Analyzing Disobedience

...It contains throughout an underlying insistence upon a rigorously literate political vocabulary that will permit the exchange of authentically opposing views...

...Contrasting the proven merits of the one with the alleged benefits of the other, van den Haag pertinently observes that "formal" democracy is primarily a process that can admit of various substantive contents without losing its essential characteristics, whereas the attempts to implement "true" democracy have led to rigid inflexibility...

...As a nation, we have engaged in massive experimentation to prove the contrary...

...The latter goes further by attempting to impose its will on that still unper-suaded majority and...

...To be sure, its seasoned practitioners are regrettably fewer than they once were, but that makes the efforts of the steadfast all the more welcome...

...Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, Oxford (New York Review of Books, June 6, 1968...

...Looking to the future of our political order, van den Haag is guardedly optimistic...

...and he bore public, symbolic and civic witness to his opposition within the established order by voluntarily submitting to trial and (if convicted) to punishment...

...Political Violence and Civil Disobedience, an admirable achievement, may be seen as an effort to to reverse this trend...

...The core of van den Haag's thoroughgoing reply is that rights arc by definition social, and can only be granted by the legitimately constituted rights-granting authority—the government...

...In his opening section, van den Haag outlines two types of civil disobedience: persuasive and coercive...

...1970...

...Van den Haag does offer a set of criteria, "partly moral, partly prudential," for deciding when civil disobedience is warranted, and when it is not...

...That bond is formally defined by the legal structure, yet compliance with the law, van den Haag emphasizes, is only a necessary, not a sufficient condition for its preservation...

...In a tightly written appendix to the first section, "Dworkin on Laws and Moral Rights," van den Haag further offers a confutation of the "moral rights" arguments of Ronald Dworkin...

...legal rights are prerogatives that have received recognition...

...Van den Haag reminds us, too, that although government can grant us rights, it cannot endow us with abilities we do not possess...

...His illegal transgression was directed only at a particular statute that he regarded as morally intolerable...

...reasons, thereby vitiating the raison d'etre of classic civil disobedience?moral persuasion of the majority to reform or repeal the opposed law...

...December 17...

...but several years and billions of dollars later, the War on Poverty, for instance, has left a social landscape dotted with pockets of justifiable resentment and disillusionment among the poor that are monuments to unrealized, and unrealizable, promises...

...Gandhi believed that the means to an end were of paramount importance...

...The credibility and moral acceptibility of the government are factors essential to the long-term maintenance of its legal authority...

...If the government does not concede a particular moral claim as a legal right, it remains a claim, nothing more and nothing less...

...He writes: "One is morally justified to deliberately disobey legitimate authority if (a) the protested law is morally intolerable to him and (b) not likely to be remedied otherwise...

...Today, our customs have been disrupted, and credibility has been shaken...

...consequently...

...The Reverend Daniel Berrigan took largely the same position in refusing to report voluntarily for a jail sentence (imposed after his conviction on charges of burning draft board files...

...Van den Haag convincingly responds that a refusal of this type makes invisible the distinction between morally principled resistance to the draft and avoidance or obstruction of it for nonmora...

...Nowhere is van den Haag's flair for presenting relevant distinctions displayed to better advantage than in his effective separation of moral claims from legal rights: Moral claims are those prerogatives an individual asserts independent of the established legal authority, and for which he desires official recognition...

...and (c) the effects of the law are not revokable by probable or possible later correction...

...That subjects so complex as violence and civil disobedience are treated so intelligibly, even authoritatively, at such short length is a measure of the cogency and incisive-ness of the author's thought and writing...

...One result is that the traditional notion of civil disobedience has come under revisionist attack on theoretical and tactical levels...

...Dworkin obliterates this difference by treating an individual's asserted moral claim as if it were already a legal right, and he urges that there be no legal prosecution against the exercise of these "moral rights...

...While acknowledging the majority's generally felt satisfaction with the benefits of the present system, he warns that limitless, indefinite tolerance of minority violence may lead to either revolution or reaction...

...An additional element is required: the informal de facto interplay between citizen and State of customs and shared expectations, the ultimate foundation of the de jure relationship...

...and (d) the totality of the expected effects of civil disobedience under the circumstances is, in his view, morally preferable to the totality of expected effects of any of the courses available within the law...

...Reviewed by Robert A. Pugsley The unabashed use of logic in analyzing our political system has not yet been abandoned...

...The years of bitterly divisive struggle among whole segments of the American political community over the Indochina War have left many casualties, not least the general appreciation of the bond that must exist between citizens and the State if democratic institutions are to prevail...

...Turning to "Political Violence," van den Haag confronts Herbert Marcuse and the critics who fabricate an ideologically self-serving discrepancy between "formal" democracy (what obtains in the United States), and "true" democracy (what "the people" would unquestionably want if only they could perceive their "real" interests...

...It is appropriately modest, given the fact that civil disobedience will probably continue to be one of the most vexing and important issues of our era...

...seriously endangers the democratic system, which has provided the greatest degree of protection for minorities' rights...

...In Disobedience and Disorder, however, published in 1968, Boston University historian Howard Zinn argued against this view, claiming that civil disobedients had no obligation to suffer punishment for violation of laws they rejected...

...because coercive civil disobedience weakened the fabric of laws, he felt, it could not be justified...

...It is increasingly apparent that there has been a deterioration in the quality of our political discourse and widespread failure in the conveyance of certain values once held in common...

...Historically, the citizen who engaged in civil disobedience acknowledged both the legitimacy of the State's lawmaking authority and its laws...

...In other words, the State, by its nature, can do very little about many things that matter greatly...

...Ernest van den Haag's most recent book is one such notable contribution to our modern political literature...

...The former tries merely to win over an unconvinced majority...

...Van den Haag's facility in explicating these fundamental concepts is particularly welcome amid the current confusion about the nature of civil disobedience...

...His objective in proposing this is to help reduce, if possible, the amount of unproductive or counterproductive civil disobedience...