Disobedience and Resistance

Catalog description

Should we to obey the laws that states make? Unsurprisingly, there are numerous counter-theories, practices of disobedience: revolution, mass strikes, sabotage, civil disobedience and conscientious objection. Other kinds of resistance – like mass protests, political strikes, and boycotts – hover on the border of disobedience itself. This course begins with a brief examination of theories of political obligation before moving to a discussion of different, concrete examples of disobedience and the political ideas that they produced. We will discuss revolution, mass strikes, and civil disobedience as paradigm cases of the political problems raised by actually existing, illegitimate laws and governments.