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Chargement... The Dissent of the Governed : A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyaltypar Stephen L. Carter
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Between loyalty and disobedience; between recognition of the law's authority and realization that the law is not always right: In America, this conflict is historic, with results as glorious as the mass protests of the civil rights movement and as inglorious as the armed violence of the militia movement. In an impassioned defense of dissent, Stephen L. Carter argues for the dialogue that negotiates this conflict and keeps democracy alive. His book portrays an America dying from a refusal to engage in such a dialogue, a polity where everybody speaks, but nobody listens. The Dissent of the Governed is an eloquent diagnosis of what ails the American body politic--the unwillingness of people in power to hear disagreement unless forced to--and a prescription for a new process of response. Carter examines the divided American political character on dissent, with special reference to religion, identifying it in unexpected places, with an eye toward amending it before it destroys our democracy. At the heart of this work is a rereading of the Declaration of Independence that puts dissent, not consent, at the center of the question of the legitimacy of democratic government. Carter warns that our liberal constitutional ethos--the tendency to assume that the nation must everywhere be morally the same--pressures citizens to be other than themselves when being themselves would lead to disobedience. This tendency, he argues, is particularly hard on religious citizens, whose notion of community may be quite different from that of the sovereign majority of citizens. His book makes a powerful case for the autonomy of communities--especially but not exclusively religious--into which democratic citizens organize themselves as a condition for dissent, dialogue, and independence. With reference to a number of cases, Carter shows how disobedience is sometimes necessary to the heartbeat of our democracy--and how the distinction between challenging accepted norms and challenging the sovereign itself, a distinction crucial to the Declaration of Independence, must be kept alive if Americans are to progress and prosper as a nation. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)323.6Social sciences Political Science Civil and political rights CitizenshipClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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I cannot quite foresee any of that happening, and he even kind of walks-back his statements on things like that, saying "this is just a scenario" or "a possibility" "I'm not advocating for this, but it could be done this way", and it all just sounds -wishy-washy- then because of that. He wants to give a 'legal idea' but then backs away from it.
The entire treatise is very heavily biased towards Christianity, and in a Black Protestant kind of way. And this just kind of muddles the points, and clearly takes away from how I viewed what this was going to be about given the title. Obviously religion was going to factor into it, but didn't think it'd be the complete deciding factor to all things related to disobedience in the meditations/lectures/treatise. I'm a bit disappointed that the main emphasis was treating the sovereign of religion over the sovereign of the government, and therefore the disobedience comes from placing God (Christian God more or less due to his biased) above that of Government, and obeying God over that of Government. He discusses peyote, polygamy, etc as examples of things that is disobedient to Government but not to God; but doesn't quite see the slippery slope of allowing religion to trump laws of the state. Namely, if I have a religion X that says X is good, that I should do X even though X could be harmful to myself, others, to my mentality, to others mentality, or even to the state/environment itself. Where do you draw the line then on that?
I think there is some valid points and some well thought out thoughts... but the biased nature of the piece and the overall lacking problems of thought really hurts this. ( )