party, encourages it. There is no impartial investigator of the facts in most legal settings under this system. Rather, the truth, it is said, emerges in the mind of the judge or jury when all sides to a dispute, partisan to the core, zealously investigate their cases and present them to a neutral court.
This arrangement permits lawyers to look to the system to produce justice, rather than to themselves. Importantly, it excuses lawyers from having to take responsibility for the positions they advocate. The result is a legal culture in which many lawyers believe they are not morally responsible for their professional behavior and there is no need for their professional conduct to be consistent with their personal morality. The lawyer’s job is simply to play a part. Lawyers thus rationalize professional behavior that is inconsistent with their personal morality by saying that if each player in the system vigorously plays his or her role, the system will take over and sort both the truth and justice out.
There is a trace of role-differentiated behavior in Gandhi’s early practice. In representing his wealthy commercial clients, he finds himself taking actions he would never take on his own as an independent moral agent. Gandhi, however, evolves. In the long arc of his practice he moves away from role-differentiated behavior. At the end, there is almost no difference between Gandhi’s morality, on the one hand, and his professional behavior, on the other. Rather, they reflect each other. It is this merger in South Africa of the man and the professional that demonstrates to him the power to be gained from personal integrity and that serves as a precedent for uniting his spirituality with his politics in India.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: ITS PURPOSES
The notion of civil disobedience developed by Gandhi in South Africa did not suddenly spring forth from him in its full maturity. It emerged in an evolutionary way—and did so as a result of a series of bold experiments. To understand these experiments as well as the civil disobedience campaigns Gandhi would later lead in India, an overview of the purposes to which civil disobedience can be put is necessary.
Over its long history, its practitioners have found civil disobedience useful for a variety of aims. While it is certainly true that a single civilly disobedient act often involves multiple, interrelated purposes, it is helpful for understanding Gandhi’s experiments with civil disobedience to identify its most salient discrete purposes and to give examples of each. Moving from the simplest to the most complex, these are as follows.
Honoring one’s conscience. While much civil disobedience has multiple motives, a disobedient might defy the law principally for reasons of conscience. Such a disobedient may have little concern for larger political, social, or cultural goals; this disobedient’s primary motivation simply may be to act in a manner consistent with his or her own conscience by protesting a wrong. In this vein are those, for example, who engage in the Plowshares civil disobedience movement against nuclear weapons by trespassing on sites that have these weapons. They consistently say they are more interested in being faithful to the Christian gospel than being politically effective.1
Testing the law. Often the quickest—and in some circumstances the only—way to get a ruling on the validity of a law is to break the law and thus force a criminal prosecution of the disobedient. In that event, a forum is created for the disobedient to mount his or her argument to a court against the validity of the law as part of the disobedient’s defense.
This was precisely the purpose for which five African Americans in 1964 entered a Louisiana public library designated by the local government for whites only. To challenge this discrimination, the men occupied the library’s reading room and refused to leave when asked to do so. They were arrested for breaching the peace. In defending against this charge, the disobedients were able to attack the library’s segregation as unconstitutional. Not only did the United States Supreme Court agree, but the Court also ruled that the disobedients had a constitutional right to mount their protest.2
Advancing the debate. When public discussion of a vital issue is stagnant or nonexistent, civil disobedience can cause discussion to occur in a higher key or to arise for the first time. A disobedient’s act, if sufficiently out of the ordinary and sufficiently open, attracts the attention of the media and the public. Debate on the substantive issue often follows.
Susan B. Anthony, the great American advocate of woman’s suffrage, knew this purpose well. In 1872, she attempted to vote when she knew she was prohibited from doing so on the grounds of gender. Her prosecution and trial made for front-page news all across the United States, stirring up a discussion of women’s rights as no other single act had done.3
Creating change. Civil disobedience can be used to create a variety of forms of change—political, social, cultural, legal, and more. It often does so through what is now a fairly well established dynamic. The disobedient breaks a law; the disobedient suffers; the public takes note of the suffering and inquires as to the reason for the disobedient’s action; the public sympathizes with the disobedient; the public puts pressure for change on those in power; and those in power react by enacting curative, institutional reform. While this dynamic does not fully explain every case of successful civil disobedience undertaken to create change, it does explain many such cases and it does highlight the critical role self-suffering plays in a civil disobedience campaign to create change.4
A leading example of civil disobedience undertaken to create change occurred in 1961 when equality activists boarded passenger buses in Washington, D.C., with the intent to travel to New Orleans and to challenge racial segregation in bus stations along the way. As the Freedom Riders moved from terminal to terminal, they drew the attention of the media, the public, and state and federal governments to the segregated terminals, particularly when they were severely beaten, their bus firebombed, and their lives threatened by racist opponents. The suffering they endured raised questions around the country about segregation, caused the public to sympathize with them, and created pressure on the federal government to intervene not only to protect the riders but also to create new law. At the insistence of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued new regulations banning racial discrimination in terminals.5
An important variant of this dynamic occurs when the disobedience is committed not by a small band of resisters seeking sympathy from the wider public, but by a significant swath of the population. Because government depends for its operation on the consent of the governed, when an appreciable portion of the public withdraws that cooperation through disobedience, government cannot function properly.6 The Danish population demonstrated this principle with its widespread resistance to German occupation during World War II. In 2011, disobedient citizens in Tunisia and Egypt, as part of the Arab Spring, removed their rulers from power by withdrawing consent to their rule. Wael Ghonim, the young Google marketing director who was a key player in communicating the substance of the uprising to the Egyptian public, encapsulated the revolution’s message to the Egyptian people in words Gandhi himself could not have improved upon: “This is your country; a government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money, and you have your rights.”7
Gandhi’s South African experiments follow this progression of purposes, though I am quite confident he did not anticipate their doing so. They begin with test-case disobedience, end with change-creating disobedience, and rest on the same foundation throughout—the need to act in concert with conscience.
GANDHI IN CONTEXT
This book focuses on the story of Gandhi’s life as a lawyer, almost all of which takes place in South Africa in the years 1893 to 1911. After Gandhi leaves South Africa, he spends virtually the rest of his life (1915–1948) in India, where he devotes himself to the movement to free India from rule by the British. (British control of India began with the coming of the East India Company in the seventeenth century, accelerated with the assumption of the company’s governing role by the British government in 1858, and ended with
