Disobedience in Western Political Thought
A Genealogy

Raffaele Laudani offers a systematic review of how disobedience has been conceptualised, supported, and criticised throughout history.

Raffaele Laudani (Author)

9781107022645, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 August 2013

181 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.8 cm, 0.42 kg

'Recommended.' Choice

The global age is distinguished by disobedience, from the protests in Tiananmen Square to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the anti-G8 and anti-WTO demonstrations. In this book, Raffaele Laudani offers a systematic review of how disobedience has been conceptualised, supported, and criticised throughout history. Laudani documents the appearance of 'disobedience' in the political lexicon from ancient times to the present, and explains the word's manifestations, showing how its semantic wealth transcended its liberal interpretations in the 1960s and 1970s. Disobedience, Laudani finds, is not merely an alternative to revolution and rebellion, but a different way of conceiving radical politics, one based on withdrawal of consent and defection in relation to the established order.

Foreword Adam Sitze
Introduction
1. Before disobedience: antiquity and the Middle Ages
2. The modernity of disobedience
3. Disobedience in the age of revolutions
4. When disobedience is 'civil'
5. Disobedience in the crisis of sovereignty.

Subject Areas: Political ideologies [JPF], Political science & theory [JPA], History of ideas [JFCX]