Disobedience and Democracy was published by Random House in 1968, in direct response to Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas’s slim book Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience (1968), which argued that while peaceful protest was legitimate, civil disobedience was not — that citizens in a democracy had an absolute obligation to obey the law, even unjust laws, because the democratic process provided legal means of change.
Zinn’s response is methodical and devastating. He takes Fortas’s arguments one by one and dismantles them: the democratic process is not equally accessible to all citizens; legal channels are often deliberately obstructed; the distinction between “peaceful protest” and “civil disobedience” is artificial; and the history of American reform shows that every significant advance — abolition, labor rights, women’s suffrage, civil rights — was achieved through illegal action, not patient petition.
The book is short (under 150 pages) but dense with argument. It remains one of the clearest philosophical justifications of civil disobedience in the American tradition — more systematic than Thoreau, more politically engaged than Rawls, and grounded in the concrete experience of the civil rights and antiwar movements rather than abstract principle.
Collecting Disobedience and Democracy
First edition (Random House, New York, 1968): Paperback original (Vintage Books imprint).
Market values:
- First edition, very good: $20–$50
- Signed copies: $75–$200