Book Review: Civil Disobedience, by William Scheuerman

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719839351
• Author: Maeve Cooke
• Date: 01 August 2019
• Published date: 01 August 2019
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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impression of the destruction to individuals than it does of which politics,
or political order, might be most responsive. And indeed, pressing such
abolitionist questions at this level of generality could only happen after the
book’s powerful arguments, which make proposals for prison reform appear
paltry and inadequate. The breadth of the challenge posed by social death
thus leaves readers haunted by the deeper question of how modern American
society, at least, has come to be fundamentally organized not just through
prisons but also through conceptions of guilt and innocence. Reforming or
even abolishing the institution of the prison is not enough. As Guenther
writes, “what we need is rather collective resistance and revolution at the
scene of the ‘crime’ itself” (61). Primal scenes of punishment need to be
revisited, worked through, and surpassed.
Ultimately, Guenther’s Solitary Confinement is a remarkable contribu-
tion to this project. Its astonishing sweep expands the terrain of philo-
sophical exploration of the social phenomenon of imprisonment. It leaves
to readers the task of picking up the threads of inquiry it bequeaths and
using these to unravel punishment’s entanglement in modern political and
social order. More importantly, it places an ethical demand on readers to
seek out the solidarities that will make such genealogical work an emphat-
ically political project.
Civil Disobedience, by William Scheuerman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018, 216 pp.
Reviewed By: Maeve Cooke, School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Belfield,
Dublin, Ireland
DOI: 10.1177/0090591719839351
Politically motivated lawbreaking is on the increase, domestically and glob-
ally. William Scheuerman’s book discusses one particular form—civil dis-
obedience. Seeking to sharpen current thinking, raise new theoretical
considerations, and facilitate public discussion, its particular aim is to
retrieve the concept of civil disobedience from the reformist interpretations
it acquired in the wake of John Rawls’ influential definition (Rawls 1999
[1971]). In critical engagement with the dominant models, Scheuerman
develops an account with clear analytical and normative contours, while
nonetheless expansive enough to accommodate a variety of modalities and a
plurality of normative aims. In this account, acts of civil disobedience should
satisfy four broad conditions: (i) seek to generate changes internal to a par-
ticular political association, typically a constitutional state; (ii) display

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“fidelity to the law”; (iii) rely on a three-pronged—legal, political, and
moral—normativity; and (iv) display commitment to a common set of stan-
dards—civility, conscientiousness, publicity, and nonviolence.
Why focus on civil disobedience? One reason is that it has come to be seen
as the moral face of lawbreaking. Gaining currency through a famous essay by
Henry David Thoreau in the 1840s, and subsequently associated with iconic
figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., civil disobedi-
ence is now widely assumed to be a normatively acceptable mode of politically
motivated lawbreaking. But Scheuerman reminds us that civil disobedience has
a long and complex history and has often been the subject of wide-ranging
controversy. Contemporary discussions tend to obscure the concept’s conten-
tious past and to adopt cramped interpretations of the rich body of political and
theoretical reflections that...