American Renaissance & American Romanticism

Civil disobedience or passive resistance

Principles:

• Individual or group must decide whether to obey “law of the state” or “higher law”
   

• If "higher law," individual or group maintains moral high ground by not using violence
   

• Often involves lifestyle of voluntary simplicity as means of reducing social pressure
   

• Sometimes involves willingness to be jailed as form of social protest

Historical & intellectual heritage:

Ancient China: Mencius (Meng-Tzu)

Classical Greece: Sophocles, Antigone; Aristophanes, Lysistrata (women of Athens use sexual abstinence to force men to end warfare)

New Testament era: Jesus of Nazareth: “Turn the other cheek”; “Forgive your enemies”; "Return love."

Mid-19^th century: Henry David Thoreau, "Resistance to Civil Government"

Late 19^th-early 20^th century: Count Leo Tolstoy—Russian novelist (War and Peace); voluntary simplicity

Twentieth Century

• Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi (India)—satyagraha; nonviolent disobedience and resistance to English rule; jail and hunger strikes against violence
   

• Martin Luther King Jr. (USA)—nonviolent Civil Rights campaigns; sit-ins; “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
   

• Nelson Mandela (South Africa )--decades in prison for resistance to apartheid, forgiveness of (or no vengeance against) oppressors after release (+ other South African resistance leaders)

Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

• Aung San Suu Kyii (Burma or Myanmar; elected president of Burma in early 1990s; election overturned by military; under house arrest or other repression but refuses to leave, even to join children or dying husband in England
   

• Kim Dae Jung (South Korea)--South Korean President & Nobel Peace laureate 2000, but earlier jailed by authoritarian governments

"Folk" examples

• Worker slowdowns as protests against management

• "Shuffling," etc. by African Americans during slavery

• Rosa Parks refuses to give up bus seat to white man, Birmingham, 1960s

• Sixties civil rights and antiwar demonstrations, sit-ins, be-ins

• Abortion clinic blockades

• Students in a classroom, when overworked, sometimes do less than in a less demanding class.

• Wives saying "Yes, dear" without consenting. ("Double language")

Advantages of nonviolent resistance: moral high ground; dialogue possible

Risk: If results aren't forthcoming, backers may resort to violence (Civil Rights militancy, Antiwar bombings, Pro-Life murders).

Provisional bibliography

Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic

John H. Redekop, The Christian and Civil Disobedience

Richard Gregg, The Power of Nonviolence

D. R. Grover, Civil Disobedience Movement in the Punjab, 1930-34

Lalan Tiwari, Democracy and Dissent (A Case Study of the Bihar Movement 1974-75) 

H. A. Bedau, Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice

Robert Tom Hall, The Morality of Civil Disobedience

Ernest Van den Haag, Political Violence and Civil Disobedience

Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict

Norton Critical Edition of Civil Disobedience

Roland Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics

Edmound R. Brown, ed. Modern Essays: Civil Disobedience, The Religion of the Future, on Going to Church

Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas

Richard Vogler, Reading the Riot Act

Hugo Adam Bedau, ed. Civil Disobedience in Focus

S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed are the Peacemakers

Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)

Nelson Mandela, Jennifer Crwys-Williams (ed.) In the Words of Nelson Mandela Birch Lane Pr., 1559724927

Desmond Mpilo Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness Doubleday, 0385496907

Mohanda Karamchand Gandhi, Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Dover, 0486245934)

Mohanda Karamchand Gandhi, Thomas Merton (ed.), Gandhi on Non-Violence (1965)

Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You

---, The Gospel in Brief

---, Confession

John Ruskin, Unto this Last