This book explores potential dangers arising from a passionate adherence to democracy, and tensions between democracy and constitutionalism, by means of examples of citizens resorting to violent and illegal political action in defense of what they believe is just. All the examples are drawn from the experience of the United States and span both left and right extremism—antislavery protests as well as southern lynch mobs, the Weather Underground as well as right-wing militias.
Jennet Kirkpatrick focuses on the explicit justifications produced by those resorting to violence, those who stress the gap between actual law and their view of justice, using this “lay political theory” to illuminate debates within political and constitutional thought. It is therefore a stimulating and unusual approach to political theory.
Uncivil Disobedience might also be of interest to those studying social movements. For example, the consideration in Chapter 4 of the three strands of the antislavery movement—gradualism linked to conversion of elites, opting out of a corrupted political system, and radical attempts to work within the system—suggests interesting comparisons with many contemporary social movements. But the author does not engage with the growing social movement literature, and pays much more detailed attention to historical American movements than to recent ones.
The category of “uncivil disobedience” is defined in opposition to “civil disobedience” as practiced by Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement; using this contrast throughout much of the book, the author argues strongly for the political creativeness of civil disobedience, as opposed to the dangers of uncivil disobedience. Whereas most debates about breaking the law concentrate on the issue of nonviolence versus violence, Kirkpatrick is primarily interested in the different understandings of democracy and law entailed in the two different approaches.
Since the concept of civil disobedience is central, an explicit definition up front would have been helpful. However, its full meaning emerges in the course of discussion, and most readers are likely to be familiar with it. Greater problems arise in relation to the category of uncivil disobedience.
The author does clearly distinguish uncivil disobedience from revolution, noting that uncivil disobedients are in their goals essentially reformers, who appeal to “traditional political concepts like law, rights, liberty, freedom and popular sovereignty” (p. 19) and claim to be returning to the true American Constitution, rather than overthrowing it. They are therefore “more lawless” than civil disobedients, who do not try to usurp the legal system itself, but are “less lawless” than revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the whole system and replace it, although some groups are closer to civil disobedients and others closer to revolutionaries (p. 15).
The treatment of the violence entailed in uncivil disobedience is less carefully framed, however. There is no real significance attached, for example, to the difference between violence arising out of crowd protest (as in the first example of Bostonians trying to save a fugitive slave in 1854) and planned use of guns or bombs. Moreover, although the author notes that some uncivil disobedience involves discriminate violence and other forms engage in indiscriminate killing of the innocent, possible implications are not examined. The linking of this category of protest to terrorism is particularly unhelpful. Kirkpatrick describes uncivil disobedience as a “homegrown version of terrorism,” while conceding that it is not the same as “terrorism” (p. 6). Given the frequent misuse of the concept of terrorism (hinted at in the opening sentences of the book), a clear distinction is badly needed. For example, in Kirkpatrick's own terms, is terrorism revolutionary rather than reformist? Is the ruthlessness of the violence relevant?
This relative lack of interest in the nature and scale of violence entailed in uncivil disobedience stems partly from the main focus of the book: the potential links between democratic beliefs and political violence. It also stems partly from the basic approach the author has adopted—to start from specific historical examples and tease out theoretical insights, rather than starting from elaborate definitions and pursuing their logical implications.
This is a book entirely about movements and politics in the United States and seems to assume an American readership. But this does not mean that it lacks relevance to a much wider international constituency of political scholars. American experience is a particularly interesting source for exploring the dilemmas of democracy and constitutionalism, as Alexis de Tocqueville illustrated long ago and Hannah Arendt more recently, for example, in On Revolution (1963).
Moreover, one of the great strengths of this book is its ability to relate illuminating historical examples of uncivil and civil disobedience to a wider tradition of political and legal theory. For example, Kirkpatrick makes use of H. L. A. Hart's distinction between “duty conferring rules” directed toward ordinary citizens and “power conferring rules” directed toward government officials to explain how civil disobedients sometimes challenge the first but respect the second, whereas uncivil disobedients challenge both (pp. 86–87). Elsewhere she explores how frontier vigilantes elevate democracy above constitutionalism in relation to a detailed and nuanced analysis of Rousseau's' Social Contract (pp. 50–55).
The Conclusion does, however, suggest some disadvantages to the American historical case study approach. The author takes as her starting point Abraham Lincoln's distinction between the rule of men and the rule of law to denounce vigilante mob rule and mob violence and assert the primacy of law for a peaceful society. This enables her to explore the dangers of Lincoln's case for total submission to the law, and also to reiterate the argument that there is an inevitable and politically creative tension between belief in democracy as the rule of the people and belief in the centrality of law. But many readers will look, as I did, for a more wide-ranging and contemporary set of arguments about the implications of uncivil disobedience to round off the discussion.
Brevity and clear, if limited, focus have their merits, however. This is an original, highly readable, and rewarding book.
