonviolence, see J. J. Ansbro, Martin Luther King Jr: Nonviolent Strategies and Tactics for Social Change (New York: Orbis Books, 1982). M. L. King Jr., “An Experiment in Love,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. J. M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 17. M. L. King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, in Civil Disobedience in Focus, ed. H. A. Bedau (London: Routledge, 1991), 71. Ibid., 73.

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“freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”60 Nevertheless, it would be misleading to reduce King’s position on civil disobedience to a mere reproduction of the historical positions of the civil rights movement. Anything but: developed in a period of transition, while the long tradition of African American struggle and theory on civil disobedience affirmed itself as the “universal” form of the struggles of the New Left movements in America, his idea of disobedience remained open and in constant dialogue with those movements. This was especially true with the student movement that derived its first forms of political expression from the civil rights movement. Adapting the experience of the fight against racial segregation to the university, in 1963, Mario Savio, the leader of the free speech movement at the University of Berkeley, theorized occupation and the speech rally as the adequate forms of practicing civil disobedience in the university: “There are,” he explains, “at least two ways in which sit-ins and civil disobedience . . . can occur.” The first, practiced by the Civil Rights Movement, consists in violating “again and again and again” a “totally unacceptable” law until it is “rescinded, repealed.” When, however, the protests are extended to “a whole mode of arbitrary exercise of arbitrary power” as to “render impossible its effective violation as a method to have it repealed,” it is then necessary to assume a position a` la Thoreau, that is, “to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.” For Savio, this was the case of American universities that were managed like factories, where professors were “a bunch of employees” and students “raw materials.” This is why they had to demonstrate to those who “own” and “govern” the university that, unless they were “free,” “the machine will be prevented from working at all!” “One thousand people sitting down someplace not letting anything happen can stop any machine,” including universities.61 This was the first step toward the inauguration of a new “tactical stage” of the extrainstitutional political

60 61

Ibid., 70 and 74. M. Savio, “Speech at the University of California at Berkeley,” in Dissent in America, ed. R. F. Young, 2 vols. (New York: Pearson/ Longman, 2005), II: 380–81.

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struggle that exploded, thanks to the important example of the anticolonial guerrillas in the Third World, in 1968. Here “symbolic civil disobedience,” built on the model of nonviolent direct action, gave way to “barricaded resistance” that, for the students, was better able to express the evolution of the student movement for university reform into a movement that expressed a specific student agency in the wider critique of American capitalist society.62 This very evolution – which combined the movement against the Vietnam War, where the refusal of the draft was considered an openly public way of “noncooperation” with the government and of “blocking the war machine,”63 and the new black radicalism of Black Power and the Black Panther Party, for which the struggle against white supremacy required a “political” turn, no longer limited to the “compromising” goal of integration into American society64 – can also be found in Martin Luther King Jr. If, in 1961, following the path of Randolph, King defined civil disobedience as the nonviolent violation of an unjust law, of a “code” that the majority inflicted on the minority, a violation that became “legal” because of the impossibility of the latter to participate in 62 63

64

T. Hayden, “Two, Three, Many Columbias,” Ramparts, May 15, 1968. M. Swann, “Noncooperation,” in Nonviolence in America: A Documentary Reader, ed. S. Lynd and A. Lynd (Chicago: Orbis, 1988). For a historical reconstruction of draft resistance during the Vietnam War, see M. S. Foley, Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). On the long tradition of American draft resistance, see L. S. Wittner, Rebel against the War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1983 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). Among the most prominent figures of this movement were Daniel and Philip Berrigan, protagonists of a famous court case for having instigated civil disobedience. On this case, see M. Polner and J. O’Grady, Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Life and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Brothers in Religious Faith and Civil Disobedience (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998). “What can we do to stop the people who, in the name of our country, are killing babies, women, and children?” asks Stokely Carmichael, founder of Black Power, since “we do not have the power in our hands to change that institution, to begin to recreate it, so that they learn to leave the Vietnamese people alone, and that the only power we have is the power to say, ‘Hell no!’ to the draft.” S. Carmichael, “Black Power,” in Civil Disobedience in America: A Documentary History, ed. D. R. Weber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 226. See also M. L. King Jr., “A Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam,” in “Takin’ It to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader, ed. A. Bloom and W. Breines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 186–91.

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its creation for lack of the right to vote, without, however, trying to “challenge” or “evade” the law,65 already in 1965, while he maintained that “mass nonviolent direct action has not only become the accepted method of the civil rights movement but, beyond that, the vast majority of all Americans now support and approve it,” he also introduced a distinction between direct action and civil disobedience, which, in his eyes, “are not synonyms” anymore. Recognizing the specificity of the Civil Rights Movement in respect to the original Gandhian perspective, he explains that the “authentic historical form” of civil disobedience implies “defiance of fundamental national law.” This, however, had never been the case of the civil rights movement. When it was “marching in the streets [ . . . it was] not challenging the Constitution, the Supreme Court, or the enactments of Congress” but was limited to practicing direct action, through which it showed the public opinion the existing “contradiction” between a few “local municipal ordinances or state laws” and the “basic national law,” the latter being, in this sense, defended and protected despite the use of illegality.66 On the basis of this distinction, in 1968, in one of his last public speeches and in the heat of the mass protests against the Vietnam War and race riots, King again updated his position, saying that nonviolence “must be adapted to urban conditions and urban moods”; that is, it must “mature” and reach a “new level,” no longer limited to a mere “statement to the larger society” but instead “a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point” and removing the obstacles that oppose “the march to liberty.” De facto, this meant parting ways with the tradition of the civil rights movement and its forms of struggle to inaugurate, like its “antagonist” Malcolm X, a united political program for the entire African American movement, capable of including even its most critical fringes: if “in the South, a march was a social earthquake; in the North, it is a faint, brief exclamation of protest.” In a context in which “the Negro revolt is evolving into more than a quest 65

66

King, Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience, in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 43–53. M. L. King Jr., “Address to the American Jewish Committee,” in Civil Disobedience in America, 219–22.

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for desegregation and equality,” in a veritable “challenge to a system” and “the white power structure,” that was still “keeping the walls of segregation and inequality up,” nonviolent direct action proved to be an “outdated” and “sterile” practice that had to leave the way for a “new level” of nonviolent conflict. This new level that preceded the reformulation of the claims of civil rights in the wider vision of the struggle against poverty found its expressive form in “mass civil disobedience,” through which a “legal” and “constitutional” movement was about to transform itself into a “revolutionary” social movement.67 4.4. The Limits of Civil Disobedience This wider and open vision of disobedience is absent in the general “theory of civil disobedience” offered by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice, to which the affirmation of the “conscientious” interpretation of civil disobedience indicated in the opening of this chapter is, in large part, due.68 It can be considered a synthesis of U.S. liberal preoccupation toward social protests in the 1960s, as a compromise able to “justify” the progressive aspects of the civil rights movement’s “heterodox” practices without, however, ever questioning the foundations of the American liberal democracy challenged by the most radical sectors of the protest.69 Following a modality that has since become canonic, civil disobedience is thus 67

68

69

M. L. King Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). See also M. L. King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community (New York: Harper and Hill, 1967). J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999). A preliminary version of this general theory is in J. Rawls, “The Justification of Civil Disobedience,” in Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice, ed. H. A. Bedau (New York: Penguin, 1968), 240–55. The main contributions to this debate are collected in two anthologies edited by H. A. Bedau: Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice and Civil Disobedience in Focus (New York: Routledge, 1992). See also Political Obligation and Civil Disobedience: Readings, ed. M. P. Smith and K. L. Deutsch (New York: Crowell, 1972). For examples of the European consequences of this debate, see R. Polin, L’obbligation politique (Paris: Puf, 1971), and A. Passerin d’Entreves, Obbedienza e resistenza in una societa` democratica (Milan: Edizioni di Comunita, ` 1970), now in an extended edition with the title Potere e liberta` in una societa` aperta (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006). Along these same lines, see N. Bobbio,

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defined by Rawls as “a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government”70 and that, despite its being at the “outer edge” – since it is illegal by definition – stays within the boundary of “fidelity to law,” in a situation where arrest and punishment are accepted without opposing resistance; this makes it “clearly distinct” from other, “more deeply opposed” forms of opposition to the legal and political order, such as “militant action” or “obstruction,” which, through “organized forcible resistance,” will prepare the way for radical or “even revolutionary” change.71 As much as it would like to faithfully reproduce Martin Luther King Jr.’s (and Gandhi’s) civil disobedience, Rawls’s definition changes its structural sense.72 Even in its first, “constitutional” version, King’s disobedience is “civil” precisely because it can show the incivility of American democracy, the injustice of a societal model based on segregation and racism. For Rawls, on the contrary, civil disobedience only operates in the framework of a “ near just” society where the weight of injustice “in the long run . . . should be more or less distributed over different groups in society” and the difficulties caused by unjust policies “should not weigh too heavy in any particular case.” In any other case, in fact, the problem of justifying disobedience is not even posed because, where these assumptions are lacking – in undemocratic and authoritarian contexts (such as under Nazism) – any means of restoring the “publically recognized standards” become legitimate. In Rawls’s perspective, the whole element of challenging the political order is completely absent, an element that even King recognizes as an essential component of civil disobedience. In fact, for Rawls, civil disobedience is a sui generis “appeal” to the majority so that they “reconsider,” in the name of

70 71 72

“Disobbedienza civile,” in Dizionario di politica, ed. N. Bobbio, N. Matteucci, and G. Pasquino (Turin: Utet, 1983), 338–42. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 320. Ibid., 322–23. On the relationship between Rawls and Gandhi, see V. Haksar, Civil Disobedience, Threat and Offers: Gandhi and Rawls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) and V. Haksar, Rights, Communities and Disobedience: Liberalism and Gandhi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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a common sense of justice, their decisions made. Furthermore, the willingness to pay the legal consequences for disobedient actions – that from Thoreau on was the expression of the will to differentiate, separate, and distance oneself from the majority’s unjust policies – becomes a way to demonstrate one’s fidelity to the system, the sharing of this “common” sense of justice. So, despite aspiring to be a reply to conservative critiques of the legitimacy of the heterodox forms of struggle used by new social movements,73 in a not totally paradoxical way, this “justification” of civil disobedience ends in being a de facto list of the limits of its practicability in a democratic society, reproducing, in a neocontractualist way, the same logic with which modern (European) political thought tried to neutralize the most subversive effects of disobedience. A first limit regards the object of disobedience: to be “civil” and therefore not fall into the incivility of other forms of struggle that challenge the political order, disobedience finds, like Locke’s concept of resistance, its specific legitimation only in truly exceptional situations, that is, when facing a serious violation of the “first principle of justice” and, in particular, the “principle of equal liberty,” when certain minorities are denied the right to vote or hold public office, to move from one place to another, or when certain religious groups are repressed. In all other cases, recourse to the normal channels of political participation should be made. There is then a limit that we could call methodological: resorting to civil disobedience is justified only when the “legal means of redress” prove to be useless, that is, when every legal or traditional attempt – such as going to the Supreme Court or through legislative struggle – is unproductive because the majority is immovable or apathetic. That is a situation that, nonetheless, for Rawls remains a “presumption” because of the impossibility of establishing with certainty the exhaustion of all legal means. Rawls then adds a third and important limit of opportunity that echoes Hobbes’s position in his Leviathan: even when the first two conditions are met – that is, when facing serious violations of fundamental 73

A utopic example is H. J. Storing, “The Case against Civil Disobedience,” in Civil Disobedience in Focus, 85–102. See also J. Raz, “Civil Disobedience,” in Ibid., 159–69.

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liberties and the normal means of expressing dissent prove to be unequivocally futile – a maximum level of political tolerability for disobedience exists and must not be exceeded. The minorities that practice disobedience must, in other words, remain within “a cooperative political alliance,” applying a kind of code of self-control able to regulate the “overall level of dissent” and prevent their activities from leading to disorder, “a breakdown in the respect for the law and constitution.” Otherwise, a “serious disorder . . . which might well undermine the efficacy of the just constitution” would result from it. Consequently, disobedient subjects must constantly evaluate this level of tolerability for disobedience and abstain from it if there is the risk of exceeding this limit. Instead, when it is used with “due restraint and sound judgment” – after having verified that its deployment does not cause “any risk of anarchy” – disobedience can be a useful tool for the stabilization of constitutional democracies, helping to maintain “just institutions and preserving their material base,” “to inhibit departures from justice and to correct them when they occur.” In this case, its characteristic of challenging legality becomes secondary for Rawls, to the point that judges should take into account the “constitutional” nature of civil disobedience and “reduce and in some cases suspend the legal sanction” for those who have practiced it.74 Within these limits of compatibility, and deprived of any relationship with an undisciplined and rebellious attitude, Rawls’s theory of civil disobedience is unable to find a real space of intervention, and it is left, yet again along the lines of the neutralizing positions of the fathers of modern contractualism, to a purely theoretical level. Following Rawls’s argument, it is difficult to define as just, or near-just, a society that denies some of its members fundamental civil rights and where the “legal means of representation” prove to be ineffectual, if not on the base of an aprioristic assumption of American constitutional democracy’s innate virtuousness that, as such, must be defended. Theoretically justified, disobedience is denied its concrete historical possibility and is affirmed in its effectual impracticability. Its justification is possible, like in the case 74

Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 329–39. See also R. Dworkin, “On Not Persecuting Civil Disobedience,” The New York Review, June 6, 1968.

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of the civil rights movement, only ex post, after its compatibility with the current system has been verified. 4.5. Crisis and Criticism of Civil Disobedience The aporias of this “general theory” of civil disobedience did not go unnoticed by the more acute commentators of the time. For example, as a young Michael Walzer (whose reflection on civil disobedience helped form many of the elements in his later thought, including the idea of pluralism)75 explains, any liberal and contractual political theory of civil disobedience – like that of Rawls – is destined to fail because such theories are founded on an abstract conception of the individual right to disobey an unjust law and therefore are unable to give the right weight to the obligations (which are almost always present in those who disobey) that push toward disobedience. “No political theory which does not move beyond rights to duties, beyond monologue to fraternal discussion, debate, and resolution, can ever explain what men actually do when they disobey or rebel, or why they do so. Nor can it help us very much to weigh the rightness or wrongness of what they do.”76 Contractualism is born with the scope of expelling the conscience from politics, relegating it to the apolitical, or prepolitical, private sphere. The same goes for Rawls, who in fact rigidly distinguishes between civil (political) disobedience and conscience (moral) objection. Whether it be religiously or politically motivated, in God’s name or in the name of the higher laws of the conscience, for Walzer, disobedience always rests, in any case, on a “shared moral knowledge,” on a series of obligations toward a handful of principles that are, at the same time, “commitments to other men, from whom or with whom the principles have been learned and by whom they are enforced.” In his opinion, to circumvent the abstractions 75

76

M. Walzer’s contributions on civil disobedience can be found in his Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). For a framing of disobedience in his political thought, see T. Casadei, “Disobbedienza civile e ‘spirito’ delle istituzioni. Una discussione a piu` voci negli Stati Uniti del ‘lungo decennio,’ ” Filosofia politica 1 (2008), 85–91. M. Walzer, “The Obligation to Disobey,” in Obligations, 23.

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of liberal theory, civil disobedience should be discussed within a conception of politics and belonging and, more precisely, in the plural memberships that characterize the life of every individual in society. As the experience of the civil rights movement clearly shows, the “duty to disobey” is born as a response to a “divided allegiance,” where the obligations incurring in a small group, for example, in a religious association or a political movement, enter into conflict with the obligations incurring in a more extensive or inclusive group such as the state. It therefore cannot be explained in liberal politics’ constitutive dichotomy between the individual and the state. To be effective, it must join the ideal discourse of the principles that govern a political community to the concrete living conditions of those who practice it, to the “mutual engagements” of responsibility by the participants and to the sharing of a “community of laws and values” that could be in conflict with those of the state. It is therefore grounded on the theme of the social connections that are at the origin of the “loyalty” to a group who, narrow in respect to the general political community, is the one with which the individual is concretely in contact and the one that he or she most feels the need to be accepted by and to be acknowledged as a “legitimate” member. People, in fact, “have a prima facie obligation to honor the engagements they have explicitly made, to defend the groups and uphold the ideals to which they have committed themselves, even against the state,” if necessary. For Walzer, recognizing this constitutively social nature of disobedience is the only way to explain why some people are ready to risk their individual existence for a collective cause that often only indirectly involves them, as witnesses of an injustice. But above all, it is also a way to better fuse the non-“criminal” and conscientious character of civil disobedience than how liberal justifications fuse them. Pluralistic theory makes the essentially nonrevolutionary character of civil disobedience its own: disobedience is legitimate because it “does not, in fact, challenge the existence of the larger society”77 and is “the acting out of a partial claim against the state” that questions only the effect of authority over one or more specific

77

Ibid., 17.

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aspects without, however, “seek[ing] to replace one sovereign power with another.” It is precisely the critique of this compromising logic, circumscribing civil disobedience to the margins of compatibility under the American liberal-democratic system, that instead characterizes the point of view of radical thinkers and activists: “the problem,” comments Howard Zinn, “is civil obedience.”78 Posing disobedience as an object for debate means making it a problem to be resolved, even when trying to “justify” it. From this point of view, the liberal supporters of civil disobedience share the same one-dimensional vision of the law as their conservative counterparts: as an absolute apparatus for the protection of individuals and maintaining order. In each and every case, then, it is necessary to establish the limits of its use to avoid running the risks of anarchy and disorder. However, as Zinn explains, the “test of justification” of a disobedient act “is not its legality, but its morality.”79 In fact, it is in the name of obedience to the law that Nazism perpetrated its horrors and caused the global disorder of the war.80 In that case, even liberals like Rawls do not hesitate to recognize that the problem was obedience and that people should have opposed resistance. Only by leaning on the myth of American exceptionalism can they affirm the “diversity” of American society, its being just or near-just. History, however, shows that the “great thing about America,” its exceptionality, has never existed. Its foundation on the rule of law never stopped it from being, since the beginning, “aggressive and mean to other people” and even toward “people in this country.” In the same way, the experience of the civil rights movement, like the abolitionist struggle before it, demonstrates that disobedience to the law did not necessarily cause “generalized illegality” and anarchy. The movement did shatter racial segregation, creating disorder in hundreds of American cities, but favored “a healthy reconstitution of the social order toward greater justice” in doing so.81 Removed 78

79 80

81

H. Zinn, “The Problem of Civil Disobedience,” in The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997), 403. H. Zinn, “Law and Justice,” in Zinn Reader, 388. For an argument specifically addressing disobedience under Nazism, see the first paragraph in next chapter of this volume. Zinn, “Law and Justice,” 405–9.

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from compromising liberal logic, a general theory of civil disobedience can be thus redefined as “the deliberate, discriminate, violation of law for a vital social purpose.” It can also be considered more or less legal, along the lines of a constitutional or international law, but its objective is always to “close the gap between law and justice.” In the same way, if an act of civil disobedience is “morally justifiable,” whether it directly violates an “insupportable” law or indirectly violates others in protest, imprisonment and punishment should not be “peacefully” accepted but, on the contrary, refused as “immoral acts.” There is no need to prove one’s loyalty to the law because “there is no social value to a general obedience to the law, any more than there is value to a general disobedience to the law.” Therefore, as much as people “who engage in acts of civil disobedience should choose tactics which are as nonviolent as possible,” that is, aimed at striking property and not people, what really counts is the existence of “a reasonable relationship between the degree of disorder and the significance of the issue at stake.”82 Unlike Rawls and other liberal theorists, Zinn holds civil disobedience to be, in last analysis, a way to gradually bring about necessary “revolutionary changes” in American society, in a political context in which “the classical revolutionary war is not feasible.” At the same time, he is also aware that alone, without being continually nourished by a “spirit of rebellion,” it risks “stagnation.” Civil disobedience should thus be continually “enriched” with “countless possibilities and tactics not yet imagined” that are able to “control” and focus the “disorder of civil disobedience” toward the creation of a “life more human.” It is precisely because of the progressive affirmation of civil disobedience as a “pure” form of acting, as a simple “pressure tactic” of social lobbying, that it can be used for every political “cause,” from environmentalist struggles to antiabortionist battles,83 that, at the end of the 1960s, thanks to the innovative contributions of the feminist and queer movements, radical American movements

82

83

H. Zinn, Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order (Boston: South End Press, 2002), 119–24. On disobedience as a pressure tactic, see G. Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, 3 vols. (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973).

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abandoned civil disobedience to elaborate an alternative conception of disobedience and direct action that was deliberately “uncivil” and over the top, that did not disdain a certain aestheticization of the disobedient act and aimed to “shock” the well-to-do and conformists:84 “S.C.U.M. [an acronym for Society for Cutting Up Men],” writes Valerie Solanas in her 1968 feminist Manifesto, “always operate on a criminal as opposed to a civil disobedience basis, that is, as opposed to openly violating the law and going to jail in order to draw attention to an injustice.” Civil disobedience tactics that “acknowledge the rightness of the overall system and are used only to modify it slightly” are for “nice, genteel ladies who scrupulously take only such action as is guaranteed to be ineffective.” The women who identify with SCUM are rather, like in other contemporary radical feminist manifestos, “dominant, secure, selfconfident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling” and “refuse to obey all laws they don’t care to obey.” Consequently, they do not aim to “attain certain rights” within the system but to “destroy it” and “kill it,” attacking “the very idea of law and government.” This assumes an overall rethinking of the organizational forms of disobedience: to “picket, demonstrate, march or strike” – the forms with which civil disobedience was historically manifested – presupposes the organization of the movement in the form of a mob. To be efficient, it should transform itself into a blob that spreads “coolly, furtively,” until “enough women either unwork or quit work, start looting, leave men and refuse to obey all laws inappropriate to a truly civilized society.”85

84

85

A. Evans, “How to Zap Straight,” in The Gay Liberation Book, ed. L. Richmond and G. Noguera (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1973), 112–15. V. Solanas, Scum Manifesto (1968) (London: Verso, 2004). In the same direction, see J. Freeman, The Bitch Manifesto (1968), now in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, ed. B. A. Crow (New York: New York Univerisity Press, 2000), 226–32.

5 Disobedience in the Crisis of Sovereignty

5.1. Unjustified Absence: Disobedience Facing Nazism “The guiding principle of the a priori is the a posteriori”: according to Franz Neumann, this Hegelian formula perfectly synthesizes the impossibility to preventively “justify” disobedience within the political categories of sovereignty. As the fathers of modern rationalism already knew, under the state, disobedience can be legitimate only when successful. The only instance in society that could preventively judge its legitimacy is the sovereign, the very target of that disobedience. For the same reason, in the perspective of the modern state, it is impossible to claim a “right” to disobedience: if by “right” we mean “the power to act conceded by a positive law,” the right to disobedience can only be exercised collectively, by the people. In this way, however, the legitimacy of disobedience would have a de facto extrajuridical nature because it would take place in an exceptional situation of a mass uprising. Even supposing the existence of a positive law that recognizes the possibility of a single individual to legally resist the state’s violation of the inalienable rights of life and liberty, such a norm would acquire real meaning only in the presence of a superior independent organ, a constitutional court, for example, responsible for deciding if the state has actually unjustly violated the rights of that individual. According to Neumann, the modern individual raised under the shadow of the state finds himself or herself alone: lacking a 121

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“universally valid statement telling us when man’s conscience may legitimately absolve him from obedience to the laws of the state,” the modern individual faces this problem in loneliness. In the state, in other terms, disobedience inevitably becomes conscientious objection, the manifestation of a moral question, the ethical duty to resist the government’s control when our own consciousness forces us to do so, and an existential experience, the conflict between the “inner voice” and the precepts of positive law. In both cases, the individual (even when acting collectively) is exposed to the tragic risk of the choice and cannot invoke any “right”: “the strong state will be very lenient and tolerant toward those whose conscience makes it impossible to accept the state’s orders. If it should not, the resister will, if his conscience urges him, resist and risk rather than obey and be safe.”1 It is precisely here, inside a similar tragic–existential experience, that European political thought, and particularly German thought, lived and discussed the “dilemma” of disobedience to Nazism: “every individual,” according to the First Leaflet of the White Rose, the group of German students who opposed the Nazi regime between June 1942 and February 1943, arrested and sentenced to death, “conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilization, must defend himself against the scourges of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism.”2 Even though activists of Christian inspiration mainly composed the group, the motivation that pushed those youths to disobedience went beyond religion. Along the lines of German existentialism, they conceived disobedience to Nazism as an “occasion of authentic comprehension of existence,” “a place of interpretation of the life itself and of its last foundation,” which escapes the instrumental rationality of a “simple prudent calculation” through sacrifice.3 In other words, for them disobedience to 1

2

3

F. Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory (New York: Free Press, 1956), 157–59. The White Rose Society, The First Leaflet (1942), http://www.whiterosesociety .org/WRS_pamphlets_home.html. M. Nicoletti, “Introduzione,” in R. Guardini, La Rosa Bianca (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2005), 24–25. See also “Volantini della Rosa Bianca. Secondo volantino,” ` in P. Ghezzi, La Rosa Bianca. La resistenza al nazismo in nome della liberta, (Cinisello Balsamo: Edizioni San Paolo, 2006), 279: “it is necessary that we meet

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Nazism was a way of living, “staying in front of something that called us” and that “demanded an answer from us,” “the very foundation, transcending man and reality.”4 This did not mean that it was depoliticized, limited to a pure moral duty. Despite defining its disobedience as “passive,” the White Rose thought of itself as a fully political resistance aspiring to the military defeat of Nazism – “the primary concern of the Germans” – through “sabotage” of the Nazi state (the “obstruction of the smooth functioning of the war machine”); this concretely meant suspending any form, even indirect, of collaboration with the “mortification of personal freedom” brought against the Nazi regime.5 That the political theme of disobedience returned to Europe in relation to Nazism was not by chance. The most attentive observers at that time saw Hitler’s regime as a “nonstate.” They saw it as the emergence in the heart of the Old World of a political logic (natural difference among men, arbitrariness in political judgment, personalization of political control) that the modern state had practiced only in the colonies up until then, thus ending the European “exception” that, since Locke, had worked as the primary motivation for defusing the (theoretical and practical) threat of disobedience. However, what began with Nazism – and in an even more explicit way when facing the “radical evil” of the Holocaust – was not exactly a discussion on disobedience but rather an “extreme” way with which European political thought tried to respond to the collapse of modern obedience.6 European thought lived the

4 5

6

together, illuminating one another man to man, always thinking and never resting until even the last of us is convinced of the extreme necessity of participating in this struggle against this system. . . . A horrible end is always better than a horror without end. . . . This catastrophe will be able to help our salvation; this will only happen if, purified by pain, we desire to see light rise from the darkest night, we rise up to our feet and help shake the yoke that oppresses the world” [our translation]. Nicoletti, “Introduzione,” 28–29 [our translation]. The White Rose Society, The Third Leaflet (1942), http://www.whiterosesociety. org/WRS pamphlets home.html. Even Rawls seems aware of this: his distinction between resistance (to a dictatorship) and civil disobedience (in a democratic society) seems to be a way to save the exception of “near-just” democracy from the general crisis of political obligation into which Western society fell after the “extreme” experience of Nazism and the Holocaust. It is no chance that in his theory of justice, the discussion around civil disobedience is inserted into a more ample theory of (partial) obligation.

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totalitarian Nazi experience as a philosophical catastrophe that unhinged from within the categorical system on which the “most civilized” Europe built itself, therefore forcing it “to rethink everything over again.”7 The same went for obedience, which was both the presupposition and the product of that system: “Much of the horribly painstaking thoroughness in the execution of the Final Solution,” reveals Hannah Arendt, “can be traced to the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey laws but to act as though one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys.”8 The disturbing truth of extermination, of the “serial production of corpses,” was in other terms identified in the vicious cycle originating between rationality and obedience,9 in the collapse of Kant’s “you must” that, reduced to pure form, in a system of norms that can be easily substituted without changing the fundamental structure, was transformed, without really contradicting itself, into the “categorical imperative of the ¨ Third Reich”: “act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action, would approve it.”10 As “banal” figures with responsibilities toward the regime, like Adolf Eichmann, demonstrate, the horror of the Holocaust did not come from any breach in order but from its disciplined application, from men who obeyed norms and followed the instructions they received and who, outside of “work,” were common people and not at all “evil.” The principle executors of the “final solution” were effectively convinced of having “done [their] duty,” of “not only obey[ing] orders, . . . but obey[ing] the law.” In this sense, they had a certain degree of reason in affirming that they had always lived “according to Kant’s moral precepts” of having acted “according to a Kantian definition of duty” and therefore of not having exclusively obeyed the law of Hitler’s Germany but of having always tried to identify their will “with the principle behind the law,” the source from which the law springs. 7

8

9

10

S. Forti, “Introduzione,” in La filosofia di fronte all’estremo. Totalitarismo e riflessione filosofica, ed. S. Forti (Turin: Einaudi, 2004), vii [our translation]. H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 137. For this interpretation of the Holocaust, see Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). H. Frank, Technik des Staates (Leipzig, 1942), 15–16 [our translation].

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For Arendt, the Kadavergehorsam – the “obedience of corpses” that Eichmann and the other Nazi hierarchs used to justify their crimes – thus brought an original vice of modern politics to light: the immediate identification of obedience with consensus. Because it assumes an unequal relationship between subjects, similar to the one that operates in parental relations, obedience should find its natural niche in a, we could say, premodern political horizon. In a modern political context founded instead on rational and equal citizens who voluntarily give power and legitimacy to a country’s institutions, anytime an individual obeys, he or she is actually consenting to power, actually “support[ing] the organization or the authority of the law that claims ‘obedience.’” The same even goes for the case of a society with a “strictly bureaucratic organization, with its fixed hierarchical order,” where “it would make much more sense” to speak of a “functioning of the ‘cogs’ and wheels in terms of overall support for a common enterprise than in our usual terms of obedience to superiors.” If this fundamental distinction between obedience and consensus is taken into consideration – every attempt to justify direct or indirect participation in the Nazi regime’s crimes in the name of obedience to superiors and laws that every organization expects – one cannot escape the accusation of a shared responsibility with evil. From a modern perspective, even under the most repressive dictatorship, the leader is in fact a primus inter pares. Those who “responsibly” limit themselves to not pose an obstacle him in reality “support him and his enterprise; without such ‘obedience’ he would be helpless.” Paradoxically, in a such a situation, the only truly responsible choice would be disobedience, the refusal to participate in public life, declining any nomination: “we have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to any of these forms of government if enough people would act ‘irresponsibly’ and refuse support, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be.”11 These conclusions, reached by Arendt only a few years after the defeat of national socialism, were particularly difficult to accept during Nazi Germany, even by those who actively opposed Hitler’s 11

H. Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. J. Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 45–47.

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regime. As Romano Guardini clarified in a 1954 letter to Henry Kissinger, up until then, German culture had always understood political obligation in terms of loyalty – a “dangerous, tragic virtue” that limited the individual even when “he should reasonably dissolve such obligation” and that therefore, “if it is put to use too often leads to disaster.”12 Thus it saw “betrayal” in disobedience, done with a “guilty conscience” with a “demoralizing effect” because the “psycho-metaphysical bond” of loyalty continues existing even after disobedience has been practiced. In his opinion, this explains the behavior of many German soldiers when facing Hitler: It would have been just, reasonable and, in theory, natural to break with the regime after its criminal character came to be known. However, the German man, despite all of the criticisms on single aspects, had developed a bond with the National-Socialist government that he himself could not overcome. That’s what is meant by the phrase: “an order is an order.” It isn’t stupidity, nor lack of conscience, but the sense of a limit while facing authority, one that didn’t deserve that limit. . . . Even if their action was successful, they would have never completely gotten over their “disloyalty” inside.13

In such a cultural context, disobedience could therefore only be supported in such a way as to not appear in total contradiction with the long German tradition of “responsible” obedience to authority. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the actors in the plot against Hitler in July 1944, wrote, In a long history we Germans have had to learn the need for and the strength of obedience. In the subordination of all personal wishes and ideas to the tasks to which we have been called, we have seen the meaning and greatness of our lives. We have looked upwards, not in servile fear, but in free trust, seeing in our tasks a call [Beruf ], and in our call a vocation. . . . Who would deny that in obedience, in their task and calling, the Germans have again and again shown the utmost bravery and selfsacrifice? . . . Calling and freedom were to him [the German] two sides of the same thing. But in this he misjudged the world; he did not realize that his submissiveness and self-sacrifice could be exploited for evil ends.14 12

13 14

¨ R. Guardini, “Uber Loyalitat. ¨ Briefe eines Deutschen an einen Amerikaner,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 21 (1970), 722 [our translation]. Ibid. [our translation]. D. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2010), 5.

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This is what happened with Nazism, under which the German people’s willingness to obey was transformed into a politics of annihilation. To not “waver” like all the other “fundamental moral concepts,” the Beruf had to assume a new, courageous articulation, transforming itself into the “necessity to act freely and responsibly even if it impaired his work and his calling,” in assuming the guilt of the “sin” and in the willingness to sacrifice “his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue.”15 For Bonhoeffer, this meant definitively taking leave from the Kantian (and, even more directly, Weberian) ethic of responsibility and duty. The object of ethical action aiming to be responsible must not be what is good in itself, adapting a value and a moral law that “refuses to scarify his own integrity,” but the willingness to “become guilty for another man,” of doing what is good for the living beings in the concrete conditions of life in a determined historical situation: The responsible man is dependent on the man who is concretely his neighbor in his concrete possibility. His conduct is not established in advance, once and for all, that is to say, as a matter of principle, but arises with the given situation. He has no principle at his disposal which possesses absolute validity and which he has to put into effect fanatically, overcoming all the resistance which is offered to it by reality, but he sees in the given situation what is necessary and what is “right” for him to grasp and to do.16

Acting responsibly is not meant to “impose” and “imprint” reality with a program; more modestly, it “renounce[s] knowing our own ultimate justice” and “letting . . . the essence of the world come” in a new way. “Responsibility” is not like this when facing a “cause” but always and exclusively when facing real people. At the same time, this acting responsibly cannot be limited in a Weberian sense to those who hold an institutional position, to the professional politician. In fact, “one ethic for the great and the strong, for the rulers, and another for the small and weak, the subordinates; on one hand responsibility and on the other obedience,” does not exist. 15

16

D. Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” in Letters and Papers from Prison, Enlarged, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 5. D. Bonhoeffer, Ethics (Austin: Touchstone, 1995), 224.

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Even if in different forms, all individuals are held to act responsibly. In modern society, and particularly in German society, the life of the individual is so exactly defined and regulated . . . that [it] is granted to only very few men to breathe the free air of the wide open spaces of great decisions and to experience the hazard of responsible action which is entirely their own. . . . Where a man meets man – and this includes encounters in professional life – there arises genuine responsibility, and these responsible relationships cannot be supplanted by any general regulation or routine.17

This does not mean in any way for Bonhoeffer disavowing the duty of following the “essential laws of reality” that, especially in politics, often coincide with a formal technique – the art of government – of which positive ordinances, social conventions, and even “all the generally accepted principles of the life of the state” are a part. However, with these “laws of the art of government,” the “essential law of the state” is not completely understood because the latter is “indissolubly bound up with human existence.” In fact, in acting responsibly, there cannot be any “petty and pedantic restricting of one’s interests to one’s professional duties in the narrowest sense,” nor can it entrench itself behind the respect for the law. In extreme situations, like the one experienced under the Nazis, responsible action cannot but push “beyond the range of anything that can be expressed in terms of rule.” In other words, there comes a point where the exact observance of the formal law of a state, of a commercial undertaking, of a family, or for that matter of a scientific discovery, suddenly finds itself in violent conflict with the ineluctable necessities of the lives of men; at this point responsible and pertinent action leaves behind it the domain of principle and convention, the domain of normal and regular, and is confronted by the extraordinary situation of ultimate necessities, a situation which no law can control.18

In this sense, it is the exact opposite of Eichmann’s “obedience of the corpses”: The extraordinary necessity appeals to the freedom of the men who are responsible. There is now no law behind which the responsible man can 17 18

Ibid., 246–47. Ibid., 234.

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seek cover, and there is also no law which can compel the responsible man to take particular any decision in the face of such necessities. In this situation there can only be a complete renunciation of every law, together with the knowledge that here one must make one’s decision as a free venture, together also with the open admission that here the law is being infringed and violated and that necessity obeys no commandment. Precisely in this breaking of the law the validity of the law is acknowledged, and in this renunciation of all law, and in this alone, one’s own decision and deed are entrusted unreservedly to the divine governance of history.19

The model for acting responsibly – where obedience and liberty are both realized through responsibility, that is, where responsibility finds its own space at the heart of obedience, such that “responsibility begins where obedience leaves off” – is Jesus Christ, who, “for the sake of God and of man became a breaker of the law”: Jesus stands before God as one who is both obedient and free. As the obedient one He does His Father’s will, in blind compliance with the law which is commanded Him, and as the free one He acquiesces in God’s will out of His own most personal knowledge, with open eyes and a joyous heart; He re-creates this will, as it were, Out of Himself. . . . In obedience man adheres to the decalogue and in freedom man creates new decalogues.20

Despite being founded on teleology, Bonhoeffer’s “responsible disobedience” has very little in common with the traditional Christian justification of disobedience to political authority in the name of the higher obedience to God’s laws.21 It is done “without protection,” “in sin,” that is, assuming the full risk of unjustified liberty that gives up any valid self-justification: “the responsible man acts in the freedom of his own self . . . the proof of his freedom is the fact that nothing can answer for him, nothing can exonerate him, except his own deed and his own self. It is he himself who must observe, judge, weigh, decide and act. It is man himself who must examine the motives, the prospects, the value and the purpose of 19 20 21

Ibid., 236. Ibid., 249. On the concept of “responsible disobedience,” see M. Nicoletti, “Obbedienza teologica e disobbedienza responsabile. L’itinerario di Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Filosofia politica 3 (2008), 61–75.

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his action.”22 A few years later, this process of the subjectification of Christian disobedience found a formulation that was even more explicit in the pacifism of Don Lorenzo Milani, accused in 1962 by the judges of the Tribunal of Florence of “apology of crimes” for having taught the right of conscientious objection to military service in the school of his little parish in Barbiana. For Milani, to obey or disobey is a totally subjective choice: “I can’t tell my kids that the only way to love the law is to obey it. I can only tell them that they will have to honor the laws of man so much as to observe them when they are right” or rather “when they are the force of the weak”; “when instead they see that they are not right – when they don’t punish the abuses of the strong – they will have to fight so that they are changed.” Judging the law’s justice is, however, entirely left to the personal decision of the individual. Nevertheless, taking a good look at it, even in this case, what is being examined is not disobedience in a strict sense. Just like Bertrand Russell’s secular positions – who, together with Albert Einstein, promoted the international movement for nuclear disarmament – the images of World War II and Nazi death propaganda are still preponderant in these considerations. The discussion on disobedience thus continues to develop inside the wider debate over the “existential” crisis of modern obedience: after Nazism, Milani states, “obedience is no longer a virtue but the most deceptive of temptations.” The tragic experience of war and genocide, made possible most of all because “the wretched men who worked on the land or as labourers” were “transformed into aggressors by military obedience,”23 definitively showed the political unsustainability of absolute obedience that can only be justified by the logic of penal law, where “only that which is established law counts”: At Nuremberg and Jerusalem men who had obeyed were convicted. Humankind as a whole agrees that they should not have obeyed, because there is a law that mankind has not yet got firmly put down in their codes perhaps, but which is written in their hearts. A large part of mankind calls it God’s law, the other part calls it the law of Conscience. Those who do 22 23

D. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 244–45. L. Milani, Don Milani’s Self Defense, War Resisters’ International (1967), http:// www.semisottolaneve.org/ssn/a/26987.html.

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not believe in either of these are but a low, sick minority. They are the worshippers of blind obedience.24

Similarly, Russell states, Those of us who protest against nuclear weapons and nuclear war cannot acquiesce in a world in which . . . the capacity of his government [can] cause many hundreds of millions of deaths by pressing a button. This is to us an abomination, and rather than seem to acquiesce in it we are willing, if necessary, to become outcasts and to suffer whatever obloquy and whatever hardship may be involved in standing aloof from the governmental framework.25

Even in this case, the shocking experience of the Holocaust is what makes disobedience necessary. The Nazi extermination of six million Jews – for which “we are shocked, rightly shocked,” without, however, that this impedes the East and the West of contemplating the possibility of “a massacre at least a hundred times greater than that perpetrated by Hitler” – is the a posteriori demonstration of the impossibility of reaching the goal of disarmament through “legal” means, even in a democratic government: “at the Nuremburg trial, war criminals were convicted for having obeyed the state’s orders”; but this was possible “only after the state in question was defeated militarily,” that is, outside of the context of “normal” legality.26 Even if on profoundly different theoretical bases, this is the same moral and existential framework in which Ernst Junger’s archetyp¨ ical figure of the Rebel should be placed: “when all institutions are vague or even suspect, and even in church people pray aloud not for the persecuted but for the persecutors, the moral responsibility goes to the hands of the individual, or better yet, to the individual who ¨ is not yet bent.”27 This “individual” is the Waldganger, the Rebel, he who, like the ancient medieval outlaws, “move[s] to the forest,” withdrawing to deserted and wild places to conduct a free and risky life. To “know what is right, he doesn’t need theories or laws 24 25

26 27

L. Milani, “Letter to the Judges,” in ibid. B. Russell, “Civil Disobedience and the Threat of Nuclear Warfare,” in Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice, ed. H. A. Bedau (New York: Penguin, 1968), 158–59. Ibid., 155. Ernst Junger, Der Waldgang (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1951). ¨

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devised by some jurist or political party”; he in fact “draws from the sources of morality that are still not dispersed in the canals of institutions.” Only this heroic and inevitably elitist attitude – since it is the opposite of the legalism of the silent majority – can save man and his “free will,” the enduring and original will that enlivens society, from the full deployment of Technique, a Technique that, in contemporary times, where the confines between “blind obedience and crime are ever more uncertain” and in which “every day can bring new systems of coercion, slavery and extermination,” and therefore behind the semblance of democracy and free elections, the most dangerous of tyrannies continues to live, has sucked what is left of the nation-state into the “irresistible vortex” of automatism and nothingness. However, this “move to the forest,” this extralegal morality of the Rebel, should not be confused with a “form of anarchy against the world of the machines.” Like the Arbeiter – the posthumanistic subject that Junger had delineated as the positive ¨ and active protagonist during the “total mobilization” after World War I – the Rebel, too, acts inside Technique, working as an element of resistance to the automatism and as a “paladin of justice” – a “right” that, nevertheless, facing the terminal crisis of the rule of law, he can find “only in himself,” outside of its institutions. 5.2. Contaminations In fact, it is only with May 1968 that the theme of disobedience returns to being the object of an explicit theoretical and political debate in Europe. May 1968 can be seen as a plurality of disobedient movements against the authority that definitively ended the “material constitution” of modern society, opening the way to the full affirmation of the global age. From a theoretical point of view, this rediscovery of disobedience was utilized above all by the student movement, and particularly by German students, to undertake organized collective action without losing the advantages of spontaneous antagonism. If the guerrilla tactics of the liberation movements in the Third World – which the student movements were fascinated by – aimed to be, in last instance, like “the combat vanguard of the people, situated in a specified place in a certain region, armed and willing to carry out a series of warlike actions for the one

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possible strategic end – the seizure of power,”28 students resorting to these “heterodox” practices of struggle worked with the understanding that the social complexity and the desire for liberty of movement make unitary and centralized recomposition of subversive praxis both impracticable and unacceptable, just as a linear substitution of the old state apparatus with a new revolutionary one would also be. Late capitalism is characterized by a profound transformation in political control, now being “reticular,” so a decentralization of the practices of social movements must correspond to this, to be spread by “contamination” throughout society’s nervous system. In other words, lacking a “heart of the state,” revolutionary struggle must introduce a new form of organization that “is outside of the organization of the political party” and that must be formed by “decentralized centers.”29 Much emphasis has been placed on the symbolic element of disobedience: “through provocative and demonstrative actions, or better yet offensive actions with the possibility of retreating,” Rudi Dutschke, leader of Berlin’s student movement, explains, “We actualize the contradictions, we create the grounds for a truly revolutionary ‘future’ situation.”30 Student disobedience works like a tool for revolutionary repoliticization that can extend from the university to the whole society: We started from society’s weakest link, the university. It was weak because it was so far from the state apparatus and because our possibilities to directly attack authoritarian structures were so great. . . . Other weak links, like professional schools and the big companies in stagnant areas of production, would be further steps in a long march . . . to reach a politicization of wider social strata, even outside of the youth movement.31

Disobedience is therefore the driving force of a long process of transformation that does not aim to take political power but rather 28

29

30

31

E. Che Guevara, “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” in The Che Reader (Victoria: Ocean Press, 2005), http://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1963/09/ guerrilla-warfare.htm. R. Dutschke, “Intervista a cura di G. Backaus,” Quaderni piacentini 34 (1968), 2–18 [our translation]. R. Dutschke, “Risposta ad Habermas,” in H. Trettl and R. Dutschke, Dutschke a Praga (Bari: De Donato, 1968), 21 [our translation]. R. Dutschke, “Portare gaiezza nella rivoluzione,” in Trettl and Dutschke, Dutschke a Praga, 51–52 [our translation].

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to “build a new society in the shell of the old.” This “long march” does not exclude the possibility of “crossing” institutions, in the double sense of creating “counterinstitutions” in the movement (like alternative media and free universities) and “subversive” participation in existent institutions (a project that, however, almost always coincided with the creation of new political parties outside of the socialist and communist traditions, such as the German Green Party, and in the progressive integration of the main leaders of the movement into the establishment), but is essentially direct and extraparliamentary:32 The revolutionary process founded on the organized refusal means the constituted apparatus’ tendency to fall, a fall that people can provoke and see. Finally the autonomous masses will recognize their own force as socially effective and during the course of their lives, which will become more and more conscientious, they will come out of the minority and a-political condition that they have been subjected to so far.33

With the student movement, disobedience and revolution return to Europe as two substantially coinciding ways (as part of the modern reinterpretation of the right to resistance)34 of describing antagonistic struggle. During the same period, another similar reflection, where disobedience, after a long development and not without contradictions, ends up modifying the essence and the phenomenology of the communist revolution, was provided by the so-called Italian operaismo [workerism] that, beginning in the 1960s, profoundly revised orthodox Marxism around the concept of the “refusal of work,” expressed by Mario Tronti in his 1966 article “The Strategy of Refusal”: A new form of antagonism must instill itself in working class science, bending this science towards new ends, and then transcending it in the totally political act of practice. The form we refer to is the form of the 32 33

34

Ibid., 70–71 [our translation]. R. Dutschke, “A proposito del rapporto tra organizzazione e movimento studentesco,” in Trettl and Dutschke, Dutschke a Praga, 126 [our translation]. “Violence is preparing the dictatorship of emergency. So we resort to the right of the oppressed, the basic right to legitimate defense and resistance.” H.-J. Krahl, “Discorso pronunciato sul Romerberg contro le leggi di emergenza,” in Attualita` ¨ della rivoluzione. Teoria critica e capitalismo maturo (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1998), 80 [our translation].

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struggle of refusal, the form of organization of the working class “No”: the refusal to collaborate actively in capitalist development, the refusal to put forward positively a programme of demands.35

Openly polemic with the glorification of work that historically permeated socialist and communist traditions – for example, in the mythical figure of the Soviet miner Stachanov – and that guided the reformist strategy of the great Italian unions and political organizations during those years, communism was not thought of as a liberation of work from private capitalist interests but rather as an uncompromising refusal of capitalist control over productive relations and, therefore, as the liberation of the working class’s autonomous creative and productive capacity from (wage) labor. As Marx had already explained, the working class has a double nature. It is at once “concrete labor and abstract labor, work and workforce, use value and productive labor, both capital and non-capital,” which objectively live divided, in conflict. Against capital’s attempt – understood as real domination over society – to continually unify this disjunction under its aegis, “a subjective action” that blocks the “mechanism of synthesis, forcefully separating the extremes, even to the limit of rupture and beyond,” is necessary; this happens through worker refusal, through “momentary blockage of the work-process and it appears as a recurring threat which derives its content from the process of [capitalist] value creation.” Through this “strategy of refusal” – that is not exclusively limited to strikes but that also includes sabotage, squatting, and, above all, in the 1970s, even the “proletarian appropriation of wealth” – communism was emancipated from the classical model of the bourgeois revolution that saw the conquest of political power only after the progressive conquest of economic power. In fact, “there can be no revolution before the destructive will that the working class bears within itself, by the very nature of its existence, takes solid form.” Consequently, there is no need for the working class to demonstrate that it is at least as capable as capitalists of economically managing society. Opening toward the revolutionary process 35

M. Tronti, “The Strategy of Refusal” (1966), http://libcom.org/library/strategyrefusal-mario-tronti.

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is “immediate,” with the collective refusal to “expose themselves as ‘a class against capital,’” with the refusal of the working masses to use the workforce and therefore threatening to “removing working class mediation from the social relation of capitalist production.” In addition, through the lenses of the refusal of work, the entire history of class conflict and capitalist development comes out upside down. Unlike in Schumpeter’s vision, history is no longer the fruit of the bourgeois’s innovative capacity, the benefits of which the working class’s struggles then try to extend to the rest of society. Here the driving forces of historical development are the movements of worker insubordination from which the capitalist class tries to “emancipate” itself through ever changing forms of political domination: “The increasing organization of exploitation, its continual reorganization at the very highest levels of industry and society are, then, again responses by capital to workers’ refusal to submit to this process.”36 In this revolutionary process, the construction of the political party is still the kairos. In fact, for “capital’s plan” to be “set into reverse, no longer just in theory, but also in practice,” refusal must be “organized.” The discovery of worker “autonomy” goes hand in hand with the certainty of determining its direction and political centralization. This is because even if it is undoubtedly true that “the political refusal of the working class to act as active partner in the whole social process . . . is already positioning itself outside of the game, against social interests,”37 it is also true that “the power of capital tries to use workers’ antagonistic will as the driving force of its own development”; for this antagonistic will to effectively become a “strategic possibility of destruction,” there must be a political party that organizes “this same real mediation by the workers of capital’s interests” as a “tactical terrain of struggle,” as antagonism.38 Especially after May 1968, and particularly in Antonio Negri’s version of operaismo, this party has little to do with the “classic” communist model, which is more and more orientated toward 36 37 38

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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“compromising” hypotheses with the capitalist order, if not in the sense of the recovery of the original Leninist spirit, which, however, operates in an economic and social context that is profoundly different from the one in which the Bolshevik revolution took place. Indeed, for Lenin, the revolution was the realization of a process that, with its force, entirely destroyed the power apparatus of the capitalist class: the state. The party had to consequently conduct a revolutionary struggle accelerating the situations of economic crisis that were nevertheless created by the dominant classes. Instead, in operaismo, as we have said, the effects of worker refusal, the immanent unavailability of the working class to work for capital, is what exercises direct “productive” action on the modes of capitalist production and its restructurings. The task of the party thus becomes “forcing autonomy,” breaking the mystified image that capital clamps onto the processes of the working class’s autovalorization, that is, its ability to create an “autonomous” world of needs (communism) while objectively functioning as a “determined block” of the valorization of capital. The party must therefore make itself the “function of destroying the capitalist mechanisms of command,” intervening “in an offensive form wherever the organisms of worker’s power find the limit of capitalist command.” The breakdown of the propulsive function of the “State-plan” and the welfare policies inaugurated with the 1929 crisis, when it is big business that directly imposes itself without regulation, as the “subject of antagonism from capital’s point of view,” means borrowing “the same forms in which the enterprise develops its control over the class.” The party can no longer give itself “an extensive horizon on which to develop,” nor can it “rely on an organic growth,” but instead it must “combat the precise initiatives which capital sets in motion in order to rupture the unified front of the proletariat.”39 The centrality that operaismo assigns to the refusal of work grafts many elements that we could call disobedience onto the “communist program”: “Refusal of work,” writes Negri in his “Domination and Sabotage” (1977), is “direct action, sabotage, 39

A. Negri, “Crisis of the Planner-State: Communism and Revolutionary Organization” (1971), in Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (London: Verso, 2005).

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and armed struggle, . . . this continual activity of the sniper, the saboteur, the absentee, the deviant, the criminal.”40 Elements of disobedience that however go hand in hand with evocative calls to “insurrection,” which although no longer considered the last step in the revolutionary process but the starting point for “an expansive force that has no limits,” see the key for liberation from the chains of capital in the frontal clash with the repressive apparatus of the state and its organization (the dictatorship of the proletariat). In reality, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the operaismo – in the meantime recharacterized as Autonomia operaia (the “movement for worker autonomy”) – identified proletarian antagonism as mainly territorial “counter-power,” that is, “the permanent upsetting of power, the deposing the organs of dominion conquered through the spread, rooting and mobility of revolutionary presence, through the hegemony of a section of class inside class composition.”41 It is only with the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the logic of modern sovereignty definitively gave way, even from a symbolic point of view, to a new poststate political space – what Negri would later define as “Empire” – that disobedience explicitly entered into the political vocabulary of operaismo: “‘Civil disobedience,’” writes Paolo Virno after the mass flight that marked the end of the German Democratic Republic, “is today the sine qua non of political action,” provided, however, that it is “freed from the terms of the liberal tradition within which it is generally encapsulated,” in other words, articulating it in a “radical” sense as a way of “[bringing] into question the State’s very faculty of command.”42 Within this explicit engagement of disobedience in an operaist perspective, there is not only a proximity to the positions of American radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s, which, as we have seen, came directly from the critique of liberal civil disobedience, but also more generally a new “geometry of hostility,” a new paradigm of antagonism that, having reached the end of the “age of the 40 41 42

A. Negri, “Domination and Sabotage,” in Books for Burning, 259. “Per il movimento dell’Autonomia operaia,” I Volsci 6 (1978) [our translation]. P. Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution,” in Makeworld, Paper 2 (2002), http:// www.makeworlds.org/node/34.

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state,” was truly posed “beyond” Marx and Lenin. An antagonistic paradigm that, to “give meaning back to the concept of enmity,” needs to make itself “American,” also from a lexical point of view:43 in the defection of East German civil society, like before in the 1970s, when, “albeit only for a brief period, occupational mobility functioned as a political resource, bringing about the eclipse of industrial discipline and permitting a certain degree of selfdetermination,” we can now fully identify the “mass flight from the factory regime” of American workers as described by Marx in his writings on the “frontier.” This process of Americanization of operaist thought struck the very conceptual statute of the “refusal of work,” transforming it into the wider image of the “exodus of wage labor,”44 a proletarian antagonism that no longer privileges the Fordist “factory” but the entire “sphere of common affairs” because now everything is political, the space of conflict between an ever more “intellectual” and social “potential wealth” produced by labor and capital’s despotic control of it (later to be called biopolitical) through the “hypertrophic growth of administrative apparatuses” and a “tight-knit web of hierarchical relations.” A few years later, Antonio Negri, who was the one who vigorously stressed the “constituent power” of the working class in the operaist tradition,45 will say, Class struggle in the biopolitical context takes the form of exodus. By exodus here we mean, at least initially, a process of subtraction from the 43

44

45

On this process of “Americanization” of Italian operaismo, see the special on “Cultura della frontiera” published in Metropoli 6 (1981): 30–52. The reference to the passage “beyond” Marx instead alludes to the classic contribution of A. Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (New York: Autonomedia, 1989.) “I use the term Exodus here to define mass defection from the State, the alliance between general intellect and political Action, and a movement toward the public sphere of Intellect. The term is not at all conceived as some defensive existential strategy – it is neither exiting on tiptoe through the back door nor a search for sheltering hideaways. Quite the contrary: what I mean by Exodus is a full-fledged model of action, capable of confronting the challenges of modern politics [ . . . ] articulated by Hobbes, Rousseau, Lenin, and Schmitt.” Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution.” A. Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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relationship with capital by means of actualizing the potential autonomy of labor power. Exodus is thus not a refusal of the productivity of biopolitical labor power but rather a refusal of the increasingly restrictive fetters placed on its productive capacities by capital. It is an expression of the productive capacities that exceed the relationship with capital.46

Within this shifted theoretical paradigm, behaviors traditionally categorized as immature or apolitical – for example, flight, migrations, boycotts – now become the beating heart of the “strategy of refusal.” This is “fertile grounds” for this “radical disobedience,” assuming the “basic and indispensable form” of political action is social conflict that, following Albert Hirschman’s analysis, is manifested “not so much as protest, but most particularly as defection.”47 In short, “the struggle against waged labor [ . . . ] is no longer connected to the emphatic perspective of the ‘taking power’”; the latter “confronts ‘power’ without dreaming of an alternative organization of the State, but rather rigidifies and extinguishes every form of command over the activity of women and men.”48 And, in turn, “restoring order” no longer means trying to “wipe out political opponents” or crush dissident cultures but instead trying to “impose the interjection of new rules to the game,” to “reconnect a society of ‘slackers’ and ‘deserters’ to some dynamic system” and “obtain the return of the runaways into the ranks and functions” of society.49 Even revolutionary violence, which in the 1970s was still considered a “necessary ingredient” and “a sign of class fellowship,”50 lost much of its charm. In this new “postmodern” scenario, where “the ‘enemy’ no longer appears as a parallel reflection or mirror image, matching point by point the trenches and fortifications that are occupied by the ‘friends’ [but] rather . . . appears as a segment that intersects several times with a 46

47

48

49

50

M. Hardt and A. Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009), 152. P. Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution.” See also A. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). P. Virno, “Right to Resistance,” http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno7 .htm. M. Bascetta, “L’ultimo che esce, spenga la luce,” Luogo comune 1 (1990), 49 [our translation]. A. Negri, “Domination and Sabotage,” 259.

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sinusoidal line of flight,”51 resorting to the use of force now serves not to attain communism (storming heaven) but to defend and protect a transformation that has already happened even if it still isn’t “concretized.” Unlike the original conception of the “refusal of work,” disobedience in not only the “destructive part” of the processes of worker “self-valorization” but a “resourceful withdrawal,” an immediately creative force that in refusing “modifies the conditions within which the conflict takes place” and “constructs different social relations and new forms of life.” 5.3. Two European Perspectives on American Civil Disobedience The difficulties that European political thought had with relating to disobedience, even during the twentieth century, clearly emerge when we observe the way that Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse participated in the American debate on civil disobedience during the 1960s and 1970s. These two “Heidegger’s children,”52 educated in classic German philosophy and emigrated to the New World to escape the Nazis, have given us two opposing interpretations of civil disobedience – one that underlines the irreducible difference with the European revolutionary tradition, the other that cannot help but lead disobedience back to that very tradition. However, they coincide in their reluctance to acknowledge disobedience’s true (theoretical and political) autonomy, both reducing it to a preparatory phase for a revolution that, according to the value that this has for them, must be contained or fully deployed in its revolutionary potential to be effectively productive. Arendt, in particular, tries to give the liberal defense of civil disobedience a different, and in her opinion more solid, theoretical base. Those positions seem to her to be biased by a “legal” prejudice (also common in the conservative critiques of civil disobedience) that takes the political legitimacy of civil disobedience exclusively to its legal justification, thus reducing it to casuistry (which, among other things, continually needs exceptions) to use for the legal

51 52

Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution.” ¨ R. Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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judgment of single, disobedient individuals. For Arendt, in doing so, the very element that makes civil disobedience a politically urgent question is minimized: its collective and mass nature, its being the expression of organized minorities that voluntarily act on the basis of shared ideas or interests. In such situations, concentrating on the subject of the conscience of who disobeys is misleading because disobedience acquires its political value in the moment in which it loses its original individualistic prerogative, that is, when it is transformed into “public opinion,” whose validity and force are not given in foro conscientiae, in virtue of its higher moral obligations, but “on the number of those associated with it.”53 But what most counts is that American commentators of civil disobedience seem paradoxically unaware of the “American” context in which these mass phenomena took place; thus they end up making the same mistakes that, for Arendt, characterize most of Western political philosophy: historically understanding power according to the vertical logic of control and obedience that, consequently, has never been able to grasp the relational nature of power and of laws. The modern “antitradition” inaugurated by the American Revolution did not assign an “imperative” function to laws, to control, that supposed a full and absolute obedience for those under them, but rather a “directive” function in the sense of norms that organize human relations, limiting them. In other words, laws circumscribe political space, defining the “rules of the game.”54 Within this political “game,” there is no place for obedience: “the only domain where the word [obedience] could possibly apply to adults who are not slaves is the domain of religion, in which people say that they obey the word or the command of God because the relationship between God and man can rightly be seen in terms similar to the relation between adult and child.”55 In a modern and, even more so, “American” perspective, obedience can therefore operate only as an original precondition for politics, as a tacit recognition of the “rules of the game” with which an individual comes

53

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H. Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crisis of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), 68. H. Arendt, On Violence (Boston: Mariner Books, 1970). H. Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” 48.

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to be a part of a political community and actively participates in it. However, paradoxically, for this tacit recognition to work through willing “support” for institutions, and therefore for obedience not to be understood arbitrarily as free consensus, it is also necessary to imagine its negation – disobedience, understood as the explicit removal of consensus that individuals and social groups can express once inside “the great game of the world,” their will to contest or modify the rules of the political game: “If I obey the laws of the land, I actually support its constitution, as becomes glaringly obvious in the case of revolutionists and rebels who disobey because they have withdrawn this tacit consent.”56 The civil disobedience practiced during that time in the United States is therefore, for Arendt, fully within the “spirit of American law.” Even though it could never aspire to legal or constitutional recognition since it is, by definition, illegal, it would merit a political recognition similar to the one that the United States gives to organized lobbies. The role that it plays in contemporary American society coincides with the role assigned to voluntary associationism by de Tocqueville in the nineteenth century: a way to participate given to minorities inside a representative political system regulated by majority principle, through which alternative centers of power are constituted that help to preserve the democratic plurality of the political system.57 To maintain this democratic and participative function, it must however remain as distinct from revolution as possible. This does not necessarily mean assigning civil disobedience, as Rawls does, a lower level of radicalness in respect to revolution, limiting its action “within established authority,” but rather (philosophically) affirming its difference from the (European) logic that governs the theory and practice of revolution. In fact, as Gandhi’s case demonstrates, “the civil disobedient shares with the revolutionary the wish to change the world, and the changes he wishes to accomplish can be drastic indeed.”58 In addition, when civil disobedience becomes a mass phenomenon, it is always facing a “revolutionary situation,” a serious loss of authority’s power and 56 57 58

Ibid. Arendt, “Civil Disobedience.” Ibid., 77.

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institutions.59 But it is precisely for this reason that New Left American movements that practice civil disobedience must not become revolutionaries: for Arendt, this essentially means that they have to distance themselves from more radical groups, such as Black Power, that use violence to break from the repressive continuity with which revolution has been historically conceived. However, in this way, they end up forgetting how breaking the automatic and predictable development of events belongs to all human action as “either mere behavior or preservation.” In her opinion, those groups do not understand that violence is the expression of a weakness, a “doing” incapable of true political creation: “out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.”60 As long as the power structure remains intact, that is to say, as long as the institutional support mechanism is still strong, revolutionary violence with its inherent inferiority in available coercive means is destined to be crushed. Only after the “disintegration” of the power structure is the success of revolutionary violence possible. In such a situation, however, resorting to revolutionary violence is no longer necessary. At the most, violence can help to “dramatize grievances and bring them to public attention.” In this sense, it precedes the development of any real political action. Still, when its duration goes beyond the precise limits of this function, it destroys the terrain on which politics develop. Power, the form in which political participation is articulated, the space that defines and enables a truly active life, and violence, the logic of subjectification, are in fact “opposite.” When the former is subjected to a contraction of its substantial legitimacy, the latter takes hold. But, as a specific way for a minority to politically participate in the life of a country and express its own political opinions with determination, civil disobedience is part of that power, one of its internal articulations. It is therefore in the interests of those who practice it to avoid any violent drift, because the risk of a repressive

59

60

“The sudden dramatic breakdown of power that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obedience – to laws, to rulers, to institutions – is but the outward manifestation of support and consent.” Ibid., 148. Ibid., 152.

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spiral that could change all politics into a violent practice that zeros out the space of expression and dissent is always present: “where violence is no longer backed and restrained by power, the wellknown reversal in reckoning with means and ends has taken place. The means, the means of destruction, now determine the end – with the consequence that the end will be the destruction of all power.”61 If Arendt’s analysis aims to separate civil disobedience from the forms of struggle practiced by more radical groups, thus keeping some form of constitutionality to it (in the sense of its compatibility with the democratic spirit of the American Constitution), Marcuse’s starting point for his reflection is instead the very search for a theoretical base able to unite all forms of struggle of the new social movements – from love-ins and countercultural practices to occupations, riots, and metropolitan guerrilla warfare – under the category of civil disobedience. In his opinion, this can only happen outside of the delimitation of civil disobedience in an albeit sui generis form of lobbying: “the opposition is placed before the fatal decision: opposition as ritual event or opposition as resistance, i.e. civil disobedience.”62 Similarly, constitutionality is not, in any way, an adequate criterion to describe civil disobedience: since oppositional practices challenge the present order, they all operate on the terrain – at least potentially – of illegality because dominant institutions are the ones that are able to “discretionally” change and restrict the limits of legality. No social system, even the most free and “democratic” ones, such as the United States claims to be, can constitutionalize a form of resistance that undermines its foundations. They inevitably remain “illegal in respect to positive law.” Nevertheless, Marcuse’s defense of civil disobedience is just as “embarrassed” as Arendt’s because it is hard to trace back to the paradigm of “critical theory of society.” Like other thinkers from the Frankfurt school, Marcuse addresses American civil disobedience from the classic communist conception of disobedience as an

61 62

Arendt, On Violence, 54. H. Marcuse, “The End of Utopia,” in Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/ 60spubs/67endutopia/67EndUtopiaProbViol.htm.

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infantile and imperfect form of political dissent. At the time of ¨ ¨ und Familie [Studies about Authority his Studien uber Autoritat and Family] in 1936, for example, he made his own sociopsychological criticism of Eric Fromm, according to whom “rebellion” refuses authority but conserves the structure of “authoritarianmasochistic” character and, for this reason, is less mature than “revolution,” which, in its opposition to authority, also dissolves the impulses that call for submission to the latter.63 Consequently, he distanced himself from the “worship of the spontaneous mass movement which pursues its aim unaided” in favor of a “progressive conception of authority” as the organization of revolutionary struggle identified in that phase with the Leninist party.64 It is only the crisis of that organizational model – definitively rendered evident after World War II with the integration of the proletariat (or, more precisely, of its historical organization in political parties and unions)65 – that pushes Marcuse to judge the American New Left’s “Jeffersonian spirit” with growing sympathy, identifying “a breath of fresh air” in the irreverent existential spontaneity of their protest and in their practices’ distance from the European socialist and communist tradition. He considered it the historical manifestation of the “great refusal” of the “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” in advanced industrial society that he described in his One-Dimensional Man and the most important contribution to the renewal of revolutionary theory. However, over the course of the 1960s, disobedience seemed to him to be still stamped with “futility”: the undoubtedly “progressive” character of the protests of the New Left clashed with the movement’s intrinsic “weakness,” “isolation,” and “lack of organization” visible in the “emotional” repetition of protests and demonstrations.66 63

64

65

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¨ ¨ und Familie: Fortschungsberichte aus E. Fromm et al., Studien uber Autoritat ¨ Sozialforschung (Dietrich: Klampen, 1936). dem Institut fur H. Marcuse, A Study on Authority, in H. Marcuse, From Luther to Popper (London: Verso, 1988), 136. But see also his “33 Theses” in Technology, War and Fascism: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 1998). H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991). H. Marcuse, uncollected papers of 1967 (Herbert Marcuse Archive 317.01), first published in Italian in H. Marcuse, Scritti e interventi, vols. I and II, ed. R. Laudani (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2005–2007.)

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From this point of view, his position was not fundamentally very different from the one held by his friend Theodor W. Adorno at the end of the 1960s, who, as director, had the local police evict students who were occupying Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research and for whom “theory . . . is kept separate from praxis” in the new social movements, finding “something of that thoughtless violence that once belonged to fascism” in their practice of civil disobedience.67 Only after May 1968, which Marcuse significantly defined as the “globalization of revolutionary opposition,”68 that is, when civil disobedience left its American confines to become a universal form of radical protest – and, more precisely, when civil disobedience was taken up by the German student movement – did his initial perplexities on civil disobedience’s effective capacity to influence politics transform into a wholehearted conviction: given the degree to which bourgeois democracy (on the basis of its immanent antinomies) seals itself off from qualitative change – through the parliamentary democratic process itself – extra-parliamentary opposition becomes the only form of “contestation”; “civil disobedience,” direct action.

However, even in this case, disobedience is left only an anticipatory role, a “catalyst” for radical change that “must prepare the terrain for the future revolution.” As the 1968 barricades in Paris demonstrate, disobedience can in fact favor “the opening of the one-dimensional society,” the “rupture with the continuum of domination and exploitation,” the visibility of the “aggravating economic stresses of the global system of corporate capitalism” and even the emergence of “new values, new resources, and new faculties of contestation” until then unexplored, but that can be fully realized only with the activation of the historical subject of the revolution: the working class.69 67

68

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T. W. Adorno, “Letter to Herbert Marcuse of 5 May 1969,” http:// platypus1917.home.comcast.net/˜platypus1917/adornomarcuse_germannewleft .pdf. This expression is credited to Marcuse by Rudi Dutschke in Dutschke a Praga [our translation]. For more on this subject, see my Politica come movimento. Il pensiero di Herbert Marcuse (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005).

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It is not surprising that every time Marcuse tried to give a serious theoretical legitimation to the New Left’s civil disobedience, the allusions and the nods to American exceptionalism – Jefferson’s “tree of liberty,” which periodically needs to be shaken by rebellion to remain healthy – gave way to the more “solid” European tradition of the right to resistance: I believe . . . there is a “natural right” of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate. Law and order are always and everywhere the law and order that protect the established hierarchy; it is nonsensical to invoke the absolute authority of this law and this order against those who suffer from it and struggle against it – not for personal advantages and revenge, but for their share of humanity. There is no judge over them other than the constituted authorities, the police and their own conscience. If they use violence, they do not start a new chain of violence but try to break an established one.70

The model of reference is Babeuf, whose defense facing the High Court of Vendome was the object of a specific study for Marcuse: the French revolutionary tried to obtain the impossible, the recognition of “extreme civil disobedience” as a form of protest legitimated by the very authority that it targets. He admits that his acts are subversive, though denying that they are a form of “conspiracy.” His subversion was not directed against a legitimate authority but against an authority that, having forced the masses into a life of “hunger and misery” to preserve particular interests, had de facto “abrogated” the “social contract.” Disobedience is, in this case, an “act of virtue” that reestablishes the order upset by constituted interests and puts an end to an order that, in practice, denied the principles of liberty and equality that, in theory, it proclaimed.71 So, at the end of the 1960s – again thanks to the “European” student movement’s theory of “immaterial labor,” which put student 70

71

H. Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 95–137, http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/ 65repressivetolerance.htm. H. Marcuse, “Thoughts on the Defense of Gracchus Babeuf,” in The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf, ed. J. A. Scott (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967), 96–105.

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agency at the heart of capitalist production72 – when Marcuse’s civil disobedience totally emancipated itself from its role as servant to proletarian revolution, it still remained conceptually subordinated to it, being revolution’s form in the age of late capitalism: “monopolistic capitalism has a new concrete sense to the ‘revolution from below’: subversion from below. The technical and economic integration of the system was so concentrated that breaking it at a key point can cause a serious dysfunction of the whole.” Facing the concentration of an enormous military and police force in the hands of the institutions of the status quo and the prevalence of a reformist mentality in the great labor organizations, the traditional revolutionary strategy of “taking power,” understood as a direct assault at the heart of the state and its nerve centers led by an avantgarde that developed the class consciousness of the proletariat from “outside,” was no longer practicable. It was to be substituted by “a general, unstructured, unorganized, and diffused process of disintegration” that was manifested in the “the methodological disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment” and in the dissolution of the “moral fiber” that supported affluent society, “in a collapse of work discipline, slowdown, spread of disobedience to rules and regulations, wildcat strikes, boycotts, sabotage, gratuitous acts of noncompliance.”73 5.4. Disobedience and Globalization With the end of the modern differentiation between the ordered space of the state and the disciplined yet “disordered” space of the colonies, disobedience thus found a new active role: “in the age of global Empire,” write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in the second volume of their trilogy on globalization, “the obstacle traditionally posed to sovereignty by the need for consent, submission and obedience becomes an ineluctable active adversary.”74 72

73 74

“Protosocialism and Late Capitalism: Toward a Critical Synthesis on Bahro’s Analysis,” in Rudolf Bahro: Critical Responses, ed. U. Wolter (White Plains, NY: Sharpe, 1980), 24–48. H. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 83. M. Hardt and A. Negri, Multitude, War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 334.

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Disobedience became “the motor force of the reality we live, and at the same time it is the living opposition.”75 Starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall, all of the stages that have marked the formation of a “new world order” over the last years have been accompanied, and in certain cases anticipated, by episodes of mass disobedience. Here it will suffice to mention the most striking cases: almost simultaneously with the mass defection of East German civil society that brought an end (also symbolically) to Soviet communism, Chinese students animated a popular protest that, although crushed by governmental repression, was the origin of “China’s new order.”76 A few years later, through a deep rethinking of the Latin American revolutionary tradition and an innovative use of new medias (particularly the Internet), the movements of indigenous resistance in Chiapas became a global model for a new way to act politically, aiming to “change the world without taking power.”77 In between, there were the countless local episodes of disobedience to neoliberal policies that, throughout the 1990s, prepared the formation of the new global movements that broke onto the world stage at the dawn of the new millennium with the demonstrations in Seattle against the World Trade Organization and in Genoa against the G8, when disobedience also appeared far from the more directly activist environments as the real new political event of the global age – just think of the emphatic definition as a “new world power” that the New York Times gave to the global day of protest against the war in Afghanistan. Disobedience’s renewed practical active role is, however, accompanied by a substantially marginal theoretical production.78 From this point of view, disobedience has experienced the same crisis in meaning and displacement that all the modern forms of political action are going through today, particularly now that the

75

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77

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M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 203. W. Hui, China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). J. Halloway, Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (London: Pluto Press, 2002). One of the rare (and modest) attempts to give a “global” theory of disobedience is T. Jordan, Activism! Direct Action, Hacktivism and the Future of Society (London: Reaktion Books, 2004).

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propulsive drive of the “global justice” movement seems to be exhausted. Looking back, that period can be seen as epitaphic, the confirmation that today disobedient actions as they were theorized and practiced in modernity are “no more disruptive than a fly biting an elephant.”79 That disobedience had its own effectiveness when “to dominate strategic sites in physical space was once the key source of power”; but today, it has itself become destituent: “domination rests on the ability of an institution to move where resistance is absent, in conjunction with the ability to temporarily appropriate a given physical space as needed.” So, if “an oppositional force [conquers] key points in physical space, [this] in no way threatens an institution.”80 It is precisely this contestation of the inevitable decline of modern disobedience that the so-called hackerism begins, rethinking the function of “civil disobedience” in the era of cyberspace: “what was once a sedentary concrete mass” that represented its power with grand architectonic structures standing out in populated city centers to give the impression of an “impregnable and everlasting solidity,” that oppositional groups could try to storm, has now become a “nomadic electronic flow.” As a result, “the strategy and tactics of CD [civil disobedience] can still be useful . . . but only if they are used to block the flow of information rather than the flow of personnel.”81 In other words, to have any significant effect, disobedience must itself become “electronic”: “blocking information access” in fact seems today “the best means to disrupt any institution, whether it is military, corporate, or governmental.”

79

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Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (New York: Autonomedia, 1996), http://www.critical-art.net/books/ecd/. Ibid. This is effectively what happened after the success of the Seattle and Genoa protests, when the actions of social movements were able to decree the failure of the summits, above all in the eyes of international public opinion, even though they did not actually stop the meetings. From that moment on, the “institutions” of globalization began to organize their summits in remote areas difficult to reach for protestors. The generalization of “preventative arrests” before a demonstration as a part of the global struggle against terrorism in the United States works in the same way. This impedes “civil disobedience” at the source because it prevents any violation of the law whatsoever. On this topic, see B. Shepard, “Creative Direct Action in the Era of Patriot Act,” Counterpunch, June 18–19, 2005. Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience.

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This, although illegal, should not be confused with “electronic crime,” which tries to profit from actions that chiefly damage individuals. Instead, the hacker “only attacks institutions”: his “criminal” penetration into cyberspace is geared toward overturning the “value system of the state,” with the goal of “placing information back in the service of people rather than using it to benefit institutions.”82 The spread of hackerism can be framed inside a more general process of the deterritorialization of disobedience that, to answer the progressive delocalization of power, tries to reinvent itself as a “flow.” Its actions thus coincide with the creation of “temporary autonomous zones,” freed areas where the verticality of power is spontaneously substituted by horizontal networks of relations that then “dissolve [themselves] to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.”83 The Direct Action Network and the Genoa Social Forum – the two organizational structures created by the movements that converged in Seattle and Genoa to protest neoliberal globalization – were, in some ways, good examples of “temporary autonomous zones”: the assault and symbolic violation of the “red zone” – the space that marked the area inaccessible to the “common” people during the two international summits – were in fact only the most prominent part (necessary to give media visibility to the movement’s arguments) of a new grassroots democratic praxis, fundamentally hostile to any unified and definitive political composition.84 It is based on this image of radical, grassroots democracy that Hardt and Negri built the concept of “multitude” that they have proposed in the last few years as the expressive form of contemporary antagonism, taking the place of the “traditional organizational forms based on unity, central leadership, and hierarchy” that are no longer “neither desirable nor effective.”85 Like during the protests in Seattle and Genoa, for Hardt and Negri, the multitude is the expression of a chorus of “different voices” that “spoke in 82 83

84

85

Ibid. H. Bey, T. A. Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 1985), http://hermetic.com/bey/. J. Brecher, T. Costello, and B. Smith, Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000). Hard and Negri, Commonwealth, 166.

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common” in the form of “affinity groups that come together or converge not to unite in one centralized group . . . but remain different and independent” in a “network” that “defines both their singularity and their commonality.”86 It is, in fact, composed of “innumerable internal differences” – cultures, races, genders, sexual orientations, desires, forms of labor, modes of life, and world visions – “that can never be reduced to a unity or a single identity,” but this does not make them unable to produce “institutions” where “habits and practices consolidated in new social institutions will constitute our now transformed human nature.” Unlike the modern tradition, these institutions are “based on conflict,” in the double sense of an extension of “social rupture opened by revolt,” and “remain open to and constituted by conflict.” Thus, inside the multitude, the forms of obligation that marked “the entire tradition of sovereign politics” are inverted: There is never in the multitude, however, any obligation in principle to power. On the contrary, in the multitude the right to disobedience and the right to difference are fundamental. The constitution of the multitude is based on the constant legitimate possibility of disobedience. Obligation arises for the multitude only in the process of decision making, as the result of its active political will, and the obligation lasts as long as that political will continues.87

Therefore, in this perspective, disobedience is not only a way to practice social conflict (“the project of exodus and liberation”) but also, and above all, a way of being of radical democracy, the subjective expression of a commonwealth (“the set of powers to act – being, loving, transforming, creating – that reside in the multitude”)88 rooted in the growing “biopolitical” socialization of production that attempts to pass from “virtuality” to reality.89 However, in the very moment when its theoretical heart moves from the “heroic” and striking dimension of its historical manifestation to the “invisible” acts that substantiate and prepare it, disobedience is transformed, de facto, into an “ought to be.” Hardt and Negri are aware of the difficulties inherent to the multitude as a “postmodern” image of antagonistic political subjectivity: in 86 87 88 89

Hard and Negri, Multitude, 288. Ibid., 340. Hard and Negri, Empire, 357. Hard and Negri, Commonwealth, esp. 149–53.

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reality, the multitude appears as a field of tension, an ambivalent space where emancipative demands and compensatory needs, instances of liberation and potent coercive logic, social solidarity and regressive aggressively coexist.90 More than a preconstructed political agent, the multitude represents the consequence of a hypothesis, a project of agency (“doing-multitude”) that is merely prefigured in the disobedience of activist groups: The multiplicity of singularities that produce and are produced in the biopolitical field of the common do not spontaneously accomplish exodus and construct their autonomy. Political organization is needed to cross the threshold and generate political events. The kairos – the opportune moment that ruptures the monotony and repetitiveness of chronological time – has to be grasped by a political subject.91

The multitude’s passage from virtuality to reality must therefore be “governed” and “organized” (“the becoming-prince of the multitude”). Facing this necessity, the “project of exodus” is forced to recover, from an ever more abstract and normative platform, the modern conceptual arsenal that it tried to leave: “revolution must be governed not only to guide and regulate its movements but also to establish the forces of constituent power as a new form of life, a new social being.”92 This produces a recession of disobedience that moves from “virtual” practices of radical democracy back to being “civil disobedience,” a specific form of struggle that, together with “sabotage, wage struggles that aim at destabilizing the productive structure, punctual struggles, conflictual relations with forms of command,” express the “destructuring” part of “doing-multitude,” a necessary but insufficient moment in the “constituent struggles in favor of a democracy of the common.”93 In stripping itself of its modern vests, disobedience therefore experiences its internal limits and takes a step back, waiting to find a new existence beyond itself.

90

91 92 93

Ibid., 169–76. On this subject, see also P. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004). Hard and Negri, Commonwealth, 165. Ibid., 371. But also 244–48 (on the multitude as political program). A. Negri, The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 121.

Index

abolitionism, 83–87 Adams, John, 80 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 147 anarchism, 91, 99 Antigone (Sophocles), 9–13, 15 Appeal to Heaven, 52 Aquinas, Thomas, 26, 29 Arendt, Hannah, 124–126, 141–145 Augustine of Hippo, 25 Babeuf, Gracchus, 148 Bodin, Jean, 49 ´ Bo´etie, Etienne de la, x, 33, 43 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 126–129 boycott, 102 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 105 Bucero, Martin, 40 Buchanan, George, 44 Calvin, John, 41–42 capitalism, late, 133, 149 Catiline conspiracy, 19, 20 Civil Rights Movement, 104–112, 117, 118 Cleyre, Voltairine de, 99 communalism, libertarian, 89 Comstock Laws, 90 constituent power, 4, 139, 154 contractualism, 116 Declaration of Independence, 61, 62, 63, 88, 92

destituent power, 4–5 disobedience and modern rationalism, 55, 68, 121 as civil disobedience, 6–7, 10–11, 91–120, 138, 141–149, 151, 154 Christian, 21–26, 28, 129, 130 electronic, 151 nonviolent, 101, 107 student, 122, 132–134, 147, 150 theory of civil, 112, 115–116, 119 to Nazism, 122–123 Douglass, Frederick, 86, 96 exodus of wage labor, 139–140 feminism, 87–90, 119–120 Feuerbach, Paul Johann Anselm, 75–79 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 73–75 Fra Dolcino, 30–31 Free Love Movement, 89 Free Speech Movement, 109 Fromm, Eric, 1, 146 Fugitive Slave Act, 83–85 Gandhi, Mahatma, 94, 101–103, 108 globalization, 6, 154 Goldman, Emma, 99 Gregg, Richard Bartlett, 104 Grimk´e, Angelina, 87 Guardini, Romano, 126

155

156

Index

happiness, 1, 64–65, 76, 90 Harrison, Hubert, 105 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 10, 79 Hitler, Adolf, 123–126 Hobbes, Thomas, 47–52, 58, 78 Holocaust, 123, 124, 131 Huguenots, 34, 38, 49 International Workers of the World (IWW), 100, 101, 105 Jefferson, Thomas, 64, 81, 148 justice, 17, 26 Kant, Immanuel, 77, 124 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 82, 104–111 League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience, 106 liberty, 35, 36, 39, 55, 70 Christian, 39 guard of, 35 love for, 35, 36 sexual, 89 to obey, 42 Lloyd Garrison, William, 83 Locke, John, 51–53, 57–64 Luther, Martin, 39–41 Lysistrata, 13–15 Machiavelli, Niccolo, ` 35 magistrate, 17–18 Marcuse, Herbert, 141, 145–149 Marx, Karl, 79–80, 135 Mayhew, Jonathan, 62–63 Milani, Lorenzo, 130 monarcomach perspective, 38–39, 44 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 104, 108 multitude, 154 Negri, Antonio, 136–140, 149, 152–154 Neumann, Franz, 121 nonviolent resistance, Gandhian, 101–103, 108 obedience, 5, 12, 13, 17–18, 23, 30, 34, 38, 42, 43, 49, 50, 55, 59, 70, 72, 118, 123, 124–131, 142–143

operaismo, 134–138 Paley, William, 95 Parker, Theodor, 84 Parsons, Lucy, 105 Phillips, Wendell, 85 Plato, 11 potency, 4 Putney Debates, 44 Randolph, Asa Philip, 105–106 Rawls, John, 112–116 rebel, 131–132 refusal of work, 134, 137–141 power of, 48 resistance, 27–31, 40–44, 51–53, 56, 66, 77, 94, 123, 134, 148. See also disobedience revolution, 61, 67, 71, 74, 92, 134, 135, 137, 143, 146, 154. See also disobedience Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 68 Russell, Bertrand, 130, 131 secession, 18–20 sedition, 18, 19, 20, 27 servitude, voluntary, 33, 35, 37, 50, 58 Shakespeare, William, 43 Socrates, 11 sovereignty, theory of, 47–49 Spinoza, Baruch, 55 student movement, 132–134, 148 Thoreau, Henry David, 91–99 Tronti, Mario, 134 tyranny, 26, 34 Underground Railroad, 84 Virno, Paolo, 138 voting, illegal, 88 Walzer, Michael, 116–118 White Rose, 122, 123 Wobblies, 100–102 Zinn, Howard, 118–119