ABSTRACT
Feelings about civil disobedience run high during times of public stress, and high feelings, in turn, lead to crude perceptions of the phenomena one is hastening to defend as acceptable or praiseworthy or hastening to condemn as outrageous and dangerous. Wyzanski holds that civil disobedience does not involve an aim of testing the constitutionality of the law or policy being protested. More commonly, however, the claim that civil disobedience is a political act amounts to a claim that the act is done for the sake of expected or hoped-for political consequences. The most basic difficulty is that of preserving a basis for recognizing the prevailing view that civil disobedience does most certainly involve a violation of a law. The distinction threatened is that between civil disobedience and lawful dissent. It is true of course that the discriminations with which this paper has been concerned are ones that civil disobedients themselves have often not made or made clearly.
