A Critical Assessment of Civil Disobedience in the View of Ancient Greek and Enlightenment Philosophers

Even if we take Sophocles’s writing about civil disobedience to be philosophically irrelevant, we cannot close our eyes to Socrates and his philosophical view of such disobedience. When he was wrongly sentenced to death by the Athenian government, he refused to listen to his friends, disobey the issued ruling, and escape from the prison, because he considered civil disobedience as contrary to virtues and social conventions. The view was, however, adamantly opposed by people who believed that laws are sometimes so unjust that it is necessary to resist them with civil disobedience as the last possible way. Given the two views about civil disobedience, the fundamental question is which act is admirable towards unjust laws: should we keep obeying unjust laws in any possible ways, or can we object to them and force the government to acquiesce to reforms? In this paper, we seek to answer this question by criticizing and considering arguments from Ancient Greece and the Enlightenment period, and then uncover their internal contradictions.