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Civil Disobedience
Arguments as to the meaning and acceptability of civil disobedience became central to political theory in the late 1950s and remained so into the 1970s. The topic had been much discussed before the 1950s, especially in debates initiated by the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy in the nineteenth century and by the actions of Mahatma Gandhi in the early twentieth, but it was the American civil rights movement and the antiwar protests of the student New Left which propelled civil disobedience to center stage in political theory. Then it captured the attention of leading political philosophers, including Hannah Arendt and John Rawls, who wrote extensively on the theme, and generated a broad public debate about the limits of acceptable political action in ...
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