From Resistance to Revolution: The Limits of Nonviolence in Arendt’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ Caroline Ashcroft Queen Mary University of London
[email protected] Abstract: Arendt’s work on civil disobedience sets out an optimistic portrayal of the possibilities of such forms of action in re-energizing the spirit of American politics in the late twentieth century. Civil disobedience should not simply be tolerated, she argued, but incorporated into the legal structure of the American political system. Her work is usually seen to promote an idea of civil disobedience that is thus bound to existing constitutional principles and essentially nonviolent. However, by looking at Arendt’s discussion and critique of various practices of civil disobedience in 1960s and 1970s America, specifically in relation to the nonviolence movement influenced by Martin Luther King, and on the other side, the more militant Black Power movement, a different idea of civil disobedience emerges. This paper argues that whilst, for Arendt, civil disobedience within America certainly possesses the constitutionally restorative potential she assigns to it, in a broader sense – theoretically, globally, and even in terms of alternative ideologies within America – her conception of civil disobedience is in itself neither necessarily constitutional, nor nonviolent. It is, instead, a form of revolutionary action, whose limits are set only by politics itself, and specifically, Arendt’s criterion of publicity. Keywords: Hannah Arendt, Civil Disobedience, America, Publicity, Martin Luther King, James Forman 1 From Resistance to Revolution: The Limits of Nonviolence in Arendt’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ 1. The Legitimacy of Civil Disobedience Hannah Arendt famously saw in civil disobedience a means by which to reenergize the American political system: to restore to it its original spirit through the political actions of the people.