Disobedience in Western Political Thought

Download or read book Disobedience in Western Political Thought written by Raffaele Laudani and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-19 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 conceptualized, supported, and criticized 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.