Civil disobedience in the shadows of postnationalization and privatization
| Date | 01 October 2016 |
| Author | William E Scheuerman |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088215617192 |
| Published date | 01 October 2016 |
Journal of International Political Theory
2016, Vol. 12(3) 237 –257
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088215617192
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Civil disobedience in the
shadows of postnationalization
and privatization
William E Scheuerman
Indiana University Bloomington, USA
Abstract
Bringing together normative political theory and recent empirical research on the state,
the essay examines the challenges posed by the postnationalization and privatization
of state authority to conventional accounts of civil disobedience. It does so by taking a
careful look at John Rawls’ influential theory of civil disobedience along with its oftentimes
neglected implicit assumptions about state and society, assumptions which turn out
to have reproduced commonplace postwar statist and Westphalian ideas, including
the optimistic view that the liberal democratic nation state should prove up to the
task of successfully regulating and perhaps civilizing capitalism. Postnationalization and
privatization render those assumptions problematic. Consequently, the Rawlsian model
that was partly constructed on them becomes problematic as well. However, some of
its features transcend the obsolescent empirical assumptions on which it was implicitly
built. Theorists of civil disobedience should not just deconstruct but also reconstruct
the Rawlsian account of civil disobedience. Postnationalization and privatization may
leave us with a bare-bones version of the Rawlsian original. Yet bare bones arguably
remain better than no bones.
Keywords
civil disobedience, globalization, international political theory, John Rawls, state
transformation, transnational activism
It is now common knowledge that political authority is undergoing postnationalization,
with even the most powerful nation-states sharing authority with major global institu-
tions (e.g. the United Nations (UN), World Trade Organization (WTO), or International
Monetary Fund (IMF)), intergovernmental organizations, international agencies and
Corresponding author:
William E Scheuerman, Indiana University Bloomington, Woodburn Hall 358, Bloomington,
IN 47405-7110, USA.
Email: wscheuer@indiana.edu
617192IPT0010.1177/1755088215617192Journal of International Political TheoryScheuerman
research-article2015
Article
238 Journal of International Political Theory 12(3)
regimes, regionally based supranational institutions (most notably, European Union
(EU)) and privileged private actors. Simultaneously, the state’s organizational structure
has experienced extensive privatization, with the actual day-to-day exercise of political
authority increasingly dependent on private businesses, outsourcing, contracting-out,
and novel organizational structures inconsonant with traditional (and oftentimes Weberian)
notions of top-down public administration.
An impressive empirical literature addresses the relevant shifts, while an equally
imposing normative literature considers their implications for political theory. Yet,
relatively few voices have analyzed their potential consequences for our dominant
conceptions of civil disobedience. Why does it matter? At least since Mahatma Gandhi
and Martin Luther King, civil disobedience has appealed to those hoping to bring about
significant social change. Not surprisingly, recent movements, some of which appear
closely related to postnationalization and privatization, occasionally describe their
activities as falling under the rubric of civil disobedience. The global justice (or mis-
named “anti-globalization”) movement, “Occupy” and European anti-austerity protes-
tors, as well as those presently engaging in electronic or digital disobedience, not only
thematize issues having a global scope and occasionally bring together activists from
different countries, but also at least claim to be engaging in civil disobedience (Della
Porta et al., 2006: 134–449; Douzinas, 2013: 6, 50, 89–106; Gould-Wartofsky, 2015;
Sauter, 2014: 19–38; Schock, 2015: 90–91). Admittedly, the term “civil disobedience”
is sometimes employed loosely by such activists; some of its uses might surprise
Gandhi and King. As a starting point for analysis, however, it seems appropriate to take
seriously what many globally minded activists are saying, and they in fact are frequently
describing their actions as legitimate civil disobedience.
Here I take an initial stab at answering a key question: do recent changes in the nature
of political authority require us to rethink conventional views of civil disobedience?1
If so, what theoretical revisions are called for? In order to do so, I start with John Rawls’
influential account of civil disobedience. The Anglophone debate on civil disobedience
in the 1960s and 1970s was complex and wide-ranging; Rawls was only one among
many impressive voices, many of whom were directly inspired by King and the US civil
rights movement.2 Nonetheless, the stunning success of his A Theory of Justice (Rawls,
1971) meant that the Rawlsian defense of civil disobedience, warts and all, soon took on
a canonical stature, both for liberals and those skeptical of liberalism. His model, of course,
has long been subjected to a barrage of criticisms; my own view is that many of the criti-
cisms are persuasive.3 Yet, in deference to the usual convention among scholars of civil
disobedience, I begin with Rawls. Although I cannot sufficiently document this claim in
the present essay, some of the arguments I direct against—and sometimes cautiously in
defense of—Rawls also apply to competing liberal (and many non-liberal) ideas about
civil disobedience.
In order to formulate my criticisms, I turn to some important empirical research about
state transformation to analyze a set of revealing implicit presuppositions about state
and society. Oftentimes, ignored by philosophical critics, those assumptions not only
proved historically more contingent than Rawls and other far-sighted liberals in the 1960s
and early 1970s grasped but now seem empirically obsolescent. By reconsidering the
Rawlsian model’s original political and social framing we can offer a helpful and perhaps
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