From the introduction to On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau, Hannah Arendt, published by Library of America in 2024.

Hannah Arendt’s essay “Civil Disobedience” appeared in The New Yorker in 1970, during the height of the antiwar movement and at the beginning of the post-civil rights movement era. Born Jewish in 1906 in Germany, Arendt was arrested by the Nazis in 1933, fled to Paris, and ultimately immigrated to New York City. She became a U.S. citizen in 1950. At the time of the appearance of “Civil Disobedience,” her books The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and On Revolution had already established her as a leading political thinker of the twentieth century. In her essay, Arendt takes aim at Thoreau and the tradition that associates civil disobedience with conscientious action. With one eye cast at the political and social movements reshaping America, Arendt argues that Thoreau’s civil disobedient is really a conscientious objector, not a member of a political movement. His essay thus fails to help us make sense of the public and collective nature of civil disobedience. Thoreau is, in Arendt’s view, fundamentally unpolitical.

Underscoring the individual and moral nature of Thoreau’s 1846 act of civil resistance, Arendt insists that civil disobedience is necessarily collective political dissent. It is a group phenomenon that publicizes widely shared minority opinions via extraordinary means to contest unjust acts by a ruling majority. “Civil disobedience,” she writes, “arises when a significant number of citizens have become convinced either that the normal channels of change no longer function, and grievances will not be heard or acted upon, or that, on the contrary, what the government is about to change and has embarked upon and persists in modes of action whose legality and locked constitutionality are open to grave doubt.” Civil disobedients “are in fact organized minorities, bound together by common opinion, rather than by common interest, and the decision to take a stand against the government’s policies even if they have reason to assume that these policies are backed by a majority.” When, say, citizens gather to block access to abortion clinics or to shut down an intersection to protest laws banning abortion, the “concerted action” of civil disobedients “springs from an agreement with each other, and it is this agreement that lends credence and conviction to their opinion.” In other words, civil disobedience is never the act of a lone individual but necessarily the actions of an organized group that aims to change laws or to prevent unconstitutional changes in the law.

As instances of extralegal and nonresponsive governments have become increasingly commonplace, civil disobedience has come to play an outsized role in American politics. Writing in 1970, Arendt could point to “seven years of an undeclared war in Vietnam; the growing influence of secret agencies on public affairs; open or thinly veiled threats to liberties guaranteed under the First Amendment; attempts to deprive the Senate of its constitutional powers, followed by the President’s invasion of Cambodia in open disregard for the Constitution, which explicitly requires congressional approval for the beginning of a war.” 

Arendt saw the rise of governmental bureaucracy as one of the gravest threats to political freedom. She calls bureaucracy “the rule of nobody” and worries that bureaucratic government is an “invisible government” that disempowers citizens and makes democracy evermore precarious. So much of the anger and dissatisfaction with government today is traceable to what Arendt calls the disempowerment of self-government by citizens and the elevation of bureaucratic elites and experts to positions of power insulated from democratic control. It is this cordoning off of power from the citizens that, Arendt argues, makes the collective power mobilized by civil disobedience so necessary and important.

Arendt wrote her remarks on “Civil Disobedience” in response to a symposium organized in 1970 by the Bar Association of the City of New York, which addressed the question “Is the law dead?” Much of the symposium concerned the then pressing issues of rising crime and disobedience in the United States. One of the panels, led by Eugene V. Rostow, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, had asked what the “citizen’s moral relation” was to the law “in a society of consent.” Arendt’s essay seeks to answer this question and to argue that civil disobedience not only is compatible with a society of laws, but is also an essential institution of constitutional government.

The starting point of Arendt’s defense of civil disobedience is her insistence that it is not criminal. Whereas Thoreau and the tradition of conscientious civil disobedience believe that punishment for breaking the law is a sign of the civil disobedient’s willingness to suffer for their moral action, Arendt believes that civil disobedients are political actors and should not be treated as criminals. Of course, both civil and criminal disobedience involve breaching the law. But unlike the common lawbreaker, Arendt argues, the civil disobedient does not seek to hide from the law. Rather, the civil disobedient breaks the law in “open defiance” of authority. This public quality allows civil disobedience to be recognized as compatible with law and American institutions of government. Civil disobedients are acting together—breathing together, Arendt says—in the spirit of the laws. As an example of civil disobedience, Arendt offers the Freedom Riders, who rode buses and organized sit-ins in flagrant violation of laws enforcing segregation. Such acts of civil disobedience, intended for the public good, not private gain, would make no sense when hidden from view. The civil disobedient is not a criminal but a political actor, someone whose action springs from agreement with others that “lends credence and conviction to their opinion.”

A second characteristic of civil disobedience is nonviolence. For Arendt, if and when civil disobedients resort to violence, they disqualify themselves as civil disobedients and justify the label “rebels,” diminishing the potential political impact of their actions and undermining civil disobedience as an institution. And yet, the civil disobedient does share with the revolutionary the “wish ‘to change the world.’ ” By acting nonviolently, the civil disobedient does not aim at revolution and “accepts, while the revolutionary rejects, the frame of established authority and the general legitimacy of the system of laws.” (Arendt complicates this observation, asking whether Gandhi accepted “the ‘frame of established authority,’ which was British rule of India.”) But a “generally accepted necessary characteristic of civil disobedience is nonviolence.”

Arendt imagines civil disobedience to be a modern and specifically American form of the right to dissent. Civil disobedience, she argues, is a uniquely American invention that emerges in the United States “in accordance with the spirit of its laws.” Though it is a global phenomenon, only America has a word for civil disobedience, she adds, and, given its unique history, “the American republic is the only government having at least a chance to cope with it.” The bond between civil disobedience and the spirit of American law is held together not by a theory but, rather, by the shared experiences of the colonists. In Arendt’s telling, the spirit of American law is consent. By consent, she does not mean a social contract between a people and its government—something, she adds, that can be quickly dismissed as a fiction. Against the Hobbesian idea of the social contract in which “every individual concludes an agreement with the strictly secular authorities to insure his safety”—what Arendt calls the “vertical version of the social contract”—she argues that the American political experiment was founded on the discovery of a “horizontal” version of consent.

Horizontal consent has its roots in the “prerevolutionary experience” of early colonial Americans. That experience is marked by “numerous covenants and agreements, from the Mayflower Compact to the establishment of the thirteen colonies.” Signed in 1620 aboard the Mayflower, anchored off the coast of present-day Massachusetts, the Mayflower Compact was a declaration of self-rule agreed to by the Pilgrims and the commoners who had sailed with them. These future citizens from all social and economic classes arrogated to themselves the right to govern themselves, demanding that their government be one of consent. 

Arendt expresses amazement at the astounding confidence these original settlers “had in their own power, granted and confirmed by no one and as yet unsupported by any means of violence, to combine themselves together into a ‘civil Body Politick.’ ” This new body politic was to be held together not by force, but simply by the faith each person had in the loyalty of each to their mutual promises. It was this actual experience of their joining together and constituting new governments—something repeated in every colony and in towns and cities across the North American continent—that, Arendt argues, was new and distinctly American. The American republic “rests on the power of the people.” 

The power to covenant existed prior to America. But the generative idea of power through mutual promises and compacts was most often fleeting; it may have flared into existence, but it was quickly and consistently extinguished as new centers of power claimed for themselves the sovereignty and the right to govern. But this is not what happened in the American Revolution, at least in the first 150 years of the republic, where the “new American experience and the new American concept of power” was elevated and incorporated into constitutions and institutions “designed explicitly to preserve it.” In On Revolution, in which Arendt examines horizontal consent at greater length, she argues that the experience of the freedom to act together in assemblies and mutual compacts opened the American colonists to a “new experience of power.” The colonists had a history of acting in concert—to build roads and places of worship, found communities, and govern themselves. It is the “great good fortune of the American Revolution,” she notes, that the colonies, prior to the Revolutionary War, “were organized in self-governing bodies.” When the American Revolution broke out and the authority of the English king was rejected, the American revolutionaries were not transported into anarchy. This is because the colonists were experienced with organized power in government bodies through constituent assemblies. 

What so impresses Arendt is that, in the wake of the liberation from England, the American colonists immediately took to governing themselves in legislatures elected according to constitutional principles, “so that there existed no gap, no hiatus, hardly a breathing spell between the war of liberation, the fight for independence that was the condition for freedom, and the constitution of the new states.” Without missing a beat, the colonists made use of their experience in self-government to put new constitutions before the people of the various states for popular approval. Thus, the American constitutions were not simply acts of government designed to limit the government and protect civil liberties. Rather, the constitutions were active examples of a people coming together to constitute themselves.

The American constitutions were more about creating new powers than about limiting power, and it was this task, “the creation of new power,” that Arendt saw to be the central activity of the American Revolution. The difference between American constitutions and their European descendants is that in America the constitutions were not made and imposed by experts, but were constituted by the people themselves.

When Arendt published On Revolution in 1963, she worried that Americans had lost the foundation of their freedom and power, because the U.S. Constitution did not in the end institutionalize the public spaces of power that had given Americans the experience of freedom. There is no institutional space guaranteed by the Constitution for town hall meetings, citizen deliberation, or civic associations. Thomas Jefferson himself saw this problem and understood that while the Constitution “had given freedom to the people” it “had failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised.” For Arendt and for Jefferson, “the failure of the founders to incorporate the township and the town hall meeting into the Constitution” meant that representation came to supplant the experience of freedom in self-government: “‘the school of the people’ ”—Emerson’s phrase—“in political matters had withered away.” And since the “Constitution itself provided a public space only for the representatives of the people, and not for the people themselves,” the expected result was their increasing lethargy and “inattention to public business.” This failure to guarantee in the Constitution spaces of freedom for the people meant that the “treasure” of the American Revolution, the experience of freedom that underlay the foundation of freedom, was lost. Arendt’s conclusion in On Revolution is that the tragic loss of the revolutionary spirit of freedom was the result of a turn away from civic republicanism toward bourgeois consumption.

However, by the time she published “Civil Disobedience,” the civil rights movement, the voting rights movement, and the antiwar movement had convinced her that the loss of the American tradition of joining together to act politically was by no means a fait accompli. The 1960s provided ample evidence that “Americans still regard association as the only means they have for acting, and rightly so.” The old traditions by which Americans joined together to right wrongs and pursue collective interests against a recalcitrant majority proved themselves to be yet alive. In the era’s many acts of civil disobedience Arendt found hope that there was still life force in the American tradition of civic republicanism.

Arendt saw the rise of civil disobedience as so many contemporary instances of what Alexis de Tocqueville called the American penchant for joining together in voluntary associations. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville writes: “As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have taken up an opinion or a feeling that they wish to promote in the world, they look out for mutual assistance; and as soon as they have found one another out, they combine. From that moment, they are no longer isolated men but a power seen from afar, whose actions serve for an example and whose language is listened to.” Citizens coming together to organize and act to correct an injustice by the majority is what links civic associations to civil disobedience. Which is why Arendt can write that “it is my contention that civil disobedients are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.” The centrality of civil disobedience to Arendt’s understanding of American politics leads her to a surprising plea: “If there is anything that urgently requires a new constitutional amendment and is worth all the trouble that goes with it,” it is a constitutional right to disobedience.

Arendt is keenly sensitive to the potential risk of enshrining civil disobedience in the Constitution, acknowledging that the dangers of civil disobedience are “elemental.” Civil disobedience mobilizes everyday citizens against the power of the elites and amplifies the voices of the disenfranchised and outsiders. It gives to minorities an instrument of power that is usually enjoyed by majorities, experts, and elites. In this way, civil disobedience reflects the radical democratic power of the townships that Tocqueville understood would often oppose the more civilized rule of urban and national elites. Tocqueville saw the spirit of the United States in townships governed by farmers, teachers, and shop owners. The township includes the “coarser elements” of the population who resist the educated opinion of the experts and elite politicians. That is why township freedom is usually sacrificed to centralized government. And yet, it is in the townships, Tocqueville argues, that one finds the true spirit of American democracy. Arendt says the same about civil disobedience. She is well aware that in elevating civil disobedience and giving it institutional and constitutional protection in the name of political freedom, we risk unleashing “evil demons.”

Arendt’s politics does not run away from the risk of contest and conflict. In her essay “Is America by Nature a Violent Society?” she writes: “it seems true that America, for historical, social and political reasons, is more likely to erupt into violence than most other civilized countries.” The American propensity toward violence coexists with the country’s deep respect for law, and this paradoxical tension between violence and lawfulness is rooted in the American traditions of political activism, freedom of assembly, and civil disobedience. These, for Arendt, are “among the crucial, most cherished and, perhaps, most dangerous rights of American citizens. Precisely because of our constitutionally guaranteed rights of assembly, speech, and activism, the United States is perennially threatened with disunity and fundamental dissent. “Every time Washington is unreceptive to the claims of a sufficiently large number of citizens,” she says, “the danger of violence arises. Violence—to take the law into one’s own hands—is perhaps more likely to be the consequence of frustrated power in America than in other countries.” Violence emerges as a real possibility at those moments when diverse constituencies feel themselves abandoned and disempowered. 

In “Civil Disobedience,” Arendt quotes John C. Calhoun’s Disquisition on Government, readily acknowledging its troubling racist and proslavery arguments but conceding that the Southern statesman “was certainly right when he held that in questions of great national importance the ‘concurrence or acquiescence of the various portions of the community’ are a prerequisite of constitutional government.” At the core of the American constitutional system is our belief that democratic majorities must also take account of minority opposition. What Calhoun calls “concurrent majorities” are those groups that, while in the minority, nevertheless represent meaningful countermajoritarian opinions that cannot safely and justly be ignored. Arendt’s point is that “we are dealing here with organized minorities that are too important, not merely in numbers, but in quality of opinion, to be safely disregarded.” In a constitutional system, all groups that feel strongly enough to engage in civil disobedience must be heard to protect against the “dangers of unbridled majority rule.”

Civil disobedience is the kind of active citizenship that has brought about, and might again bring about, revolutionary change without civil war. Arendt’s prime example is the civil rights movement. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, guaranteeing Black Americans the rights and protections of citizens, were “meant to translate into constitutional terms the change that had come about as the result of the Civil War.” But the South resisted that change and developed the system of Jim Crow laws that evaded racial equality through the implementation of the inherently unequal “separate but equal.” The Fourteenth Amendment became activated by the Supreme Court only in the 1950s and 1960s, and the “plain fact is that the court chose to do so only when civil rights movements that, as far as Southern laws were concerned, were clearly movements of civil disobedience had brought about a drastic change in the attitudes of both black and white citizens.” For Arendt, civil disobedience has succeeded where the laws have previously failed, to bring “into the open the ‘American dilemma and, perhaps for the first time, forced upon the nation the recognition of the enormity of the crime, not just of slavery, but of chattel slavery.” In Arendt’s telling, after the amendments failed to establish the promised revolutionary refounding of America, that revolution, to the extent that it happened, was brought about by civil disobedience.

Thoreau’s moral wildness and Arendt’s revolutionary constitutionalism, for all their irreconcilable differences, come together around a deep suspicion of democratic majority rule. Both aim to mobilize protest as a way to protect against the tendency for democracies to be carried away by the tyranny of the majority as well as the apathy and corruption of the citizenry. Both are skeptical that voting is an adequate activity of democratic citizenship. Democracy, they each argue, requires of its citizens a more active engagement that demands each citizen to act in accord with republican virtue. Thoreau and Arendt both hold up civil disobedience as a way of inspiring in citizens the virtue necessary to resist the conformity and passivity of democratic majority rule.

From the introduction to On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau, Hannah Arendt. Copyright © 2024 by Roger Berkowitz. Published by Library of America. Reprinted by permission of the author and Library of America.