Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The introductory chapter situates the civil rights movement within the political theory literatures on civil disobedience—old and new—and traces the way that the debate has shifted since the mid-century (from a decidedly liberal framework to various democratic ones) as well as broadened (bringing attention to new movements and forms of action). Despite the important insights generated out of these shifts, the civil rights example remains at once central and marginal—operating as a key proving ground for the political purchase of liberal and deliberative theories but also attesting to their limits, without making the movement itself the subject of sustained analysis or theoretical interest. In contrast, drawing on—but also departing from—the insights of the critical historiography of the “long civil rights movement,” the introduction presents the case for returning to the civil rights movement as a site of (and source for) political theorizing about civil disobedience.