Civil Disobedience

On 12 March 1930, a 60-year-old man left his ashram near Ahmedabad on foot, with 78 followers. Over the next 24 days they walked about 385 kilometres to the coastal village of Dandi. Crowds gathered along the way, and journalists followed. On the morning of 6 April, Mohandas Gandhi bent down on the shore and picked up a lump of natural salt. ^[1]

That was the whole act. He had made salt without paying the tax on it.

Under British rule, the manufacture and sale of salt in India was a government monopoly, and the tax fell on everyone, however poor, because everyone needs salt. By picking some up, Gandhi broke the law in the most ordinary way possible and invited everyone else to do the same. Within months, people across India were making salt, boycotting British cloth and refusing to cooperate with the administration. Around 60,000 people were arrested, Gandhi among them. ^[1]

In May, volunteers marched on the Dharasana salt works. Row after row walked up to the police lines without raising their hands and were beaten to the ground with steel-tipped clubs. The American journalist Webb Miller's reports reached newspapers around the world. ^[1] The British Empire had soldiers, prisons and laws. What it could not easily survive was being seen to beat people who would not fight back.

The next year the viceroy, Lord Irwin, negotiated with Gandhi directly, and Gandhi went to London as a representative of the Indian National Congress. India did not become independent until 1947, and many forces contributed to that, but the Salt March showed that an empire could be put under pressure by people who simply refused to obey. ^[2]

The Basic Idea

Every government, however powerful, depends on cooperation. Soldiers must follow orders, officials must process paperwork, workers must work, and taxpayers must pay. Most people obey most laws most of the time, not because they are forced to individually, but because obedience is the default.

Civil disobedience uses that dependence. Instead of fighting the state, people openly refuse to do what it asks. If enough people refuse, the machinery stops.

The idea is old. In Sophocles' tragedy, written in the fifth century BCE, Antigone buries her brother against the king's order because she believes a higher law requires it, and accepts the punishment. The political scientist Gene Sharp later built a theory of power on the same observation: rulers hold power only as long as those they rule continue to supply it. ^[3]

How it differs from other protest

Philosophers usually define civil disobedience more narrowly than "breaking the law for a cause". The most cited definition, from John Rawls in 1971, describes it as a public, nonviolent, conscientious and political act contrary to law, usually done to bring about a change in law or policy. ^[4] Each word matters.

• Public: it is done openly, often with advance notice to the authorities. Secret sabotage is not civil disobedience.
• Nonviolent: it does not harm people.
• Conscientious: it comes from sincere moral conviction, not self-interest.
• Accepting the penalty: the person usually does not flee punishment. Going to prison is part of the message.

That last feature puzzles people at first. Why would anyone who believes a law is unjust accept being punished under it? The answer is that accepting the penalty separates the protester from a criminal. It says: I respect the idea of law so much that I will suffer rather than obey this one. That is what turns an arrest into an argument.

Action by refusing to act

Much civil disobedience consists not of doing something forbidden but of not doing something required: not paying a tax, not moving to the back of a bus, not reporting for military service, not buying a product, not going to work. Refusal is available to almost everyone, requires no weapons, and is very difficult to force someone out of. A government can compel many things, but it cannot easily compel millions of people to cooperate at once.

Historical Development

Thoreau's night in jail

In July 1846, Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail in Concord, Massachusetts, for refusing to pay a poll tax. He objected to a government that supported slavery and was waging war on Mexico. His 1849 essay, first published as "Resistance to Civil Government" and later known as "Civil Disobedience", argued that a person's conscience should not be surrendered to the state, and that when a government commits injustice, the proper place for a just person may be in prison. ^[5]

Thoreau's refusal changed nothing at the time. His aunt paid the tax the next morning, against his wishes. The essay's influence came later.

Gandhi and satyagraha

Gandhi developed his method in South Africa, where he worked as a lawyer. In 1906 the Transvaal government introduced a law requiring Indians to register and be fingerprinted. Gandhi led a campaign of open refusal, and he and many others were jailed. ^[2] He named the method satyagraha, from Sanskrit words for truth and firmness: "holding firmly to truth". He read Thoreau's essay during this period and corresponded with Leo Tolstoy, whose Christian pacifism he admired, but he stressed that satyagraha drew on Indian sources and on his own experiments. ^[2]

For Gandhi, satyagraha was not only a tactic. It rested on ahimsa, the principle of non-harm found in Jain, Hindu and Buddhist traditions. The aim was not to defeat the opponent but to convert them, by accepting suffering rather than inflicting it until the opponent could no longer justify the injustice. Ahimsa, for Gandhi, extended beyond humans: he was a lifelong vegetarian and argued that non-harm applied to animals. ^[2] Which animals can be harmed in the relevant sense is the subject of Sentience.

King and the civil rights movement

On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her arrest started a bus boycott that lasted more than a year and brought a young minister, Martin Luther King Jr., to national prominence. King studied Gandhi's methods and visited India in 1959.

In April 1963, jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, for defying an injunction against protest, he wrote a reply to local clergy who had called the demonstrations "unwise and untimely". ^[6] In it, he argued that "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws", and that a person who breaks an unjust law openly and willingly accepts the penalty "is in reality expressing the highest respect for law". The letter remains one of the clearest statements of the logic of civil disobedience.

Why It Works: The Evidence

For a long time, the claim that nonviolence works was a matter of faith or anecdote. In 2008 the political scientists Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth tested it. ^[3] They assembled data on 323 major resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006 that sought to remove a regime, expel an occupier or win independence, and compared nonviolent campaigns with violent ones.

The nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53% of the time. The violent ones succeeded 26% of the time.

They proposed two main reasons.

• Participation. Joining a boycott, a strike or a sit-in has far lower physical, moral and practical barriers than joining an armed group. Nonviolent campaigns can therefore attract far more people, from every part of society.
• Defections. Soldiers and police are more reluctant to fire on unarmed crowds, especially when the crowds include people like their own families. When security forces hesitate or change sides, a regime loses its main tool. Violence, by contrast, tends to unite the security forces against a common threat.

Chenoweth later noted a striking pattern in the data: campaigns that mobilised around 3.5% of a country's population at their peak were very rarely defeated. She has described this as a historical observation, not a law. ^[7]

Certainty note. These are correlational findings from historical data. Campaigns choose their methods under different conditions, and some of the success of nonviolent campaigns may reflect the situations in which nonviolence is chosen. The finding is strong and has been widely examined, but it is not a controlled experiment.

Obedience Is the Default

Why is refusal so powerful? Partly because obedience is so strong.

In 1963 the psychologist Stanley Milgram asked volunteers to give what they believed were increasingly painful electric shocks to another person, on the instructions of an experimenter in a grey coat. ^[8] The "victim" was an actor, and no shocks were real. Of 40 participants, 26, or 65%, continued to the highest level on the machine, marked with warnings of danger, despite the apparent screams and later silence of the person in the next room. Many were visibly distressed. They obeyed anyway.

Milgram's experiments have been criticised for their ethics and their methods, and later analyses show that participants' behaviour depended heavily on the situation. But the central lesson has held up: ordinary people will do things they believe are wrong when an authority tells them to, and the easiest thing is to go along. Civil disobedience interrupts that default. It also works socially: once some people refuse, others find it easier to refuse too, the same logic of cooperation that governs The Evolution of Trust.

Where It Fails: Orwell's Objection

In 1949, the year Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, George Orwell wrote an essay called "Reflections on Gandhi". ^[9] He admired Gandhi's personal courage, but raised a hard question. Gandhi's method, Orwell argued, depended on the opponent having some scruples and on the world being able to see. It was difficult to see how it could work in a totalitarian state, where opponents disappear in the night and are never heard of again, where there is no free press to report the beatings, and where a mass movement cannot even be organised.

Orwell's novel imagines exactly that world. In 1984, Winston Smith's rebellion is secret: a hidden diary, a forbidden love affair. Nothing he does is public, and so nothing he does can function as civil disobedience. The Party's power lies precisely in having removed the conditions under which open refusal would mean anything. It controls what is seen, what is recorded and eventually what can be thought.

Orwell's objection is serious, and the evidence partly supports it. Nonviolent campaigns against the most brutal regimes do face long odds. Chenoweth has also documented that the success rate of nonviolent campaigns fell considerably in the 2010s, as governments learned to counter them with surveillance, disinformation and more selective repression. ^[7] Nonviolent resistance is not guaranteed to work. It works more often than violence, which is a different claim.

Limitations and Open Problems

• Causation is hard to isolate. Indian independence resulted from many forces, including the economic strain of the Second World War and changes in British politics. The Salt March was important, but it did not by itself end colonial rule.
• Nonviolence did not prevent violence. The Partition of India in 1947 was accompanied by mass killings and displacement on an enormous scale, which Gandhi was unable to stop.
• Leaders are not saints. Gandhi has been criticised, among other things, for his views on caste, sharply challenged by B. R. Ambedkar, and for his early statements about Black Africans in South Africa.
• Justification is debated. Philosophers disagree about when breaking the law is justified in a democracy, where legal channels for change exist. ^[4]
• The data describe the past. Tactics that worked in the twentieth century may work differently against states with modern surveillance.

The Strength of Water

There is an old Chinese image for this kind of power. The Daodejing observes that nothing in the world is softer or weaker than water, yet nothing is better at wearing down what is hard and strong. ^[10] The Daoist idea of wu wei, often translated as "non-action", does not mean doing nothing. It means not forcing, acting without striving against the grain of things, as described in Taoism. Gandhi did not draw on Daoism, and the parallel is an interpretation rather than a historical link. But the Salt March has something of that shape: a man stooping on a beach, doing almost nothing, in a way that an empire could not absorb.

The Buddhist analysis of Suffering makes a related move: hatred answered with hatred multiplies suffering, and refusing to return harm can break the cycle.

Civil disobedience matters because it shows that power is not only something done to people; it is something people continuously give. What the historical record shows is that open, nonviolent refusal has succeeded more often than armed revolt. What it does not show is that it always will, especially where, as in Orwell's novel, a regime can make refusal invisible. And it raises a question discussed in The Illusion of Free Will: whatever determines our choices, the most consequential ones are sometimes simply the choice not to comply.

References

[1] Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Salt March.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Salt-March

[2] Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Mahatma Gandhi.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mahatma-Gandhi

[3] Stephan, M. J., & Chenoweth, E. (2008). “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.” International Security, 33(1), 7–44. https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.2008.33.1.7

[4] Brownlee, K. “Civil Disobedience.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/

[5] Thoreau, H. D. (1849). “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (originally “Resistance to Civil Government”). Project Gutenberg edition. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71

[6] King, M. L., Jr. (1963). “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/letter-birmingham-jail

[7] Chenoweth, E. (2020). “The Future of Nonviolent Resistance.” Journal of Democracy, 31(3), 69–84. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2020.0046

[8] Milgram, S. (1963). “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371–378. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040525

[9] Orwell, G. (1949). “Reflections on Gandhi.” Partisan Review. The Orwell Foundation. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/reflections-on-gandhi/

[10] Chan, A. “Laozi.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laozi/