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Fellow during the summer term 2019
Project: Complete Civil Disobedience: Gandhi's Satyagraha and American Constitutionalism, 1919-1971
It is a widely-accepted historiographical assumption that civil disobedience, in contrast to both criminal and revolutionary action, by definition presupposes the overall legitimacy of a polity's legal and political systems. However, Gandhi's conception of civil disobedience and anti-colonial struggle contradicts this common view. In one of his early essays on nonviolent resistance, Gandhi theorizes what he calls "complete civil disobedience." As he writes in 1921, "complete civil disobedience is a state of peaceful rebellion - a refusal to obey every single State-made law." It would be, for Gandhi, "more dangerous than an armed rebellion."
In my article, tentatively entitled "Complete Civil Disobedience: Gandhi's Satyagraha and American Constitutionalism, 1919-1971," my intention is twofold. First, I analyze the development of the idea of "complete civil disobedience" in Gandhi's intellectual output, an idea largely neglected by studies on Gandhi and historiographies of civil disobedience. Second, I reconstruct the reception of Gandhi's theory of nonviolent resistance in the United States. While most studies focus on the reception of his political ideas by American pacifists and anti-segregation activists, I focus on how American lawyers, legal scholars, attorneys, judges and justices interpreted Gandhi's legal thought. I find that for those who considered civil disobedience to be compatible with American constitutionalism, it was necessary to insist that civil disobedience could not be "complete" in a constitutional system such as the American one.