Lewis Perry. Civil Disobedience

As a subject of study, civil disobedience seems to resist the rigor of historical analysis. Too often it is reduced to a panoply of heroes: from Henry David Thoreau, to Mohandas Gandhi, to Rosa Parks. In Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition, Lewis Perry takes a different approach. As his title suggests, he sees civil disobedience as a sustained “tradition” rather than the actions of exceptional individuals, and he seeks to trace “the practice, justification, and criticism” of that tradition “from its pre-revolutionary backgrounds to the present” (p. 1). His ambitious synthesis ranges across the history of ideas, politics, and social movements, while also engaging in the “moral history” pioneered by scholars such as George Cotkin, Robert B. Westbrook, and Thomas L. Haskell. The result is a fascinating book that reinterprets familiar characters and events to illuminate surprising connections, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The dilemmas inherent in the civil disobedience tradition are Perry's special interest, particularly “the underlying paradoxical feeling of wanting to respect the law and institutions of civil society while being unable to acquiesce in or ignore immoralities in those laws and institutions” (p. 1). Civil disobedience is lawbreaking with some measure of civility and willingness to accept punishment, making it for Perry a form of “moderate protest” (p. 3). No definition, however, can fit every relevant case, and the most captivating parts of the book come when historical actors themselves argue about the meanings of their dissent.

Civil disobedience · Civility · Criticism · Dissent · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies