The Fools of Yesterday.

Thoreau and Habermas on the disobedient civilian

Ferenc Szabó (University of Szeged)

In this paper I would like to examine the concept of civil disobedience in regard Henry David
Thoreau and Jürgen Habermas. To do this, I will focus on Thoreau’s essay On the Duty of
Civil Disobedience (1849) and Habermas’s Ziviler Ungehorsam – Testfall für den
demokratischen Rechtsstaat (or Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test for the Democratic
Constitutional State; 1983) and his notions about the deliberative democracy from the early
90’s. First, I will recapitulate their views, then collide them, as it is. My main question is, are
they meeting at some point or not?

What is civil disobedience? In a rough overview (here I mostly rely on John Rawls and
Gáspár Miklós Tamás) it is a political act: to harm an unjust law in order to get the political
apparatus to fix it, or, in the long run, to fix the whole political apparatus if it is unjust. It is
not a terrorist or an anarchist move, the civil disobedient do not want to eliminate the state or
set a whole new rule, but to convince the majority to settle the appearing social injustice. As it
is, civil disobedience is a tool of the (liberal) democracy. It has to be non-violent, thus civil,
open and understandable for the neutral masses, and it has to be educational. It has to be well
placed and timed and the disobedient has to be responsible for himself and for his act in the
eye of the people: he has to undertake punishment so he could appear as a faithful civilian.
Gene Sharp, the quasi mastermind of the Orange Revolution of Ukraine in 2004 and
the Cedar Revolution of Lebanon in 2005, distinguishes 198 types of it, so if you allow me I
will point out only two examples, which, I hope, will show how broadly understood this
phenomena is.

First, the Republik Freies Wendland, or Free Republik of Wendland, which was a protester
camp near Gorleben, Lower Saxony, Germany. On 3 May 1980 a group of activist occupied
the planned site of a nuclear waste dump there and established a free country. It was an
example of grassroots democracy with lectures, concerts, readings, even puppet shows. They
had their own pirate radio broadcast and the residents of the surrounding region supported
them with food and water. Notables like the future Chancellor Gerhard Schröder visited the
camp. Wendland had its own passport. Their aim was to call the attention to and actually
physically prevent the irreversible pollution and to educate their fellow civilians to use their
power. On 4 June the camp was cleared by the police on the order of Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt. The eviction was peacefully, the nearly 2000 occupiers gave a sit-in protest. The act
was and still is a symbol of civil disobedience.
Second, 10 April 2017, Budapest, Hungary: Márton Gulyás throws paint cans at the
Sándor Palace, protesting against the Lex CEU and in particular János Áder’s act signing it,
which could be viewed as in-autonomous. The hearing of Gulyás afterwards was a collision of
(political) anger of both sides and an opportunity for him to make himself an example.

Comparing these two acts one could see that both are openly political, motivated by the
actors’ consciences, educative and quasi non-violent, which is important because by this
attribute one could separate them from any acts of terrorism of which main feature is
intimidation. On the other hand, both acts are violent in a way. The Wendland activists were
arbitrary area occupiers, transgressing some forestry laws at least. The act of Gulyás was
directly violent by damaging public property, moreover a historical site. Both acts are
scandalous in the lights of some media reports but both are responsible towards the civil
sphere because of the unhesitant acceptance of the punishment.
However, the Wendland act was a direct protest against the objected measure. In its
size and message it was more social than civil, and, most of all, it was an anarchist act. It
showed an alternative to the existing political arrangements and also a civil force.
Gulyás’s act, in contrast, was symbolical, individual (he has done it with a friend of
his, but his was all the fame) and indirect: he attacked not the objected measure (it was
impossible, as it was) but rather violated a law easy to violate to call attention to his message
during the hearing of this violation. Gulyás’s act was not anarchistic, it was symbolical, to get
to a point from which he could point out an injustice.

So, again, what is civil disobedience? Is it against or for the state and the rule of law? How
can “the fools of yesterday” become the heroes of tomorrow? This turning point is what
interests Habermas most in his essay mentioned above (the citation is his) and this is the latent
question of a part of the literature also.
After the practical examples, let us turn towards the theoretical background in hope of
finding the answer, or at least a part of it.

First Thoreau, the father of the notion of civil disobedience. Thoreau wrote his essay about his
own prison experience. At 24 July 1845 he was imprisoned by Sam Staples, the Concord tax
collector, because he refused to pay his poll tax. With this refusal Thoreau protested against
the war for Texas and California against Mexico. The United States of America wanted to
extend its territory to found slave states beneath the line of the Missouri Compromise.
Thoreau, a lifelong disclaimer of slavery, opposed this policy, called it unjust and withheld his
cooperation with the slaveholders. The slavery, by him, corrupted the whole state and his
conscience did not let him to obey any more. As a citizen, he saw this refusal, this resistance
to the function of the machine of the government the only option to make it better, to call it up
to its own, immanent injustice. An individual step towards a better legislation system,
motivated by conscience, a symbolical, but, at the same time, direct and open action, a
transgression of law for which he undertake the punishment (which tinctures the picture is
that his aunt paid his bail, so he was out the next day). To make an example, it was only his
aim in the long run; he did not believe that his fellows will follow him, because the corruption
of the state was their fault in the first place.
However, this very momentum, that the state of the state is the consequence of the
behavior of its people is the lesson of Thoreau’s story. In a (liberal) democracy the state is an
instrument of the coexistence: nothing more and nothing less. Defense, foreign policy and
monetary policy, that is it, the dividing line between the private and the public. A very
lockean, thus American tradition. For the first reading, Thoreau’s civil disobedient only points
out this.

What is with the civil disobedience of Jürgen Habermas? By him, the government gets its
legitimacy to practice legality, from its people. But this is only the second half of the notion of
legitimacy. First, nobody is an individual by his own right. To become an individual, one has
to be a part of a political construction; he has to be acknowledged by the others who he
acknowledges vice versa. A deliberative democracy means that everything, every part of a
political coexistence is a matter of rational discourse – even the fact, that everything should be
a matter of a discourse. Thus, the system of legislation is a field of constant debate, the
constitution is dynamical, and the only fix point is the pursuit of everybody to get a moral
standpoint in reflection of the others’, from which he can take part in a rational discourse.
Habermas does not look for a system of compromise or a system of consensus: he says that
these are idolums. A people cannot search for the origins or the ends of political coexistence
but has to deal with the always current problems to steer clear of irreversible mistakes of
governance.
The civil disobedient is the reminder of the people of all this, he says, that the people
are not governed by stone tablets but they writes these very tablets. The civil disobedient has
to act by the moral principles of his people, facing the political construction of them. He has
to be communicative, open, non-violent and direct as much as he can. His act is very timely
but for eternity in regards the rational discourse. He has to be very accurate and loud. He has
to be the remedy of today, instead of the fool of yesterday or the hero of tomorrow. The
German (and European…) conscientious tendency to deal with the past…

At first, comparing these two notions, we find a manifest contradiction. Thoreau starts from
the viewpoint of the individual, who, in some kind of a Socratic manner, can never ever
contaminate his conscience with injustice, so he cannot cooperate with an unjust state.
Anyway, he does not mean revolution: to not pay the tax means a bloodless revolution, a
simple turn away to search for alternative life forms (Project Walden maybe, or the Brook
Farm, etc.). In contrast, Habermas speaks from a collective point of view in which the
disobedient civilian is domesticated so as he has to sacrifice himself by showing the right
direction of the rational discourse.

But if we go deeper we could find something interesting.

For Thoreau, in the light of his oeuvre, the disobedience is only the civil form of non-
cooperation with anything which withholds the individual in his project of self-development
and self-exceeding, to get better day by day. For him, the only permanent value is the life
itself, to live it well. Nobody and nothing can give it a form but the individual itself. He does
not want to destruct the state, not even leap out of it, but fix it by reminding that its
legitimating comes from its people, that, exactly, it is built from its people as a form of
coexistence. In the long run, the current form of government may be discredited or dissolved,
but we live now and our duty is to make it better, make it just and livable – so, our duty is to
be disobedient against it, but within it, if it has gone towards the wrong way. Blind obedience,
chasing capitalist prosperity for example, leads only to a state of affairs when one can only
points to another and blame him – to a state of affairs where there is no place for direct action
to practice one’s own legitimacy by legal ways, only to say a big no. Against the state with its
own tools: stand up like an individual, a state-in-itself, with the word of conscience.
Against the state with its own tools: that is for what Habermas urges in his essay, in
my opinion, by a deeper insight. Civil disobedience is a very democratic way of fixing the
faults of democracy when it calls for the majority in the name of minority. It reminds the
government, the process of legislation of its own methodology: that it is dynamic rather than
constant. That in a rational discourse the debating sides has to listen to and respect one
another. All arguments and aspirations have their own place in the course called statehood. So,
the civil disobedient is not only a martyr but an actor rooted deeply in the democratic way of
political coexistence: he is between the majority and the minority, but one of them in the
endeavor of common wealth.

So, all in all, the civil disobedient has to be civil: a part of the particular nation. A highly
engaged civil so as to throw himself before the jurisdiction for his acts. He cannot hope for
anything in return but retaliation. He has to show example, has to shout his message loud and
clear, and has to point out the dangerous parts of constitutional process. He has to be
disobedient: a counter-friction and a control, one who knows when and why he has to act. He
has to be able to distinguish between justice and injustice. He has to be able to work along
other people, with the majority, with the minority, but his motivation has to be conscientious
(individually, or measured on the public conscience, it is another question). Thoreau and
Habermas shakes hands on that there is no outer space of civil sphere, no before or after: there
are no fools of yesterday or heroes of tomorrow; at least they do not get a word today. The
problems of today have to be solved today. And here comes the civil disobedient.

Bibliography

Habermas, Jürgen. 1985. “Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test for the Democratic Constitutional
State”, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 1985/30, 95-116.
Thoreau, Henry David. 1849. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Online:
https://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Thoreau/Civil%20Disobedience.pdf (last download:
16/11/2018)