Lefkowitz, Disobedience and Political Authority: North Carolina’s Moral Mondays as a Paradigmatic Case of Civil Disobedience

Shannon Davis

doi:10.22151/politikon.26.4

Authors

Shannon Davis Yale University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22151/politikon.26.4

Keywords:

anarchy, civil disobedience, Moral Mondays, state legislation, North Carolina (United States)

Abstract

This paper examines political philosopher David Lefkowitiz’s (2007) framework of public disobedience and argues that the acts of civil disobedience employed in the nonviolent Moral Monday protests held at the State Legislative building in the city of Raleigh, North Carolina (United States) during the summer of 2013, are consistent with his account. By definition, public disobedience is a “suitably constrained form of civil disobedience,” compatible with political authority, or a legitimate state's right to rule, because citizens are recognized as holding a moral right to engage in such acts. Specifically, I argue that North Carolina's Moral Mondays activism is a paradigmatic instance of civil, nonviolent resistance by demonstrating how the protests satisfy three necessary conditions of civil disobedience that are also present in Lefkowitz's framework. In my final analysis, I conclude that Moral Mondays are distinguishable from forthright, lawless acts of dissidence that undermine rather than safeguard political authority.

Author Biography

Shannon Davis, Yale University

Shannon Davis, 26, was born in North Carolina, United States. She is a current graduate student who received her bachelors in history at North Carolina State University (Raleigh) in 2010, where she focused an honors project on racial ideology in post-World War I Germany. After taking time off to pursue nonprofit work after graduation, she entered graduate school in 2012. She earned a master's degree in liberal studies at Duke University (Durham, North Carolina) in 2014. She focused her master's thesis on the question of civil disobedience at the intersection of religion, morality, law and politics. She currently studies theology and ethics in the Master of Divinity degree program at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut). She will ultimately pursue law school where she intends to study constitutional, nonprofit and property law. An aspiring attorney and legal academic, her interests include moral and political philosophy, law, social justice, human rights, and theological ethics.