Circumstances of Courage1
Andrew Sabl
Visiting Associate Professor
Harvard University
Department of Government
1737 Cambridge St., N-410
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 496-0234
asabl@gov.harvard.edu
(Permanent Affiliation:
Public Policy and Political Science, UCLA
sabl@ucla.edu)
Draft prepared for the Brown University Political Theory Workshop, 12 October
2006. This is a very rough and preliminary draft; comments of any length are
therefore very welcome but please do not cite without permission.
1
I would like to thank Chenelle Idehen for research assistance.
1
My topic is political courage: specifically, the extent to which courage is a
civic virtue in a liberal democracy. The question is both whether certain kinds of
courage are necessary for ordinary citizens of a liberal democracy and whether
certain kinds of courage (the same, or others) are even compatible with it. That
certain specialized political offices call for something called political courage I do
not doubt, but my subject is whether liberal democracy requires such a thing of
ordinary citizens and if so what shape it might take.
I assume at the start an instrumental view of political virtue: a political virtue
is one that benefits the polity or the values it ought to embody rather than
(necessarily) the person who holds the virtue. Thus many ancient discussions of
virtue, as well as contemporary “virtue ethics” to the extent that tit builds on
these discussions,” will be either irrelevant or relevant in accidental and
unintended ways. For instance, in discussing true courage, which “chooses and
stands firm because that is fine or because anything else is shameful,” Aristotle
says that “it is quite possible for brave people not to be the best soldiers”—for
instance, those who have nothing to lose might fight more fiercely than those
with the proper motivational structure.2 If that is the case, the place to look for
politically useful military courage is clear: it is those with nothing to lose who
most have it, not those who are so well constituted that they think more about
what is shameful than about fighting.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985): 1116a10-13,
1117b17-20.
2
2
In previous work,3 I have put forth a framework on political virtue that is
meant to make sense of these questions. I distinguished between core virtues,
those which are really necessary for most members of a liberal democracy to
possess most of the time if the polity is to continue functioning, and ideal virtues,
those conducive to one vision among many of how a liberal democracy ought to
progress or flourish. I also claimed that most virtues are pluralistic and episodic:
it is legitimate for some citizens to specialize in some, others in others; and many
virtues are called for only in certain circumstances, useless or harmful in others.
The same article asserted, briefly, that a certain radical and world-changing
conception of courage fit the last category: it is useful in times of radical crisis
when liberals must dare to act before liberalism’s enemies do, but “a danger to
the polity” when this is not the case and existing institutions demand our
qualified support.
A similar conclusion has long been associated with liberal theory but has
always lacked intuitive appeal. Hannah Arendt wrote that “courage is one of the
cardinal political virtues”—and that “we” all hold this “as a matter of course”
even though our theories of politics give little reason for doing so.4 Both parts of
her claim still have force. The Rawlsian liberalism that serves as political
theorists’ default assumption now seems to have no more room for courage than
3
4
Andrew Sabl, “Virtue for Pluralists,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 2, No. 2 (July 2005): 207-235.
Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future, 156.
3
did the more pluralistic liberalism that reigned when Arendt wrote.5 The first
virtue of social institutions is of course justice. And to avoid an incoherent
destabilizing clash between private and political duties, our private morality
must (roughly speaking) put justice first as well. The primary “natural duty” is
one of justice, “to support and to further” arrangements that satisfy the
principles of justice.6 Other duties considered necessary for the just society’s
stability include civility and mutual aid—but not courage. Later Rawls, which
focuses more on reasonable pluralism, still stresses other values, and other
virtues,7 but not courage. In a well-ordered society based on an overlapping
consensus rather than on agreement regarding comprehensive doctrines, “a
normally effective sense of justice” is essential (the purely political conception
that cements the polity is still a “political conception of justice”8) but courage is
not: the “very great virtues” “that make a constitutional regime possible” are
“the virtues of political cooperation” (tolerance, “being ready to meet others
halfway,” reasonableness, fairness)—not the virtue of courage.9 To be sure,
courage might be praised or valued within a particular comprehensive
conception, but politics, it seems, can do without it as it cannot do without
fairness, toleration, or a sense of justice.
The word “courage” does not appear in the index of John Rawls’ major works: A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1971); Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993);
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Belknap, 2001).
6
Theory of Justice, §51, p. 335.
7
I do not mean to suggest a one-to-one correspondence, nor indeed any necessary
correspondence, between values and virtues, least of all between their names. To use the most
obvious example, a peaceful society may require aggressiveness in the soldiers defending it.
8
ibid., 44
9
Political Liberalism 35, 44 (emphasis added), 157.
5
4
This seems both intuitively wrong and theoretically correct. A nation of
political cowards sounds like a candidate for liberal failure—for instability and
injustice—let alone for ignobility. On the other hand, there seem good reasons
for the internal processes of liberal democracy, where it is hoped law and
peaceful dispute resolution reign, to downplay the role of courage, whose
paradigmatic sphere of operation is war.10 In this essay I shall sketch a defense
of both our intuitive attachment to political courage and the reasons for liberal
theory to reject the claim that it is central to political life. Courage is a political
virtue in certain circumstances, but not those Arendt envisioned and not for the
reasons she had in mind. There is nothing in general wrong with liberal
democracy’s aspiring to make many kinds of courage obsolete—to make
democracy as safe for cowards as for the rest of us who are imperfect in other
ways. The form of courage that has the best claim to be enduringly necessary
and more of a help to liberal democracy than a hindrance is neither the martial
courage of the ancients nor the existential courage of Arendt and her followers
but what the Germans call civil courage: and it too must, if it is to be tamed for
democratic purposes, play a more limited role than many think. For the qualities
that make it so attractive as a counterweight to political evil also represent a
threat to political justice. Thus civil courage will be arguably a liberal-democratic
core virtue—but the fact that its presence in the core is arguable means that it
As noted by Holloway Sparks, “Dissident Citizenship: Democratic Theory, Political Courage,
and Activist Women,” Hypatia 12, No. 4 (Fall 1997): 74-110 at 92.
10
5
must either grudgingly take its place among “ideal” virtues or stand with those
who question altogether the worth of liberal democracy or the way we think
about it.
I. Red herrings: preservationist courage and military valor.
Courage can mean many things; political courage, almost as many. A matrix
combining all the possible ways of defining the virtue of courage (not having a
certain kind of fear, or overcoming it? If overcoming: by means of feelings of
solidarity, rational knowledge of the good, patriotism, animal spirit, or does it
not matter?) with all the possible definitions of political goods worth being
courageous for, would have a great many boxes. Since no claim is made here
about permissible “ideal” virtues or goals—everyone is entitled to praise all sorts
of motivations for standing fast in pursuit of all kinds of potential goods in the
face of all kinds of temptations—I shall start by talking about two kinds of
courage that might seem both fundamental to liberal democracy and related to
each other, but (I shall claim) are neither.
Holloway Sparks has described the “classical” portrait of political courage as
the “warrior courage of soldiers and heroes” that “enables the warrior to gain
personal glory while defending the existing community from external harm.” We
might note at least four distinct propositions involved in this “classical” or epic
view: courage is (1) the special province of soldiers and heroes; (2) oriented
towards glory; (3) what might be called preservationist or conservative,
6
involving steadiness in defense of the existing order; and (4) addressed towards
external enemies. Sparks notes that Plato’s “civic” (or “political”) courage in the
Republic is a version of courage in this sense (we might add, without the glory
but with more immediate, i.e. romantic, compensations): it is preservationist, and
the quality above all of the Guardians.11
Considered as a specialized or else episodic virtue, this seems, once more,
unexceptionable. Surely every liberal democracy sometimes faces military
threats, and surely some people some of the time must be able to brave danger in
repelling them. The extent of those threats, and therefore the frequency and
scope in which warrior virtue must operate, is a persistent partisan dispute
between conservatives and liberals, one which theory can hardly illuminate
reliably. One thing the theorist can do is point out how the claims made for
warrior courage typically metastasize in ways that make no logical but keen
political and psychological sense.
Put simply, the four above qualities have little logical connection to one
another, and none has any logical connection to a willingness to repress domestic
dissenters who lack alliance with foreign enemies. The tendency to conflate the
two, accidentally or as a deliberate evasion, is of course very ancient. Even
Plato’s own treatment, which he carefully limits to specialized, political courage
Sparks, 93, citing Plato, Republic 429. Sparks does not mention Socrates’ explicit refusal (430) to
identify this preservationist, warrior courage with courage simply. To be sure, Allan Bloom’s
claim (in his translation of the Republic [New York: Basic Books, 1968], 456n16) that “[c]ourage,
simply, without the qualification political,…consists precisely in the willingness to question
opinions, even the most authoritative ones” may be admirable but seems without warrant in the
text.
11
7
in the hypothetical ideal city, engages in such slippage. Courage is sought in the
warrior class because it seems the quintessential quality of warriors (429b)—but
then is inconsistently asserted to serve a more generalized political end. The
guardians’ steadfastness in the face of external threats is conflated with their
refusal to tolerate any changes in the politeia (430b). The very quality with which
the guardians were first identified—the ability to distinguish enemies to be
attacked from friends to be treated kindly—is quickly forgotten: the response to
domestic innovation is placed in the portfolio of those entrusted with
ruthlessness towards foreign threats.
It is hardly new to note that times of war present the danger of domestic
conformity and political repression, but not always recognized that it often does
so through appeals to political courage—identified with this narrow or military
ideal. The soldier’s values of obedience, patriotism, and steadfastness in the face
of death come to be conflated with civic virtues that ought in many cases to be
opposites of these; veterans are assumed to be preferred candidates for office, as
if physical bravery entailed general civic devotion or selflessness; the
contentment with the status quo that is a good thing in the professional soldier (it
prevents coups) is made a virtue of the whole citizenry, precisely the body
entrusted with making and evaluating demands for change;
The link between valuing soldiers and punishing dissenters is so strong
largely because the slide between very different claims about courage is so easy.
While an extreme version of the military-civic slide—that career soldiers are best
8
suited to monopolize political power—is restricted to military dictatorships,
subtler versions can be found across the political spectrum. On the (nonauthoritarian) Right, it is common to assert or at least imply that domestic
dissenters are allied with foreign enemies precisely because the former often
refuse the demand to heap plaudits on those who attack the latter—appear, that
is, insufficiently appreciative of military courage, thus cowards by association.12
In the republican or “civil liberal” center, preference for a draftee over a
professional army is sometimes linked to unrelated values like social mixing or
fair distribution of military risk but just as often to the idea that the military
virtues or their civilian analogue make for more steadfast citizens. But there is no
a priori reason to suppose this. Even habits of cooperation and sacrifice common
in civilian service projects might be double-edged if they (as alleged) spill over
into civic life. As Richard Posner has pointed out, the “GI generation’s” ethos of
service and sacrifice made them poor critics of government misbehavior
precisely because they were
particularly good at keeping secrets and at lying for the greater good,
tactics of solidarity which boomeranged when the [Vietnam] war turned
sour. Their whimpy [sic] successors, the ‘Silent Generation,’ turned out to
have deeper insights into the war.13
An extreme example is the physical violence practiced and promoted by the American Legion
against a religious sect that refused the flag salute as idolatrous. Shawn Francis Peters, Judging
Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution (Lawrence, KS: Univ.
Press of Kansas, 2000).
13
David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000) at 8
[confirmation of source tk: my notes are unclear.]
12
9
But perhaps most interesting is a recent claim from a leading left-liberal that
turns out to be a version of this argument. In attacking what he sees as
dangerous talk of “balancing” security and liberty, restricting the latter in the
face of threats to the former, Jeremy Waldron writes:
Of course, it is possible that we could make the adjustment in the other
direction. Instead of beginning with an idea of the maximum risk…we
were prepared to bear as a result of people’s liberty, we might begin with
an idea of the minimum liberty…we were prepared to accept. The
recalculation after September 11 would then require us not to accept less
liberty but to brave a higher risk for the sake of the liberty we cherish.
The appropriate changes in public policy, then, would be calls to greater
courage, rather than diminutions of liberty.14
Leaving aside that “calls to greater courage” seems not quite a public policy (any
more than calls to tighten one’s belt are a social policy), the question is who is
being called to greater courage, and greater than what. The idea seems to be that
we must all display something like warrior courage, since terrorists intend to
make all of civilian society a battlefield.15 But the word “greater” is problematic
here, as the amount of warrior courage normally expected of, say, four-year old
children is normally zero. To accept even a small but pervasive degree of violent
insecurity is to display the kind of virtues that liberal governments are supposed
to render obsolete for most people and required only in a few. Waldron resists
talk of “balancing” liberty against security partly because such talk is too
Jeremy Waldron, “Security and Liberty: The Image of Balance,” Journal of Political Philosophy 11,
No. 2 (2003): 191-210 at 194.
15
That everyone must now display civil courage rather than shrinking from small but important
contributions to a common effort would be an interesting claim. Camus’ Plague presents
something like this case, but I do not think Waldron intends it.
14
10
casually consequentialist whereas liberty is supposed to be at least quasiabsolute.16 But perhaps virtues, or their absence, are tacitly regarded as quasiabsolute as well. One way of reformulating the goal of a liberal society is that of
making the truly necessary civic virtues as few as possible and their necessary
level as close to zero as possible. The call for everyone to get used to needing
warrior courage is much more radical than it seems.17
To sum up: That warrior courage translates particularly well into the courage
necessary for domestic political life is a claim that can certainly be made. But it is
an ideological claim: it presents a certain story about what ails politics, a claim
that must stand on its specific causal arguments and cannot claim to rest on
anything inherent in the logic of either courage or liberal democracy. That is: it is
no more plausible to suppose that military or preservationist courage is related
to the (nebulous) courage appropriate to citizens than to suppose it is related to
anything else: generosity, or courtesy, or drunkenness, or skill at pole vaulting.
II. Arendtian Courage: Radical Virtue for Dark Times.
Arendt’s claim that courage is crucial to politics is very specific and surprisingly
hard to gloss. She endorses the claim attributed to Churchill that courage is the
Ibid.
That the level of warrior courage required of citizens ought to be zero does not imply that it is.
After September 11, one sometimes heard it said that middle-class White Americans were now
experiencing the kind of violent insecurity that minorities in crime-ridden neighborhoods felt
every day. But no one claims that the existence of violent crime should be met by a call for
greater courage among its usual victims.
16
17
11
first of all human qualities” because it “guarantees all others.”18 This could on
the surface mean many things, for instance a point about weakness of will, but in
citing it Arendt means very specifically the courage necessary to leave the
private realm and engage in public action.
In her discussion of political freedom Arendt writes that courage
Does not gratify our individual sense of vitality but is demanded of us by
the very nature of the public realm. For this world of ours, because it
existed before us and is meant to outlast our lives in it, simply cannot
afford to give primary concern to individual lives and the interests
connected with them; as such the public realm stands in the sharpest
possible contrast to our private domain, where, in the protection of family
and home, everything serves and must serve the security of the life
process. It requires courage to leave the protective security of our four
walls and enter the public realm, not because of particular dangers which
may lie in wait for us, but because we have arrived in a realm where the
concern for life has lost its validity. Courage liberates men from their
worry about life for the freedom of the world. Courage is indispensable
because in politics not life but the world is at stake (emphasis added)”19
The degree of actual danger or threat to our persons is not, it seems, even
relevant; military courage is not at issue. (In another passage Arendt says, yet
more vividly, that even cowards can be heroes and that being a coward may
even increase the courage displayed by leaving one’s “private hiding place.”20) It
takes courage to face not so much physical danger but the insecurity specific to
politics, in which how our private lives go is not of concern. But it remains
Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Compass
ed., 1968; reprint, Penguin, 1987), 156. I have been unable to far to find the original source of the
Churchill quotation (not cited by Arendt) and would be interested in its original context or even
its genuineness.
19
Ibid. Just before the text quotation, Arendt explicitly stresses the contrast between this sort of
courage and the physical courage of the one who seeks “the daring of adventure.”
20
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958): 186-7.
18
12
unclear why politics should be insecure at all, why it should seem threatening to
leave home and engage with others, why “the public realm” in general and
politics in particular (a word that Arendt uses sparingly) should involve such
risk. A common answer given by Arendt scholars involves the uncertainties and
vagaries of risking one’s private identity in the world of public perception, an
answer that focuses on authority rather than identity seems more convincing and
harder to claim as universally valid.
Arendt’s work was born in what she (following Brecht) called “dark times”:
specifically the “first half of the twentieth century,”21 which saw two world wars,
Depression, Holocaust, and the unprecedented political structure that Arendt
would analyze as Totalitarianism. Arendt took for granted that as a result of
these experiences (and only these experiences) “the thread of tradition finally
broke”: “the gap between past and future,” once a construct of intellectuals who
can stop time notionally, in thought, is now “a tangible reality” and has “political
relevance.”22 The vigor and brilliance of Arendt’s attempts to make sense of such
times resonated with an entire postwar generation with personal or familial
Hannah Arendt, “Preface” to Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968):
vii.
22
Hannah Arendt, “Preface” to Between Past and Future, 14. Compare “Tradition and the Modern
Age,” in ibid., 26: “Totalitarian domination as an established fact, which in its unprecedentedness
cannot be comprehended through the usual categories of political thought, and whose ‘crimes’
cannot be judged by traditional moral standards or punished within the legal framework of our
civilization, has broken the continuity of Occidental history. The break in our tradition is now an
accomplished fact. It is neither the result of anyone’s deliberate choice nor subject to further
decision,” and “What is Authority?” in ibid., 91, which starts from the bald premise that
“authority has vanished from the modern world.” [More citations tk: Origins of Totalitarianism,
Men in Dark Times, others. Also chase down in secondary literature the link to Benjamin and to
Zionist thought; a start is Eyal Chowers, “Time in Zionism: The Life and Afterlife of a Temporal
Revolution,” Political Theory 26, No. 5 (October 1998): 652-685.
21
13
memories of these catastrophes and of the multiples losses of certainty, hope,
and identity that went with them.23 Arendt’s self-consciously literary, baroque,
evocative rather than careful words and arguments, praised as a new way of
doing political theory by Arendt’s Continental or postmodern followers and
often so infuriating to Anglo-American critics,24 track more closely than either
group recognizes a particular set of political experiences. Arendt’s method, akin
to Socrates’ (tentative, original, prone to use everyday metaphors, nonsystematic) makes sense if and only if one thinks that there is no alternative to
There were specifically dark places, not just dark times. Those who grew up in
interwar Central Europe, laid low by defeat, hunger, the loss of “imperial” political
identities, and hot (Germany) or cold (Austria) civil wars among dueling revolutionary
and counterrevolutionary factions could well believe that taking any political role was a
risk. “I spent my childhood in the impoverished capital of a great empire, attached, after
the empire’s collapse, to a smallish provincial republic of great beauty [Austria, in both
cases], which did not believe it ought to exist,” writes Eric Hobsbawm, born eleven years
after Arendt. And of his own communism: “It was easy enough in Europe during and
between the world wars to conclude that only revolution could give the world a future.
The old world was in any case doomed.” Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times (New York:
Pantheon Books, 2002): 8, 137. Compare Michael Frayn’s Heisenberg, whose life is
framed by the sight of starving children and rotting corpses, and the experience of having
bought his own life from a jumpy fellow-German soldier for a pack of (American)
cigarettes: when it is suggested that his actions might stand up well “if people are to be
measured strictly in terms of observable quantities,” “then we should need,” replies
Heisenberg, “a strange new quantum ethics” (Michael Frayn, Copenhagen [New York:
Anchor Books, 2000]: Act Two, 92). (Arendt herself stresses that even the greatest crises
of authority need not lead to revolution if the regime in question is lucky enough to avoid
defeat in war—Crises of the Republic [cite tk; near the quotation below about De
Gaulle.] The despair and vertigo that Arendt takes for granted as the starting points of
honest “modern” thought were the taken-for granted childhood experiences of
Hobsbawm and Heisenberg; of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (rich, conservative) brother, who
shot himself on Austria’s Eastern Front after his Slavic troops deserted. Not to overstress
autobiography, they were also my father’s, and I can attest to the relevance of Judith
Shklar’s statement that the difference between her work and Michael Walzer’s was “the
difference between a refugee and a citizen” [cite tk].
23
As noted by Elizabeth Young-Bruel in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World [cite tk], citing Stuart
Hampshire.
24
14
starting anew, that the world no longer contains solid premises from which to
reason and make systematic progress through logic alone. Considering “all our
experiences in this century, which has constantly confronted us with the totally
unexpected,” optimistic doctrines of continuity and Progress (here Marxist, but
Arendt blames liberal ones just as much) represent “a comfortable, speculative or
pseudo-scientific refuge from reality.”25
Both those who want to claim Arendt’s insights are undoubtedly true and
those who want to dismiss them as undoubtedly nonsense should recognize that
Arendt explicitly links her theoretical claims to specific kinds of experiences and
political conditions.26 “Anglo-American” theory sounds very different from
Arendt because it is written by Britons and Americans who have no reason to
believe the claim that modernity has catastrophically disrupted political and
cultural life: whose traditions never stopped working. Where constitutional
traditions persist, even grow stronger over time, Arendt’s answers can still
fascinate but they seem the mere intellectual games that Arendt granted they
would have been absent the experience of Dark Times:
“the disorder and the hunger, the massacres and the slaughterers, the
outrage over injustice and the despair ‘when there was only wrong and no
outrage,’ the legitimate hatred that makes you ugly nevertheless, the wellfounded wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse. All this was real
Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972),
130.
26
“My assumption is that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must
remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings.” “Preface” to Between
Past and Future, 14.
25
15
enough as it took place in public; there was nothing secret or mysterious
about it.”27
But it is mysterious now: her experience, not ours. Arendt’s apparently
obscure political categories—power vs. authority vs. strength vs. violence;
courage is the central political virtue but toleration is not—are often seen by both
her partisans and enemies as resting on abstract theses about the human
condition when they could be read as attempts to make sense of political
circumstances.
This has clear implications for courage and explains why courage is so
important and so central to Arendt’s politics. Arendt sees revolutions as a matter
of power’s slow disintegration followed by a contest of initiative:
Disintegration often becomes manifest only in direct confrontation;
and even then, when power is already in the street, some group of men
prepared for such an eventuality is needed to pick it up and assume
responsibility.28
Arendt’s example of this is France in 1968, where the students were not ready to
pick up the power lying in the street—but de Gaulle was.29 Arendt’s metaphors,
like Socrates’, should be taken very seriously as attempts to create new premises
when old ones are inapt. If revolution means a rush to pick up power, and if
power in most modern societies is so fragile that it is often lying there to be picked
Arendt, “Preface” to Men in Dark Times: viii. Compare the “Walter Benjamin” essay in ibid.,
191-2, especially on Benjamin’s reaction to Scholem’s advice not to abandon “the most fruitful
and most genuine traditions of a Hamann and a Humboldt.” Benjamin started from the
assumption that these traditions were no longer of any use.
28
Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic, 148.
29
Ibid., 149.
27
16
up—this is what a crisis of authority means—then politics is like a game of
Australian Rules football. The ball is propelled forwards through rough kicks
and fist-socks: it typically lands close to players on both sides (more like soccer
than like a U.S. football pass) and whoever gets it first wins possession. Many
players running hard and trying to scoop up the ball in their hands means that
head-on collisions are very common and are more serious the harder the players
are competing. Now make the prize for getting the ball not a possession but the
right to write the constitution and dominate the political system. This is no
longer a game in which toleration could possibly be more important than
courage.30 Even an agreement not to play, to let the ball lie there, would only
entail that someone else, perhaps a great enemy, could break the deal and pick it
up without effort—much as fascism in fact seemed in the eyes of a generation
that ten or twenty years before saw no reason to doubt that liberalism would
survive forever only to see it die utterly, defended by no one.
This is not our game. There is simply no good reason to believe that
authority in liberal democracies is now fragile, that alternative claimants to
power fail mostly or even partly because they fail to take initiative Arendt’s
defense of courage is not “wrong” but describes political circumstances that
simply are less relevant here and now than they did in her day and her
Now consider soccer, otherwise very similar except that one may not use one’s hands. This is
like liberalism: infuriating to those who want to see the full extension of our human capacities,
rational to those who care more about players’ being able to walk away. Baseball is more liberal
still: the least “republican” of sports, the most individualistic and quantifiably meritocratic, the
least amenable to genius and innovation in tactics and strategy, the one in which boldness and
initiative count for least and practice and routine for most, easily the dullest, easily the safest.
30
17
birthplace. (It is no accident that the active politicians most influenced by Arendt
mostly grew up in Eastern Europe, or Iraq.) Short of portraying our times so
pessimistically that we forget the profound difference between the problems of
the U.S. today and those of interwar Germany or Austria, 31 we cannot easily
claim that politics today requires the courage Arendt described. We can now
enter politics without risking either life or security and without expecting the
“miracles” that Arendt saw in the political realm.32 And we can fail to enter
politics without leaving politics to fascists and communists: in a stable liberal
democracy, a moderate preference for our private shelters simply does not do the
polity fundamental harm.
III. Civil courage: antipolitical society vs. rational publicity.
For examples of this see Dianna Taylor, “Hannah Arendt on Judgment: Thinking for Politics,”
International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10, No. 2 (2002): 151-169 at 156-159 and, on a much
more sophisticated level, Jeffrey C. Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1998).
32
“What is Freedom?” 168. To be sure, the politics of the civil rights era did require both crisistype courage and belief in something like a miracle in social relations; see the reflections on Ella
Baker and other Civil Rights leaders in Sparks, passim. I merely question whether direct
analogies can still be drawn to such situations. Sparks’ assimilation of the concrete physical and
economic risks posed by Civil Rights activism to the more rarified “risk, uncertainty” of forming
coalitions and challenging one’s comfortable social assumptions in feminist meetings and similar
fora (97, with citations to several feminist theorists) seems too quick. In particular, one wonders
whether the feigned confidence known as “stage presence” would not solve the latter problem
more simply than appeals to radical courage do. Cultivating the appearance of courage rather
than speculating about its reality would respect as well Arendt’s desire to leave political personae
masks in place, to avoid the politics of hypocrisy and (alleged) authenticity, to acknowledge that
“in politics, more than anywhere else, we have no possibility of distinguishing between being
and appearance” (Arendt, On Revolution, Viking Compass edition [New York: Viking, 1965], 98).
There are practical implications as well: while feminists were engaged in consciousness-raising,
aiming at a deep and conscious political awareness and close understandings among women of
different backgrounds, anti-feminist groups that concentrated on training nervous traditionalist
homemakers in the practical skill of looking and sounding good on television. gained a certain
advantage. Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, (University of Chicago Press, 1986). [This
deserves further exploration; it probably needs to be a separate article.]
31
18
If any kind of courage seems suited for liberal democracy, it is what the
French and (especially) Germans call civil courage. The term is ubiquitous in
civics lessons and newspaper commentary but mostly ignored by philosophers:
one must therefore start with origins and definitions.
Zivilcourage in its origins is diametrically opposed to warrior or military
courage, originating in a complaint by Bismarck that “courage on the battlefield”
was a common Prussian quality, but “Zivilcourage” (i.e. here civilian courage)
less so.33 If the original context opposed “civil” courage to “military,” the current
meaning is clearly closer to civil or civic: the courage appropriate to ordinary
citizens is meant.34 Beyond this, however, agreement on what this term entails
and even what it basically refers to (on conception as well as concept, in
Rawlsian terms) becomes elusive. One foundation that gives prizes for civil
courage defines it as “steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk.”35 In this
context, civil courage is regularly ascribed to anti-Nazi martyrs like Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, who wrote some famous (though brief and cryptic) remarks on civil
The universally cited sentence is “Mut auf dem Schlachtfeld is bei uns Gemeingut, aber Sie
werden nicht selten finden, daß es ganz achtbaren Leuten an Zivilcourage fehlt.” (“Courage on
the battlefield is common property among us, but you will not seldom find that quite respectable
people lack civil courage.”) Unfortunately, the source is elusive and one of the few attempts at
scholarly citation cites a page where no such sentence appears. Till Bastian, Zivilcourage: Von der
Banalität des Guten (Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag, 1996): 38. citing (spuriously) Felix Max Robert von
Keudell, Fürst und Fürstin Bismarck (Berlin: W. Spemann, 1901; Bastian’s citation gives no
publisher but there is no other edition). I continue to search.
34
In German as (more or less) in English, “Zivil-“ attached to a noun has meant since the
nineteenth century (1) “civil” in the sense of “pertaining to a citizen” (as in Zivilkrieg = Bürgerkrieg
civil war), or (2) “civilian,” not military, or (3) civil as opposed to canon law, or (4) a civil as
opposed to a criminal lawsuit. Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch, 32
volumes (Leipzig: S. Hirzel 1854-1960): volume 31, pp. 1727-31. Bismarck meant the second
sense; modern commentators, clearly the first.
35
The Northcote Parkinson Prize. http://www.civilcourageprize.org/about-prize.htm As many
people have received the prize posthumously (including Bonhoeffer) as when still alive.
33
19
courage36 and won that prize posthumously. Civil courage in this heroic sense is
certainly admirable but will be of limited use in functioning liberal democracies,
in which standing up against injustice, almost by definition, entails no such
danger. On the other hand, civil courage is very often spoken of in the context of
the ability to take actions that entail no risk, except perhaps embarrassment: in
the case of Kitty Genovese, whose neighbors would have risked little or nothing
by calling the police, or foreign equivalents thereof. Even a soccer star’s choice to
found a charity is said to demonstrate Zivilcourage.37 These things involve
(some) altruism, or perhaps mere helpfulness—the “willingness to do small
favors” lauded by Kant and Rawls—but their connection to courage is doubtful;
they seem related to the Nazi rescuer case only in the sense that both may serve
as very different antonyms for apathy.
Between these heroic and petty definitions lie the idea that Zivilcourage
involves “courage of one’s convictions,”38 which implies attachment to moral
values and some disregard for possible consequences for oneself, but not
necessarily that those consequences be dire. A risk to one’s job, for instance,
might be sufficient. Also consistent is John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage
(whose heroes lost elections but no more) was rendered as Zivilcourage in
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Civil Courage?” in “Letters and Papers from Prison,” ed. Eberhard
Bethge (London: S.C.M. Press, 1967): 5-6.
37
Bastian, chapter 1, who rightly uses “Altruismus” as a synonym for this sense. His subtitle, “of
the banality of good,” is unintentionally comical in some of his contexts, though of course (p. 20)
he intends to explore how we can avoid following Arendt’s Eichmann in the banality of evil.
38
The rendering in the Oxford-Duden Concise dictionary.
36
20
German.39 And sociologist Richard Swedberg’s treatment of the concept, which
focuses on Knut Wicksell, a sort of Bertrand Russell figure in Sweden—like
Russell, greatly influenced by J.S. Mill—who faced social and academic
disapproval and a brief stay in jail for his anti-nationalist, pro-contraception and
freethinking views but certainly no grave physical risks (he did not even lose his
tenure).40 This might be called the social conception of civil courage, or perhaps
the antisocial, since it involves risking social approval and economic position
rather than letting civil society serve as an instrument of fear.41 Not the courage
but the risks faced are social in character. The ends may either be social, even
private—here versions of subway muggings where the rescuers face some risk
might qualify,42 as would some anti-Nazi rescuers of Jews—or we could require
that they be, as with Wicksell or with Kennedy’s senators, political. This
corresponds to the two senses of Zivil- or Bürger-/bürgerlich- in German (both
mean either “pertaining to bourgeois, ordinary people in civil society” or
“pertaining to citizens”) and roughly to the distinction in English between “civil”
duties, which can have a social or private character, and “civic” ones, which
involve political citizenship.43
I have checked this and it is true but [cite tk] for where I first read it.
Richard Swedberg, “Civil Courage (‘Zivilcourage’): The Case of Knut Wicksell,” Theory and
Society 28, No. 4 (August 1999): 501-528. Wicksell’s jail term does not alter the assessment: it was
relatively brief and very comfortable—he got lots of writing done—as well as accidental: Wicksell
thought his position meant he would not be arrested for blasphemy.
41
For a somewhat overheated treatment of the latter tendency, see Corey Robin, Fear: The History
of a Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford Trade, 2004).
42
As per Gesine Schwan, “Civil Courage and Human Dignity: How to Regain Respect for the
Fundamental Values of Western Democracy,” Social Research 71, No. 1 (Spring 2004): 115.
43
I owe the last distinction to forthcoming work by Ben Berger.
39
40
21
Such courage might seem dangerously ineffable and, precisely because it is so
praiseworthy, antidemocratic. The egalitarian moral psychology characteristic of
most contemporary political thought supposes that everyone, by nature or more
likely socialization, has values and can act on them: justice is no specialized skill.
It seems difficult simultaneously to praise civil courage and to rescue such a
moral psychology. Put differently, either civil courage is superogatory—which
would place it outside the core and make it much less fun to lament its absence—
or it is a crucial citizen virtue for all of us but one that most lack. Or, finally, civil
courage could be crucial in some repressive regimes—those in which defying an
official order or suggestion endangers one’s career or position but not one’s life—
but not so much in ours. Absent blasphemy laws or even economically
significant blacklists, there is little occasion for ordinary citizens to display even
Wicksell’s or Russell’s courage.
Gesine Schwan, author of possibly the only scholarly treatment of civil
courage from a moral perspective, claims that the case of a repressive but mostly
non-murderous regime, the German Democratic Republic (in German DDR)
teaches wider lessons. She asks why some people had the civil courage to refuse
to cooperate with the Stasi, the DDR’s secret police. Schwan claims that civil
courage involves several essential aspects:
—we “intuitively associate civil courage with situations in which people
behave in a nonconformist manner, contradicting or acting counter to a majority of
the people who surround them.”
22
—These individuals “have the courage to follow their own reflections or
consciences” [but…]
—“Whereas courage can be shown and practiced by an isolated individual,
civil courage refers to a social and political frame regardless of whether it is actually
present or only imagined.”
—civil courage involves not mere “querulous” or stubborn noncooperation
for its own sake but involves “reflection,” thinking and responding to arguments.
“To accept the necessity of thinking and arguing means that we accept the
principal realm of arguments and thus, at least to a certain degree, the equality of
the participants who are engaged in the argument. We find therein an affinity
for a democratic regime.”44
There is an unresolved tension here between individualism and social
responsibility. Civil courage is by definition (rightly, it seems) nonconformist:
but not too nonconformist. An aristocratic, perhaps “querulous” defiance of
conformity as praised by Tocqueville45 could certainly ground noncooperation
with official injustice—but, being insufficiently rationalist, it might also threaten
noncooperation with official justice, which Schwan (who seems to follow
Habermas on most things) will not risk. But if a society is as morally and
politically rotten as the DDR was, communication will be too risky: the “social or
Schwan, “Civil Courage and Human Dignity,” 108-110 (emphases added)); extended quotation
on 109-110.
45
See Delba Winthrop, “Rights: A Point of Honor,” in Ken Masugi, ed., Interpreting Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991); for an extended treatment
see Sharon R. Krause, Liberalism with Honor (Harvard Univ. Press, 2002).
44
23
political frame” must be notional. One must apparently act on conscience but be
confident, somehow, that if there were a public sphere, arguments within it
would justify one’s conduct.
Schwan’s examples belie her theory: this will to hypothetical, reflective, and
egalitarian justification seems unnecessary for actual resistance and rarely
something resisters think about. Rescuers in the Nazi era “acted spontaneously”
(Schwan notes that this supports Aristotle’s theory of virtue but fails to note the
tension between this and Habermas); had “personal contacts and friendships”
with Jews; got their ideas of human dignity and equality not from argument but
from “mostly personal examples from their youth”; did not reflect upon possible
advantages or disadvantages but simply felt the impulse to help” (emphasis added);
felt “personal strength and they also felt strong”; had “an intense empathy with
and fidelity to their life principles”; prized the “secondary virtues” like
“reliability, punctuality, and friendliness” rather than obedience.46 Those who
turned down invitations from the Stasi were disproportionately female; were
relatively unimpressed by the promise of power; had a strong sense of autonomy
or independence; and “of course, belong[ed] to non-Communist ideological
groups that abhorred betrayal.”47
Thus it seems that the roots of civil courage lay in personal experience,
immediate empathy, a feeling of strength, habit, social ties that were proof
46
47
Schwan, 114.
Schwan, 115.
24
against official claims of political duty; and a tendency to prize private
helpfulness over public duty. To this extent, civil courage seems accidentally
well named: it stems from Tocquevillean roots, from the contingent and
differentiated experiences of civil society, not from the state and still less from
the public sphere of argument. Civil courage, on this preliminary account, works
by virtue of being antipolitical: to the extent that it is “civic” it defines citizenship
in ways that do not require either official authority or general agreement.
Refusing to join the Stasi is easier if one is deaf to the claims of faithful DDR
citizenship; casting a lone dissenting vote in the Senate or a faculty meeting is
easier if one doubts that the quintessential exemplars of rational argument and
deliberation have presumptive validity; even intervening to stop a crime on the
subway may be easier if one takes for granted that the police will never come.
If civil courage is antipolitical, it need not be antisocial. Making the
interesting suggestion that civil courage be viewed as akin to Robert Merton’s
study of nonconformity, Swedberg notes that Merton saw the nonconformist as
far from an a antinomian “deviant”: her or she appeals rather to a group other
than the one he refuses to conform to. It is with support from this outside
reference group that he is “prepared to accept, if not to welcome, the almost
certain and painful consequences of dissent.”48 Literature on Nazi-era protectors
of Jews often stresses similarly the links between civil courage and small gestures
Swedberg, 517, citing Merton, “Nonconformity as a Type of Reference Group Behavior,” Social
Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press, 1968): 411-422.
48
25
of resistance rooted in social, corporate, or bureaucratic rather than universal
loyalties: Bonhoeffer smuggled Jews not for himself but for German military
intelligence, which had traditionalist military but non-Nazi commitments49; one
study of a politically neutral aviation scientist in the Third Reich finds him
simultaneously working feverishly for aircraft production and (for that reason)
protesting at risk of the concentration camp and contrary to very clear Nazi
policies against dismissals of Jewish scientists.50 Here corporate and social
loyalties trumped—fortunately!—assertions of political duty. We must
remember that the latter were very strong and often took the form of exalting
duty and the public sphere over the pettiness of civil society and the squabbling
of interest-group politics.51
Civil courage is in fact often contrasted with outright revolutionary or
militant resistance and associated instead with Resistenz, a term brought into
historians’ debates by historian Martin Broszat, who means by it a willingness to
oppose the Nazis’ policies but not Nazism itself, “the many ‘small’ forms of civil
courage that could be expected from every contemporary as opposed to the main
stream of fearful adjustment or enthusiastic support for the regime” (emphasis
[cite tk: I have a poor source for this but need to check.]
Helmuth Trischler, “Self-mobilization or resistance? Aeronautical research and National
Socialism,” In Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker, eds. Science, Technology and National Socialism
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994): 72-87.
51
Fritz Stern, “National Socialism as Temptation,” in Dreams and Delusions (New York: Knopf,
1987): 147-91.
49
50
26
added).52 One summary of this school, associated with the Alltagsgeschichte
(history of the everyday) movement in German history, notes that
“The many small forms of civil courage” with which historians of
everyday life have been so concerned are attributed less to political beliefs
than to the pursuit of interest, the strength of local communities, and the
defense of cultural autonomy. Politics seem as irrelevant of Resistenz as to
daily life. 53
Lest all this seem insufficiently engaged or altruistic, one might note both that
open resistance was utterly futile and guaranteed not to teach general lessons
(due to lack of publicity) and that the Gestapo were few, and depended on
denunciations for the secret police system to function: mere lack of active
cooperation would have been enough to make the terror system largely
inoperable.54
Martin Broszat, “Resistenz und Widerstand: Zwischenbilanz eines Forschungsprojekts,” in
Herrschaft und Gesellschaft im Konflikt, vol. 4 of Martin Broszat, Elke, Fröhlich, and Anton
Grossmann, eds., Bayern in der NS Zeit (Munich and Vienna, 1981), p. 693, quoted by Michael
Geyer, “Resistance as Ongoing Project: Visions of Order, Obligations to Strangers, Struggles for
Civil Society,” Journal of Modern History 64, Supplement (December 1992): S223-4. Other
definitions of Resistenz, include: “morally neutral impenetrability or immunity rather than
actively motivated opposition”—Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 15 [full cite tk]; and most
concisely “individual acts of opposition coupled with a fundamental loyalty to authority”—
Renneberg and Walker, “Scientists, engineers and National Socialism,” in Renneberg and Walker,
op. cit., 20. Trischler at 73 notes that Resistenz is precisely not properly translated by English or
French “resistance,” résistance. “The concept of ‘Resistenz’ does not include systematic efforts for
overcoming the system. It is characterized instead by the rejection of and refusal to support the
system, the limitation and the containment of Nazi power and its claims, irrespective of the
reigning power or dominant interests involved. [More needs to be researched and said here.]
53
Mary Nolan, “The Historikerstriet and Social History,” New German Critique 44, Special Issue
(Spring-Summer 1988): 51-80 at 73. I must add that Nolan is quite critical of the Alltagsgeschichte
school for overvalorizing everyday life and ignoring the ways in which apathetic private
withdrawal actually served the Nazi regime. I have no quarrel with this critique, and would
merely note that to the extent that nothing substantial was done to frustrate the regime’s goals
and the Nazis were satisfied with the outcome, the moral critic may say that nobody in fact
showed civil courage. No one claims that the presence of daily life or civil society is sufficient for
civil courage.
54
Robert Gellately, “The Gestapo and German Society: Political Denunciation in the Gestapo
Case Files,” Journal of Modern History 60 (1988): 693.
52
27
On one level, then civil courage so understood has impeccable Kantian
credentials: if everyone in the Nazi regime or the DDR had cared enough to take
small risks in defiance of the regime for private reasons, neither regime could
have functioned. They would have become, like Eastern Europe in 1989, wouldbe or former totalitarian states, but failed ones. (In this context, Vaclav Havel’s
“The Power of the Powerless,” in praise of a shopkeeper’s refusal to post the
required political slogan in his window, fits perfectly with the account of civil
courage given here.55) On another level, civil courage is radically anti-Kantian,
since it relies not on the free public use of one’s reason but on either an
impossibility of appealing to that, or else a relative lack of concern as to what
public reason might conclude. Private and social sources of judgment are more
important. Schwan claims that civil courage “strengthens the institutions that
require support from the subjective behavior of citizens in order to remain alive
and strong”: one might only add that these institutions need not be, as Schwan
implies, either political or politically approved of.
This raises the question of whether we can call civil courage what pursues
immoral ends. Swedberg considers
the imaginary case of a racist who stands up in front of an audience,
which consists of convinced anti-racists, and launches into a violent
speech in favor of a race war. Does this represent and [sic] act of civil
courage or not?56
Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in John Keane, ed., The Power of the Powerless:
Citizens against the State in East-Central Europe (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985).
56
Swedberg, 522.
55
28
Swedberg answers no, justifying this by linking civil courage to the ideal of civil
society (as above) but endorsing a morally demanding conception of the latter
term.57 Schwan makes a very similar appeal: suicide attacks, however brave, lack
civil courage because
[t]he civitas—the civil community—that civil courage is to serve implies as
a supreme value the dignity of people, expressed in their right to selfdetermination; it requires nonconformism and the pondering of
arguments; it is used to strengthen the rule of law and thus to find ways of
compromise and it seeks to avoid violence.58
But a more honest and less question-begging answer would be that of course
civil courage can be evil, just as military courage can be found in soldiers fighting
a war of conquest. (And of course, in neither do people regard themselves as evil
or non-civil in the first person but on the contrary see themselves as good and
steadfast: we have a speech by Goebbels praising Hitler for having “the civil
courage in the face of nearly everyone else to express with iron logic what had to
be done.”59) The right response to the presence of each is the same: a desire to
foster greater courage—and, more important, proper tools and organizations—
on the side that is just. We must get used to the fact that justice is the only
personal virtue that tracks the metaphorical “virtue” of social institutions, as well
Swedberg, 523, citing somewhat out of context Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and
Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), xiii.
58
Schwan, 116.
59
Joseph Goebbels, "Der Führer als Redner," in Adolf Hitler. Bilder aus dem Leben des Führers
(Hamburg: Cigaretten/Bilderdienst [sic it seems] Hamburg/Bahrenfeld, 1936, pp. 27-34. Trans.
By Randall Bytwerk at http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ahspeak.htm; See also Dr.
[no first name given] Ellenbeck, Der Offizier als Führer im Kampf gegen die feindliche Propaganda
(OKW, January 1943), trans. Bytwerk at http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/officer.htm.
Both accessed 3 October 2006.
57
29
as the only social value for which the anthropomorphizing term “virtue” makes
much sense.60
IV. Circumstances of courage
Above I mentioned that the specialized and episodic virtue of warrior
courage seems more than episodic from a certain ideological or partisan
perspective, one which stresses the presence of a dangerous world full of
frightening enemies. The question here is one of assessing risks: necessarily an
ideological and partisan question because the level of risks like this is bound up
with controversial world-views about what human beings can foresee, what is in
our control, what kinds of social actors we trust or distrust, and which social and
political institutions are likely to protect us or threaten us.61 Just as warrior
courage seems to conservatives not a peripheral but a core virtue or something
close to it, civil courage can seem the same thing to certain political radicals. If
the regime of the United States amounts to fascism, the lessons of Bonhoeffer and
Institutions may be said to “allocate” and “judge” things—and in doing so their lack of human
feelings may be seen as an advantage, as with the Social Security system that churns out checks to
all on a list without knowing anything about them. But this lack of feeling makes courage
impossible, since courage is only called for when one feels fear, or does not feeling fear when
others might. Nor can institutions face death or physical harm, so even a standard of “objective”
fear makes no sense. To the extent that a political institution could be “fear” extinction, the
proper response would seem to be rational cowardice, as with the Supreme Court’s New Dealera “switch in time that saved Nine.”
61
For arguments on this point by scholars whose professional training might bias them towards
“rational” accounts of risk assessment, see Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture
(Univ. of California Press, 1982) and Aaron Wildavsky and Karl Dake, "Theories of Risk
Perception: Who Fears What and Why", Daedalus 119 No.4 (Fall 1990): 41-60.
60
30
Wallenberg will be of daily application. At some point, world-views will differ
so greatly that useful arguments cannot be joined. But theory can still illuminate
what is at stake and what is not. If the points above about Arendtian courage are
correct, radical, existential courage will be relevant only where politics poses
threats of a certain kind: threats of imminent political takeover by the forces of
evil, so that political action and initiative are absolutely imperative. Citizens’
alleged helplessness in the face of subtler forms of ideological domination make
entry into the public realm not courageous but nonsensical.
Civil courage will clearly be continually relevant if the government’s
principles are thoroughly evil: here almost any form of resistance grounded in
social or private allegiances or values will be better than doing one’s “political”
duty. In other sorts of regimes, the question is more difficult. If one could
smuggle evil into the definition of civil courage, there would be an easy answer:
civil courage would justify exactly as much resistance as the objective evil
demanded by the regime required, and no more. But if defining civil courage in
terms of its goodness is, as suggested above, a cheat, this answer will not work.
The would-be virtuous Tocquevillean may, as far as a more rational public
judgment is concerned, be a racist or worse.62 That is, the antipolitical and
prerational tendencies that distinguish civil courage from other phenomena and
explain its distinctive role also set it up in potential conflict with justice.
Cf. Simone Chambers and Jeffrey Kopstein, “Bad Civil Society,” Political Theory 29, No. 6
(December 2001): 837-865.
62
31
Two responses are possible. The first is that actions based on civil courage
must abjure violence—not because civil courage is inherently civil in the
normative sense, but because it is inherently civil in the Bismarck sense: civilian,
non-military, unofficial. Lacking a claim to legitimately command the state, such
actions cannot presume to challenge the state’s monopoly on legitimate force.63
The racist at the meeting may say racist things but he cannot declare a race war
because he lacks the authority to wage any war. Similarly, a suicide protestor
who had civil courage might set himself on fire, but if he blew up others he
would be a murderer, not because killing is always wrong but because only the
state may kill in pursuit of justice.64
We might still hope that the racist not speak at all, regardless of violence. It
would be better if, preferably out of a sense of justice or equality but if necessary
out of conformity or shame, he were to keep quiet and go along with the
prevailing norm against violent racism. This suggests that civil courage is
morally praiseworthy precisely to the extent that the relevant portion of civil
society embodies values “better” than those of the polity—and much will
depend on one’s assessment, a fundamentally ideological assessment, of how
often this is likely to be the case. Perhaps it is a good thing if a vigorous civil
society makes it always possible to dissent from public values and to weather the
Swedberg, 523, makes this argument as well but without distinguishing it from the one
mentioned above that defines the racist speech as non-“civil” by fiat.
64
A suicide bomber who attacked only military targets could be claiming to fight a just guerilla
war. This might actually be justifiable, but then it would be a form of warrior courage. Of course,
all the requirements and caveats of just war theory would apply in such cases, which have moved
beyond “civil” conditions.
63
32
resulting storm. (Surely the price of racism should not be a loss of all
employment.) But the desirable amount of civil courage, and of the civil
institutions and mores that might support it in particular cases, will essentially
be a mean between too much conformity and too little respect for values that
others after long debate have found ethically compelling. It is no secret that
those who resisted Hitler often had resisted Weimar as well: the values
embodying their dissent were in both cases aristocratic (or illiberally Catholic or
militaristic), not egalitarian.
Civil courage, on this view, may tend to replicate the usual questions of the
civil society argument and the larger debate on the private-public distinction.
Those who above all fear tyranny, or Tocqueville’s “despotism,” will want to
strengthen civil society and will fear the power of public opinion to force
conformity of moral views; those who above all fear inequality will be suspicious
of civil society and will welcome a uniform realm of equal rights in polity and
society alike. “Antitotalitarian” theories, often sympathetic to civil society’s elites
and more libertarian than egalitarian, clearly have greater sympathies with the
former position; Rawls, with the latter.65 The assertion that the justice of the state
Consider Rawls’ reassuring response to Susan Okin’s feminist critique of his polity-centered
justice: “A domain so-called, or a sphere of life, is not…something already given apart from
principles of justice. A domain is not a kind of space, or place, but rather is simply the result, or
upshot, of how the principles of political justice are applied, directly to the basic structure and
indirectly to the associations within it. … So the spheres of the political and the public, and of the
not-public and the private, take their shape from the content and application of the conception of
justice and its principles. If the so-called private sphere is a space alleged to be exempt from
justice, then there is no such thing” Justice as Fairness, 166 . To define domains in terms of justice
rather than the other way around is (quite purposely) to deny to civil society as such any possible
critical role as a source of moral action independent of what the society holds as publicly
65
33
is always radically imperfect and that one should heed the voices of injustice’s
continuing victims66 only has bite if one also accepts the implicit premise that
forces in civil society consistently provide hope for more justice than the state
guarantees, and that unleashing those forces is on balance good even if voices
calling for injustice—believing it just—are also encouraged as a result.
Conversely, the Rawlsian insistence on the difference between pluralism and
reasonable pluralism, only the former deserving respect and political
accommodation,67 implicitly reflects the opposite assumption: that a sufficiently
just public realm of reason will consistently do better than a politics that
encourages action based on the assumptions of individuals or social groups
whose mores and principles have never passed public tests.
Civil courage will be acknowledged by all as the least bad thing in truly dark
times, when liberal democracy’s legal mechanisms of opposition and dissent are
not available. The extent to which it is a good thing in times of fairly secure
liberty and aspirations to equality will be a controversial and partisan position
that divides people with different elemental concerns and fears within liberal
democracy—not a conviction, grounding a virtue, essential to it.
justified. In contrast, Arendt expresses regret that the old elites that once provided conceptual
and moral order in Europe can no longer play this role [cite tk], and Tocqueville’s Democracy in
America seeks in jealous associations, legal formality, and other mechanisms a substitute for the
absence of aristocrats in American democracy.
66
Examples in very different modes Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1990) and Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1993).
67
Rawls, Political Liberalism, 36, crediting Joshua Cohen and his “Moral Pluralism and Political
Consensus,” in David Copp and Jean Hampton, eds., The Idea of Democracy (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).
34