ABSTRACT
Civil disobedience has been and continues to be an important form of protest against unjust policies or practices. In this entry we begin our discussion by considering some of the key figures in the history of civil disobedience and the philosophical questions they attempt to answer. The philosophical questions discussed in detail here are: What, if anything, distinguishes civil disobedience from other criminal activities or forms of protest? What sorts of reasons should be offered to justify acts of civil disobedience? In hopes of answering these questions we discuss the works of theorists such as Socrates, Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Rawls (among others). Finally, we consider some of the public policy implications of civil disobedience within the United States. In this final section we examine some of the ways civil disobedience has been employed in the United States, beginning with the use of civil disobedience during the civil rights movement and continuing on to the present. We close with a discussion of some of the ways the state may respond to acts of civil disobedience.
