Political disobedience v. civil disobedience — there's a big difference

Our language has not yet caught up with the political phenomenon that is emerging in Zuccotti Park and spreading across the nation, though it is clear that a political paradigm shift is taking place before our very eyes. It’s time to begin to name and in naming, to better understand this moment. So let me propose some words: “political disobedience.”

Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called “political disobedience,” as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.

Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.

Read the rest at The New York Times Opinion

Occupy Wall Street’s ‘Political Disobedience’

by Bernard E. Harcourt, chair of the political science department and professor of law at The University of Chicago and author of “The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order.”
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

This is an important article for understanding what is going on now worldwide. This is a refusal to participate in existing institutions, rejecting them as immoral and rapacious. "Occupy Wall Street" suggests that the focus is financial and economic. However, Harcourt argues that it is more comprehensive than that, encompassing major social, political and economic institutions. In this sense the protests can be seen as the next step in the expansion of political liberalism, that is, further integration of liberty, equality, and solidarity.

It also answers Slavoj Zizek's harsh criticism of the European rioters, “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” Harcourt shows why he thinks that this entirely misses the point because it is trapped in what the protestors call "old thinking."