Book Review: A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil, by Candice Delmas
| Published date | 01 August 2020 |
| Author | Jennet Kirkpatrick |
| Date | 01 August 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591719892195 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
book-review2019
Book Reviews
Political Theory
2020, Vol. 48(4) 528 –542
Book Reviews
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx
A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil, by Candice Delmas. Oxford
University Press, 2018, 312 pp.
Reviewed by: Jennet Kirkpatrick, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591719892195
Political theorists and philosophers, writing in the long shadow cast by
Sophocles’s Antigone and Plato’s Crito, have generally argued that individu-
als have a political obligation to obey the laws of their state or country. The
inversion of this question—is there a duty to disobey unjust laws?—was,
with a few important exceptions, generally ignored until the 1960s. During
the civil rights movement proponents of civil disobedience argued that break-
ing unjust laws could be moral too, especially when it was done in a particu-
lar way. According to this view, disobedience to the law can be legitimate so
long as it is “civil,” meaning in the broadest terms that it is subject to collec-
tively imposed constraints that are in accord with democratic principles and
values.
What about uncivil disobedience to unjust laws? Might that be legiti-
mate, too? This is the central question taken up by Candice Delmas in A
Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil. The book makes
two related arguments. First, Delmas argues that there is a duty to disobey
unjust laws, not just a right to do so. Individuals are morally required to
violate laws that are unjust, even in democratic, legitimate states or govern-
ments. “Resistance to injustice is, I will argue, our political obligation” (5).
Second, Delmas argues that both civil and uncivil disobedience are legiti-
mate methods of violating the law. A main goal of the book is to argue for
an expanded notion of legitimate resistance and law breaking, one that
includes violent, covert, or offensive actions that are typically seen as out-
side of the realm of civil disobedience.
The book begins by exploring “principled disobedience,” a term that
encompasses civil and uncivil disobedience (21). Delmas’s goal is to clar-
ify what these two terms mean, and she begins by examining existing
accounts of civil disobedience, paying particular attention to John Rawls’s
Book Reviews
529
account of civil disobedience as well as the activism in the civil rights
movement that inspired it. Rawls, Delmas argues, offered an idealized
account of civil disobedience that, in addition to being unattainable, was
based on a misunderstanding of the civil rights movement. Rawls, for
instance, emphasized the activists’ respect for the law and their preference
for nonviolence, seeing these elements (and others) as key to civil disobe-
dience as a legitimate political action. But, these decisions were strategic
decisions made for tactical, context-dependent reasons, not principled
ones (27). Thus, the Rawlsian notion of civil disobedience, scrubbed as it
is of historical accuracy, creates a standard of judgment that emphasizes
conformity and docility. Delmas does not, in the end, give an account of
civil disobedience that is radically different from traditional conceptions.
She understands civil disobedience as a form of...
To continue reading
Request your trial