Abstract
The idea of a social contract has often been used as a means of informing moral reflection on the scope of our right or duty to resist injustice. Hannah Arendt—perhaps surprisingly—also draws upon this tradition in her analysis of civil disobedience in the United States of America. The contention of this chapter is that her republican recasting of this tradition cannot speak to the injustice of arbitrary exclusion from the original contract. The resistance of the excluded is not a backward-looking attempt to enforce the original terms of the agreement, but a forward-looking attempt to remake that agreement. The political action made possible by their association allows the excluded to demonstrate their ‘right to have rights’, calling for the recasting of the polity along more inclusive lines.
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Notes
- 1.
John Rawls, A Theory ofJustice, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 342. The unlawful tactics employed by the protest movements of this period included, among others, “freedom rides,” sit-ins, unpermitted demonstrations, occupations of university buildings, and destruction of draft-cards.
- 2.
Ibid., 335.
- 3.
Raffaele Laudani, Disobedience in Western Political Thought: A Genealogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 114.
- 4.
Ibid. 115.
- 5.
Ibid., 115–16.
- 6.
Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 51–102. Citations to this essay will henceforth appear in text with the initials “CD.”
- 7.
William Smith, “Reclaiming the Revolutionary Spirit: Arendt on Civil Disobedience,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 2 (2010): 149–66.
- 8.
As she puts it: “the practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world” (Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 177).
- 9.
See, for instance, Jean L. Cohen and Andrew A. Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 593–99.
- 10.
Laudani, Disobedience in Western Political Thought, 143. By “European” logic, Laudani appears to have in mind certain interpretations of the “right to resistance” that legitimize the use of spontaneous or organized violence as a means of breaking down unjust structures that are themselves sustained through violence (ibid., 148).
- 11.
It is, for instance, striking that Arendt’s appeal to the idea of a social contract goes unmentioned in Laudani’s analysis of her ideas. It is as if that appeal is an aberration, or a minor detail to be set aside, rather than—as it in fact is—a bedrock of her attempt to defend civil disobedience.
- 12.
Although Arendt—somewhat controversially—claims that civil disobedience is “American in origin and substance” she does not deny that it has an existence and relevance beyond American shores (CD 83). Arendt’s analysis of the political complexion of civil disobedience—specifically its associative nature, public spirit, and urge to initiate—can arguably be applied to its theory and practice not merely in America but around the world. It is undeniable, though, that Arendt perceives a special relationship between civil disobedience and what she sees as distinctively American experiences.
- 13.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 170.
- 14.
There appears, as Cohen and Arato observe, to be a subtle shift in Arendt’s treatment of the social contract in the decade or so between the publication of On Revolution and “Civil Disobedience” (Cohen and Arato, Civil Society). She had, in her earlier discussion, contrasted the idea of “consent” and “mutual promise,” explicitly or implicitly suggesting that the former—in the sense of consent to rule—is only an outcome of the vertical and not the horizontal contract (see, for instance, Arendt, On Revolution, 170–71). By the time of “Civil Disobedience,” consent—in the somewhat different sense of “active support and continuing participation”—is treated as an outcome of the horizontal contract and thus reconciled with the practice of mutual promise (CD 85).
- 15.
This interpretation of political obligation is not as idiosyncratic as it may appear. Joseph Raz, for instance, arguably holds a somewhat similar view, in rejecting a general duty to obey the law while also positing a presumption against conduct that would threaten the stability of just societies. See Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 262.
- 16.
Arendt famously appeals to Tocqueville’s nineteenth century writings on voluntary associations, understood as “ad hoc organizations that pursue short-term goals and disappear when the goal has been reached” (CD 95). She discerns a historical continuity between these associations and the organized minorities carrying out civil disobedience in the twentieth century: “it is my contention that civil disobedients are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country” (CD 96).
- 17.
The tendency of liberals to understate the radicalism of civil disobedience as a historical phenomenon is discussed in David Lyons, “Moral Judgement, Historical Reality and Civil Disobedience,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 27, no. 1 (1998): 31–49; and Marc Stears, Demanding Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 147–59.
- 18.
Andrew Sabl’s impressive defense of Rawlsian civil disobedience escapes this unattractive implication through recasting it as a “forward-looking” rather than a “backward-looking” theory. On his account, civil disobedience is an attempt to move a segregated “piecewise” just society toward a state of genuine justice. See Andrew Sabl, “Looking Forward to Justice: Rawlsian Civil Disobedience and Its Non-Rawlsian Lessons,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 9, no. 3 (2001): 307–30. For further discussion of the tensions that beset Rawls’s treatment of civil disobedience within a “nearly just” society, see William Smith, Civil Disobedience and Deliberative Democracy (London: Routledge, 2013), 36–59.
- 19.
Margaret R. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to HaveRights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 67.
- 20.
Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in her Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 193–213.
- 21.
It should be noted that Arendt’s reference to “society” here should probably not be confused with the society—or “cosociation”—that she sees as established through the social contract. The latter, unlike the former, is a political community the innermost principle of which is equality rather than discrimination. The account of society in the former sense is elaborated at length in Hannah Arendt, TheHuman Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
- 22.
Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” 205.
- 23.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Volume 1, ed. Phillips Bradley and trans. Henry Reeve, Francis Bowen, and Phillips Bradley (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1945), 419.
- 24.
Hannah Arendt, TheHuman Condition, 9.
- 25.
Ibid., 246.
- 26.
Ibid., 244.
- 27.
Ibid., 245.
- 28.
The idea of “beginning something anew” is compatible with a certain kind of backward-looking appeal to the social contract, in the sense that those who were excluded demand inclusion in the original agreement. It should, though, be noted that the claims of the civil rights movement could not be met merely through proper access to constitutional norms, as is illustrated through their increasing focus on issues such as economic justice. This, again, attests to the sense in which the civil rights movement was “revolutionary,” or at least committed to a radical and transformative political agenda (see, on this point, Stears, Demanding Democracy).
- 29.
Étienne Balibar, Citizenship, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 74.
- 30.
Ibid., 75.
- 31.
Ibid., 66.
- 32.
Charles Barbour, “Between Politics and Law: Hannah Arendt and the Subject of Rights,” in Hannah Arendt and the Law, ed. Marco Goldoni and Chris McCorkindale (London: Hart Publishing, 2012), 315.
- 33.
Hannah Arendt, The Originsof Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 297.
- 34.
Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 65.
- 35.
This dimension of protest is strategic as well as expressive, in that nonviolent resistance aims to discredit an unjust institutional order through provoking its representatives and supporters into violence (see, for instance, Todd May, Nonviolent Resistance: A Philosophical Introduction [Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015]).
- 36.
Arendt, TheHuman Condition, 180.
- 37.
Barbour, “Between Politics and Law,” 317.
- 38.
For further discussion of this capacity, see Balibar, Citizenship, 129–30.
- 39.
See Haydenand Saunders’s chapter in this volume.
- 40.
Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 194.
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Smith, W., Zhang, S. (2019). Resisting Injustice: Arendt on Civil Disobedience and the Social Contract. In: Hiruta, K. (eds) Arendt on Freedom, Liberation, and Revolution. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11695-8_5
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