Carl Cohen's Argument Against Civil Disobedience

In The Case Against Civil Disobedience the unknown author claims in his very first sentence that “the most striking characteristic of civil disobedience is its irrelevance to the problems of today” and that it is “the resort… exercised because the subject cannot or will not take up the rights and duties of the citizen.” What he fails to realize is that the rights and duties of a citizen is to keep an eye on the laws that rule the land and to revolt when those laws become unjust. It’s all part and parcel to the social contract thought up by Locke and heavily leaned upon by Thomas Jefferson. As Henry David Thoreau says in Civil Disobedience, “a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscious.” Civil disobedience can never become irrelevant because corruption will forever attempt to corrode even the best intentions of a government and so there will always be a need to revolt when unjust laws get pasted.
As Carl Cohen points out in his Arguments Against Civil Disobedience, civil disobedience has often been misunderstood to connote a contempt or lack of respect for the law and used only to serve the selfish interests of the law breakers.
He then rebuttals these arguments with the completely true statements that civilly disobedient people act the way they do in an effort to improve the laws that govern us so that all of society might live in a freer and more just place –often at a great cost to themselves. Sacrificing themselves to create a positive impact on their society is in no way selfish. Especially if justice would never have been realized without someone drawing attention to the inherently moral wrongness the law enabled to
occur. The author of The Case Against Civil Disobedience brings up another point. That “nonviolence resistance may take the form of massive but legal protest.” This is entirely true, but as Martin Luther King Jr. points out in his Letter From Birmingham Jail, doing things legally and/or trying to negotiate a solution to the injustice doesn’t work if the people in power refuse to listen. Illegal procedures or sometimes the only resort to make them pay attention. And as King quotes St. Augustine, “an unjust law is no law at all.”
If peaceful resistance to laws hadn’t used by King and his fellow protestors, then the United States of America would still be subjected to the racist Jim Crow Laws which were both immoral and unjust. Or, if they had chosen a more violent means to get rid of such tyranny, then our country would probably still be deeply torn and resistance to unity would be more evident than it currently is. As a country we still struggle with the racism that civil disobedience has been combating since our declaration of independence in 1776 (which incidentally states that we the people have the right to change and abolish the government). It is our dirty “secret” that makes us hypocrites in the face of our claims to stand up for liberty and equality. And, as with anyone ashamed of our damning faults, we react with anger and a tendency to violence when someone points our flaws. The sole purpose of a civil dissident is to point out our flaws, such as racism, and force us to try to fix them. By going about their duty in as peaceful a manor as possible, they make a positive impact by shaming us when we react as the villain and allowing us to make a smoother transition unburdened by resentment –only remorse.