Vol. 3 No. 2 (2022): Special Dossier - Disobediences (jul/dec 2022)
Special Dossier

Civil disobedience: a dispute of concepts

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  • Bárbara Nascimento de Lima
Bárbara Nascimento de Lima
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brasil
Bio

Published 2023-04-18

Keywords

  • civil disobedience,
  • Henry David Thoreau,
  • liberal model of civil disobedience,
  • radical civil disobedience,
  • political action

Copyright (c) 2023 Bárbara Nascimento de Lima

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Civil disobedience: a dispute of concepts. (Des)troços: revista de pensamento radical, Belo Horizonte, v. 3, n. 2, p. 36–64, 2023. DOI: 10.53981/(des)troos.v3i2.44936. Disponível em: https://periodicos-hml.cecom.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/article/view/44936. Acesso em: 4 oct. 2025.

Abstract

Adopting a genealogical methodology, this paper aims to unveil the historical intricacies of civil disobedience’s many conceptualizations, particularly the ones related to the Thoureaivian concept and the liberal model of civil disobedience. As suggested by Hanson, there has been a long process of selective appropriation of Thoreau’s Resistance to civil government - later republished as Civil disobedience - that goes from the editors until Gandhi. By the same token, there has been a second process, not of selective appropriation per se, but of colonization in which the authors of the liberal model of civil disobedience imposes a series of theoretical constraints in the form of constitutive elements that ought to be fulfilled in order for a political movement to be considered a legitimate case of civil disobedience. This has resulted in civil disobedients being required to recognize the legitimacy of legal and political systems and to demand changes only within the boundaries of the rule of law. Conversely, we suggest a different – and radical – approach to civil disobedience, one that acknowledges that civil disobedience’s conceptualization should be practical-base, i.e., determined from real political actions and not necessarily centered on legal foundations or normative status.

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