“Martin Luther King, Jr., Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Civil Disobedience Reconsidered”
On April 12, 1963, Civil Rights protestors affiliated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and led by, among others, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were arrested en masse in Birmingham, Alabama, in just one of many such protests throughout the turbulent decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Written during his subsequent confinement, and in response to public criticism of the “untimeliness” of civil rights actions by eight leading members of Birmingham’s clergy, King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” does more than merely memorialize that particular civil rights demonstration. It has come to be recognized as one of the great philosophical articulations of non-violent resistance in the history of political thought. In this masterful piece of political rhetoric King outlines his criteria for civil disobedience and anchors these justifications for passive resistance in a broad and complex tradition of natural law thinking.
Scholars have identified numerous intellectual sources for King’s arguments in the “Letter.” These include religious figures such as Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich among other Christian thinkers, and King’s central distinction between just and unjust laws explicitly references the Thomistic conception of natural law. Footnote #1 content: See, e.g., VINCENT W. LLOYD, On Martin Luther King, Jr., in BLACK NATURAL LAW (2016). For King’s references to these Christian figures, see MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., Letter from Birmingham Jail, in WHY WE CAN’T WAIT 91, 93–94 (2000) [hereinafter King’s Birmingham Letter.]. Likewise, King cites the Jewish theologian Martin Buber by way of analogizing segregation in terms of an “I-it” rather than an “I-thou” relationship. Footnote #2 content: KING, supra note 1, at 94. Besides these appeals to the Christian and Jewish traditions, other commentators have stressed the importance of non-Western influences, in particular the writings of Mahatmas Gandhi, whose strategy of passive resistance and “spiritual purification” did so much to inform King’s unique species of non-violent social activism. Footnote #3 content: For a more extensive discussion of this relationship, see Karuna Mantena, Showdown for Nonviolence: The Theory and Practice of Nonviolent Politics, in TO SHAPE A NEW WORLD: ESSAYS ON THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. 78 (Tommie Shelby & Brandon M. Terry eds., 2018).
More recently, however, archival materials have come to light that reveal an even wider range of philosophical sources which may have shaped King’s thinking on matters of law, social justice, and resistance. The publication of King’s collected papers offers a fascinating glimpse of his reading and teaching from the period immediately preceding the Birmingham protests. We now have King’s handwritten “outline” of a draft syllabus from a “Seminar in Social Philosophy” which he co-taught at Morehouse College in Atlanta in the Fall 1961 semester, for example, as well as his final examination questions for the seminar. Footnote #4 content: These two documents from the King Papers have recently been published online. See Justin Weinberg, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Social Philosophy Course, DAILY NOUS (Jan. 16, 2023, 7:15 AM), https://dailynous.com/2023/01/16/martin-luther-king-jr-s-social-philosophy-course [https://perma.cc/9VEA-QJFA]. Drawing on hints from these and other archival materials, as well as a close reading of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the following essay advances three main claims about King’s intellectual influences and the tradition of civil disobedience more broadly.
First, I propose a novel source of inspiration for King’s “Letter:” namely, the Genevan political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although Rousseau is never mentioned in the “Letter,” I want to explore similarities between King’s criteria for distinguishing between just and unjust laws and Rousseau’s treatment of law in the Social Contract. This comparison is apposite, I contend, insofar as King was teaching and thinking about Rousseau’s political philosophy less than a year and a half before the civil rights protests in Birmingham. While it may be impossible to demonstrate conclusively the extent of Rousseau’s influence, a consideration of King’s political philosophy in light of Rousseau’s seminal Social Contract brings to the foreground unique aspects of King’s “Letter.” Besides illuminating King’s understanding of natural law and civil disobedience, my second claim is that these comparisons draw attention to the flip-side of Rousseau’s defense of political obligation as well. Rather than an unqualified defender of patriotism, civic duty, and love of country, Rousseau acknowledges, as per King, that not all laws are just and legitimate. Even for Rousseau, as we will see, political obligation has its limits. Finally, and more broadly, King’s recourse to Rousseau reminds us of the extent to which doctrines of civil disobedience may be rooted not only in the substantive dimensions of natural law thinking, but also in certain formal criteria for law. For King, Rousseau, and many other “natural law” thinkers such as Lon Fuller, the legitimacy of law hinges as much on satisfying requisite conditions of generality, popularity, and non-arbitrariness as its substantive accordance with a higher moral law.
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