Article

Theory, Culture & Society

2016, Vol. 33(6) 51–73
Philosophy against and ! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276416651976

Kant, Thoreau and the tcs.sagepub.com

Revolutionary Spectator
Avram Alpert
Rutgers University

Abstract
In this article, the author argues that the works of Immanuel Kant and Henry David
Thoreau can help reframe current political discussions about violence and nonvio-
lence within revolutionary movements. For both of them, the means and ends of
political change must coincide. Since they seek a nonviolent state of affairs, each
argues against violent political change. However, they are also concerned to articu-
late a relationship between armed and unarmed struggle. After all, Kant and Thoreau
worked to find what was positive in violent acts: the French Revolution and John
Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, respectively. They suggest that one of the ethical acts
of revolutionary nonviolence is the sympathetic spectatorship of comrades in strug-
gle who have chosen violent means. This opens up a theory of revolutionary non-
violence as a dual injunction to remain resolutely opposed to violence, but also to be
capable of finding within violent acts a deeper desire for the end of violence.

Keywords
Kant, nonviolence, peace, political philosophy, revolutionary movement, Thoreau,
violence

If a person takes a position of nonviolence, how should they respond to

acts of violence committed by those on the same side of their struggle?
This fraught question recurs throughout history. It was, for example, a
concern for Immanuel Kant when he witnessed the French Revolution,
whose democratic aims he supported, but whose violent means of usurp-
ing power he deplored. It was also a point of contention for the peaceful
Abolitionist movement in the United States after John Brown’s 1859
anti-slavery raid on a military arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
Witnesses to that event, including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo

Corresponding author: Avram Alpert. Email: avram.alpert@rutgers.edu

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
52 Theory, Culture & Society 33(6)

Emerson, and William Lloyd Garrison, had to square their position

against violence with support for Brown’s aim of ending slavery. Later
activists against violence, including Martin Luther King and nonviolent
protestors around the world today, have similarly asked themselves how
to maintain their position while simultaneously bearing witness to the
meaning of violent acts committed by those on the same side of their
struggle.
For a nonviolent person to praise a violent act would seem to devolve
the position of nonviolence into contradiction and hypocrisy. The aim of
this article is to argue that this is not the case. One can meaningfully hold
a steadfast position against violence for one’s self, while also bearing
witness as a spectator to acts of violence by others. Tracing this position
back to Kant’s writings on the French Revolution and Thoreau’s essay
on John Brown, I will call this the ‘tradition of the nonviolent revolu-
tionary spectator’. This tradition aims to reduce the violence of life not
only by refusing to commit violent acts, but also by making a community
of nonviolent spectators who bear witness to the use of violence to end
oppression and exploitation.
The claim made by those in this tradition is that political actors cannot
separate means from ends. If the goal is to end violence (structural as well
as physical), then violence cannot be used in the political process.1
Instead, one pursues what Emerson (1904: 168) called the ‘activity’ of
peace: petitioning, demonstrating, organizing, and other creative forms
of resistance for transformation. The trouble arises at moments in history
when those struggling against the violence of colonialism, slavery, or
other forms of oppression and exploitation engage in violent responses
themselves, such as the French Revolution or Brown’s raid. In such
instances, the tradition of nonviolent revolutionary spectatorship
responds neither by condemning violence nor by calling it necessary,
but rather by witnessing it in an act of what can be called ‘sympathetic
withholding’ (Kateb, 1995: 4). The aim is to explain why violence hap-
pened (how it was created by a previous violence or oppression), while
simultaneously refraining from assenting to the morality of reactive vio-
lence itself. The nonviolent spectator will then witness, speak, and write
about the violent acts of those whose goals they share in such a way as to
show their underlying struggle for peace. This witnessing only works
through alliance, since it is only by maintaining the activity of nonvio-
lence – by being at once sympathetic to the act and withholding from
committing the act oneself – that this position does not fall into a cynical
justification of violent acts.
Furthermore, one cannot affirm any violent act as possibly leading to
peace, since this is simply just war theory. The point for this tradition is
that there is no such thing as just war. Only those acts which align
themselves with the overarching agenda of ending violence are deemed
worthy of witness by this tradition.2 Understanding why nonviolent
Alpert 53

actors can bear witness in this way requires understanding what nonvio-
lence means. Indeed, the word itself may create some confusion, since
what we are discussing here is not so much avoiding violence as negating
it. Gandhi (2008a; 2008b) always stressed that himsa is the condition of
violence inherent in the universe. Ahimsa is an (according to him) uniquely
human capacity to act nonviolently (2008a: 54; 2008b: 56). The a- prefix in
Sanskrit, as in Greek, functions as a negation, so we could better translate
this word as anti-violence. This is central for nonviolent revolutionary
spectators: they are not simply avoiding acts of strife; they seek, as part
of their revolutionary activity, to end the continual recourse to acts of
political violence, or what Judith Butler (2009: 184) has called ‘the frames
by which war is wrought time and again’. Since, as Gandhi notes, himsa is
irremovable from natural cycles of birth and decay, ahimsa is an infinite
task of negation. Nonviolent spectators cannot, therefore, disapprove of
all violence, since this is akin to disapproving of the universe as such.
Nevertheless, they commit themselves to ending as much human-pro-
duced violence as possible. To do so they not only refrain from commit-
ting acts of violence; they also, following Butler, attempt to change the
very frames of analysis that lead to such acts.
Revolutionary spectators must remain vigilant that they do not merely
stand idly by and watch violence. Their spectatorship is not a privileged
position that can only be taken by those not immediately affected by the
ongoing violence of oppression. We can recall here Gandhi’s distinction
between two kinds of resistance: duragraha, ‘passive resistance of the
weak’, and satyagraha, ‘active resistance of the strong’ (cited in
Dalton, 1993: 135). Spectators and witnesses must be active resistors;
they must be willing to put their own reputation and well-being on the
line in speaking out for a cause.3 There is also good empirical evidence to
suggest that nonviolent activities are both as meaningful and as effective
(if not more so) as violent activities (Chenoweth and Stephan, 2012;
Scott, 1985; Sharp, 1973). This kind of active spectatorship, then, is
not a ‘clean hands’ position, but an efficacious and necessary part of
political struggle.
I call these activities a ‘tradition’ in order to invoke Jeffrey Stout’s
(2004: 3) definition of the term as something that

inculcates certain habits of reasoning, certain attitudes toward

deference and authority in political discussion, and love for certain
goods and virtues, as well as a disposition to respond to certain
types of actions, events, or persons with admiration, pity, or horror.

The purpose of arguing for nonviolence is precisely to establish the kind

of political rationality that leads one to choose peace over war, creative
over violent confrontation, and universal freedom from violence as a
deeply cherished value that must be embodied as a process and not
54 Theory, Culture & Society 33(6)

just claimed as a goal. But, and this is the key point, it disposes one to
respond to violent events with more than ‘horror’: while one continues to
express disdain for violence, one also expresses sympathy for the under-
lying cause of ending violence.
This tradition has not been fully articulated in part because most
theoretical writings have kept nonviolence and violence strictly separate.
Either one commits to refraining from violence regardless of the opposi-
tion’s actions, or one commits to an armed struggle in order to achieve
one’s stated aims. But the actual history of political struggle, with its
multiplicity of associated partisans, shows no such binary. Those against
violence and those who praise it are often fighting for the same cause.
Riots, destruction of property, and a general threat of violence were part
of the story of even classically nonviolent campaigns, including Indian
Independence, Ghanaian Independence, and the US Civil Rights
Movement. And one can equally point to the existence of peaceful
demonstrations, civil disobedience, and other nonviolent tactics along-
side acts of organized political violence, as in, for example, the struggle
against apartheid, the contemporary Palestinian movement, and anti-
police brutality campaigns in the US today (Cobb, 2014; Hallward and
Norman, 2015: 23–26). This article aims to develop a theoretical stance
that enables nonviolent revolutionaries in such causes to condemn vio-
lence while still remaining part of a broader struggle.
In what follows, I explore how the dual injunction of nonviolence and
spectatorship plays out, primarily in the writings of Kant and Thoreau.
Kant argues that there is a means–end relation in politics, and that the
condition of perpetual peace can be achieved only by peaceful acts. He
suggests that the best way to create the conditions of peace is the estab-
lishment of the modern, constitutional state as an impartial arbiter
between competing claims. This position leads him into a double bind:
the state must be protected in order to ensure peace, but the state must be
resisted if it acts violently. Kant never fully resolves this contradiction,
but I argue that he initiates this tradition because he interrelates two key
points: first, that there may be nonviolent ways to resist the state other
than a violent revolution against it; second, and more important here,
that when a nonviolent spectator cheers violence against an oppressive
state, this is itself part of the creation of a new, peaceful community.
Thoreau differed from Kant in both historical vantage (he lived after
the birth of modern social movements) and political temperament (he
believed in a communitarian anarchism that could secure peace without
need of the state). Still, they share the basic goal of establishing peace and
bearing witness to specific acts of violence. By writing about his refusal to
pay war taxes for the American war on Mexico in 1848, Thoreau demon-
strated that there were other modes of resistance than violence against
the state. Moreover, he exposed the lie that one could be nonviolent
simply by not committing violent acts. Paying a war tax, or a tax to
Alpert 55

uphold the slave state, Thoreau maintained, is no better than holding

slaves or fighting a war oneself. A decade later, after Brown’s raid,
Thoreau faced Kant’s problem: what to do when someone also opposed
to the violence of slavery uses violence to end it. Thoreau answered as
Kant did: continue to refrain from violence, while simultaneously witnes-
sing the act and using it to create a new and growing community of
nonviolent actors. Since Kant’s remarks on the French Revolution are
somewhat brief, Thoreau’s essay also provides occasion for a more exten-
sive analysis of how, precisely, such an act of witnessing works. In the
concluding section, I continue to build this tradition through an analysis
of two late speeches by Martin Luther King, and consider how his words
have been taken up by protestors against political violence in the United
States today.

Kant on the Double Bind of Resistance and the Justification

of Revolutionary Nonviolence
It might seem strange to enlist Immanuel Kant for this argument. After
all, there is almost universal dismay expressed when Kant’s readers turn
to his writings on revolution and resistance (Beck, 1971; Korsgaard,
1997; Rawls, 1969). As is well known, Kant forbade, on moral grounds,
the right of subjects to coercively rebel against the state. He believed that
even in the case of intolerable and unjust governments the people had no
right to use force against state authority. However, I will suggest that
Kant’s writings on these topics show a mind struggling to find the lan-
guage in which to defend a concept of revolutionary nonviolence. Kant is
as committed to the development of a perpetual peace for all humanity as
he is to the process by which that peace is achieved. Hence he will say,
when he forbids violent revolution even in order to attain basic human
rights, ‘These rights, however, always remain an idea which can be ful-
filled only on condition that the means employed to do so are compatible
with morality’ (Kant, 1970: 7:87n/184n, original emphasis).4 Like
Thoreau, Kant believed that ‘What I have to do is to see . . . that I do
not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn’ (Thoreau, 1992: 233).
This does not mean that calls to resistance disappear from Kant’s
writings. He once wrote, for example: ‘The proposition, “We ought to
obey God rather than men”, means only that when human beings com-
mand something that is evil in itself (directly opposed to the ethical law),
we may not, and ought not, obey them’ (Kant, 1998: 6:99n/110n).5
If Kant admits of this division, and of this duty not to obey unethical
human laws, how do we reconcile this with his remarks on the generic
duty to obey? He is unequivocal about the illegality of resistance: ‘this
prohibition is unconditional, so that even if that power or its agent, the
head of state, has gone so far as to violate the original contract . . . a
subject is still not permitted any resistance by way of counteracting
56 Theory, Culture & Society 33(6)

force’ (Kant, 1996a: 8:300/298, original emphasis). Kant is clear about

the reason why: the people do not have the right to determine how the
constitution is to be judged. ‘For suppose that the people can so judge,
and indeed contrary to the judgment of the actual head of state; who is to
decide on which side the right is?’ (8:300/299). In essence, if the people
can call into question the head of state, but the job of the head of state is
to be the final arbiter of right, then who can mediate this dispute?
Here Kant follows social contract theory, with some revision. To
understand the contract, Kant argues, we need to look to its logical
rather than its historical emergence (1996a: 8:297/296–297). As Kant
understands it, the mythical time before the original contract was a law-
less time. It was not a time in which everyone was always fighting, as he
read Hobbes as saying, but rather a condition in which anyone at any
moment could be fighting (Kant, 1998: 6:97n/108).6 Moreover, it was a
moment in which no authority could step in and mediate the dispute.
Hence, ‘before a public lawful condition is established individual human
beings, peoples and states can never be secure against violence from one
another’ (Kant, 1996b: 6:312/456, see also Kant, 1996c: 8:349/322).7 This
is absolutely essential to his theory: the purpose of the original contract is
to end violence. Kant calls this a condition of ‘distributive justice’, since in
it, the genetic distribution of might (violence) can be reorganized into the
purposive distribution of right (justice) (6:307/451–452).
This idea forms the background of Kant’s rejection of the right to
resistance as part of his argument for nonviolence. He believes that the
whole purpose of the sovereign power is that it establishes norms by
which people can appeal against each other’s unjust actions. Even
though we may not like what a sovereign does, we still need to acknowl-
edge that it is only because of the contract that we can have a claim to
rights at all: ‘a rightful condition is possible only by submission to its
general legislative will’. Hence:

The reason a people has a duty to put up with even what is held to
be an unbearable abuse of supreme authority is that its resistance to
the highest legislation can never be regarded as other than contrary
to law, and indeed as abolishing the entire legal constitution. (Kant,
1996b: 6:320/463)

But it is precisely here that we enter into the first double bind of Kant’s
politics. We ought not to obey commands that go against morality.
However, we must obey any command of the sovereign. This is the
double bind of nonviolent politics: it must square means with ends, but
in so doing it may allow a situation of violence to continue.
Kant may be quietly offering a way out. For what we are being told is
not in fact that we must obey, but only that we cannot coercively, or
violently, resist. Were we to do so, we would be invalidating the condition
Alpert 57

of the social contract wherein I have given up my right to coerce the

highest authority so that society may generally gain the possibility of
rights. Hence, a few pages later, Kant notes that we have only given
up our right ‘to coerce the government’. A people is still allowed to
use ‘negative resistance, that is, a refusal of the people (in parliament)
to accede to every demand the government puts forth as necessary for
administering the state’ (Kant, 1996b: 6:322/465, original emphases).
Again, the whole purpose of the social contract is to end violence. This
simply cannot be done when the legality of violence is shared equally
among a population with unequal might. Kant’s definition of the state is
thus not so different from Max Weber’s: ‘a human community that
(successfully) claims the monopoly of legitimate use of physical force
within a given territory’ (Weber, 1958: 78, original emphasis). But this
monopoly in Kant’s sense of things is given only so that the state may use
coercion to end the coercion of those who would inhibit freedom.
(Rejecting the idea that anyone, state or otherwise, has a right to violence
will become essential to the development of this tradition.)
Here another double bind arises: if the role of the state is to end
violence, what is a people to do when the state itself is violent? Since
their aim is to go beyond violence, they cannot use violence. The indivi-
dual has no more of a right to declare war on the state than the state has
to declare war on another nation or its own people:

The concept of the right of nations as that of the right to go to war

is, strictly speaking, unintelligible (since it is supposed to be a right
to determine what is right not by universally valid external laws
limiting the freedom of each but by unilateral maxims of force).
(Kant, 1996c: 8:356–7/328, original emphasis)

A ‘right to go to war’ – by either a nation or an individual – thus contra-

dicts the very notion of right, which is supposed to use principle before
violence. Kant’s solution is that all a people can do is to maintain the
purpose of the state – to end violence – even when the state fails to do so.8
In the citation above, he relegates this possibility to the actions of parlia-
ment, which may be a philosophical position derived from his historical
moment. After all, Kant wrote at a time when the idea of collective
political action by organized citizens in the form of social movements
was just beginning (Tilly, 2004). If Kant failed to see the meaningfulness
of the ‘primitive rebels’ (Hobsbawm, 1965) around him, he was not
alone. By 1835, John Stuart Mill would still write: ‘The capacity of
cooperation for a common purpose, heretofore a monopolized instru-
ment of power in the hands of the upper classes, is now a formidable one
in those of the lowest’ (cited in Arendt, 1972: 97).9
However, there is at least one moment in Kant’s corpus when he
explicitly suggests that one not only can but ought to non-coercively
58 Theory, Culture & Society 33(6)

resist the demands of the sovereign on moral grounds. It comes in an

example offered near the end of the Critique of Practical Reason. There
Kant relates the situation of an ‘honest man whom someone wants to
induce to join the calumniators of an innocent but otherwise powerless
person (say, Anne Boleyn, accused by Henry VIII of England)’. This
honest man refuses to do so, even though this refusal sends him through
a Job-like scenario of losing friends, family, and home (Kant, 1996d: 5:
155–156/264–265). Thus, hidden within an example about the moral law,
Kant allows himself to advocate for nonviolent disobedience. This
thought will never find full expression in his writings – either because
of his fear of censorship or because of his historical conjuncture – but its
appearance shows the philosophical justification for nonviolent disobe-
dience latent in his works.

From Passive to Active Resistance: Nonviolent

Disobedience and the Spectatorship of Violence in Kant’s
Writing on the French Revolution
Although Kant was never so bold, or never even conceived of a complete
notion of active resistance, we know the distinction between passive and
active quite well from his philosophy. We have, in the Metaphysics of
Morals, for instance, the injunction that no law should be passed which
does not correspond ‘to this freedom, namely that anyone can work his
way up from this passive condition to an active one’ (Kant, 1996b: 6:315/
459). In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant also uses the dis-
tinction to discuss obedience to government. Speaking of the prohibition
against graven images, Kant says there is ‘no more sublime passage in the
Jewish Book of the Law’ (Kant, 2000: 5:274/156), because the prohibi-
tion extinguishes the senses but allows the pure idea of morality to
remain. Governments, he then says, tend to encourage religion to
break this prohibition, since looking at such images can

relieve the subject of the bother but at the same time also of the
capacity to extend the powers of his soul beyond the limits that are
arbitrarily set for him and by means of which, as merely passive, he
can more easily be dealt with. (5:275/156).

Later in the text he gives us his maxims of reason, one of which is that
reason should never be passive, since this passivity means we need to be
led by others, are subject to prejudices, and hence not autonomous
(5:294–295/174–175). Since it is our duty to be active subjects, and
since it is our duty to be nonviolent, and since it is our duty to preserve
a form of governance that can dispel violence, we must obey the true
purpose of that mode of governance, which is always to end violence.
Alpert 59

This distinction between active and passive also grounds his position
on hope in his critiques of the notions of grace and providence in Religion
Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. For Kant, grace cannot provide a
ground for our actions or expectations. We ought to concern ourselves
with what must be done and not believe that ‘the good (the morally
good) is not of our doing, but that of another being’ (Kant, 1998:
6:53/73). Similarly, Kant rejects the exploration of our ‘private moral
affairs’ while we ‘entrust to a higher wisdom the whole concern of the
human race’ (6:100/11). Kant’s concern is that such passivity with regard
to our actions, whether or not Providence does its job, vitiates our duty
to be active, moral subjects. Without such activity, we lose hope: ‘Each
must, on the contrary, so conduct himself as if everything depended on
him. Only on this condition may he hope that a higher wisdom will
provide the fulfilment of his well-intentioned effort’ (6:100/111, emphasis
added). Only through dutiful activity is hope possible.
These concepts help establish Kant’s position in his remarks on the
French Revolution. In the ‘Contest of Faculties’, he finds his hope not
with the active revolutionaries, but with the onlookers – the seemingly
passive spectators. Does this not contradict his position? Are these
people not placing their hope in the actions of others? But here we
must remember what exactly activity means. It does not necessarily
mean doing something. It refers rather to the free, unprejudiced use of
our reason, and the possible actions or non-actions (disobedience) that
follow from that. What Kant sees in the French Revolution is that ‘the
mass of men’ (in Thoreau’s phrase) are responding positively to an
attempt to overthrow a corrupt regime. He does not believe – since he
must uphold the necessity of nonviolence – that this action is morally
right. But he does believe that those who watch the revolution are parti-
cipating in something other than violent action. ‘Their reaction (because
of its universality) proves that mankind as a whole shares a certain
character in common, and it also proves (because of its disinterestedness)
that man has a moral character, or at least the makings of one’ (Kant,
1970: 7:85/182). It is no wonder reading such passages that Hannah
Arendt turned to Kant’s aesthetic philosophy in order to find his politics.
What Kant describes here is no less than the sensis communis which
shows the possibility of universally valid judgments. Thus the activity
of the onlookers is the making of the political community. They are not
passively and prejudicially condemning the revolution as their leaders
and countrymen are. They are actively witnessing. As Arendt (1962: 63)
puts it, ‘The spectator is not involved in the act, but he is always
involved with fellow spectators.’ They are forming a world community
of spectators through their sympathetic withholding – by cheering a
revolution during which they do not commit acts of violence.
But this involvement is only part of what makes the spectator active.
What makes Kant’s remarks significant is that they are Kant’s – not
60 Theory, Culture & Society 33(6)

because he is an important thinker, but because he has proven himself to

be someone concerned with creating the social and political foundations
of peace and justice. He can enact sympathetic withholding because he
has previously established the credentials for his sympathy in his writ-
ings. To simply cheer the revolution without aligning one’s self with
nonviolence would be to escape into a ‘clean hands’ position. And to
deplore the revolution because of its violence would refuse the need of
transforming what Butler (2009) calls the frames of politics. Kant accom-
plishes something different here: he maintains the importance of negating
violence as the ultimate political horizon, while at the same time creating
a community of witnesses in his ‘city of words’ (Cavell, 1990: 7–8).
His spectatorship thus brings the violent activity within the folds of the
nonviolent community.
Kant continues the citation above, writing: ‘And this does not merely
allow us to hope for human improvement; it is already a form of
improvement itself, in so far as its influence is strong enough for the
present’ (Kant, 1970: 7:85/182). Kant reminds us here that our percep-
tions of the world are as much a part of our politics as our actions. The
French Revolution has made possible a new way of thinking about
equality, liberty, and governance, and, in so doing, has changed what
kinds of political activities will be possible in the future. Acting as a
spectator, Kant’s aim is to show how the revolution is creating the pos-
sibility of a nonviolent future.10 What Kant leaves unsettled still is the
question of what kinds of political activity beyond parliament and revo-
lution are also part of these acts of creation.

Nonviolent Action by Other Means: Thoreau’s Resistance

Central to the tradition of nonviolent revolutionary spectatorship is the
claim that the nonviolent partisan be an active participant in the struggle.
In Kant, this was only possible in the form of parliamentary resistance.
Thoreau, who believed in the potential of different forms of the social
contract, and who was an active participant in revolutionary social
movements against the slave state, was able to envision other modes
(Cooney, 1995: 136). The difference between Kant and Thoreau created
in part by this historical change can be seen in their respective positions
on war taxes.
The question of the right to refuse paying war taxes is one of the most
perplexing moments in Kant’s theory of obedience. We can see here just
how much Kant was struggling for a language and method of disobe-
dience to get around the double bind produced by his opposition to both
violence and resistance. (It is important here to separate out the war tax
from taxes as such, since it is the right of war itself that is being called into
question.) Kant’s position on a war tax is rather complicated, but can be
summarized as follows: he does not believe the state should be able to go
Alpert 61

to war without the consent of the people, but he never says the people
have a right to refuse to pay for the war. Indeed, he seems to say that the
citizens have a duty to pay for the war regardless of the war’s legality
(Kant, 1996a: 8:311/308).
Kant’s concern is that, by refusing to pay taxes, the people are threa-
tening the dissolution of the state, which, again, he views as the only
means of ending violence. Thoreau, with his knowledge of a different
kind of political activity than coup d’e´tat or parliament, provides a dif-
ferent answer. Although Thoreau (1992: 229) calls for revolution, he
explicitly does not start one in the sense of a coup d’e´tat: ‘In fact, I quietly
declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make what
use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases’ (p. 241,
emphasis added). Now we might read this as just the sort of hypocrisy
Kant is trying to avoid. But Thoreau is being earnest – his war is with the
state, not on it. He is actively engaged with the world around him, since
his aim is to transform it. And he will continue to take advantage of it
because he is, de facto, associated with it. As Stanley Cavell (1992: 84)
writes in his brief commentary on the essay, ‘as things stand, one cannot
but choose to serve the state.’
The question for Thoreau (1992) then is not whether or not he should
withdraw from the state, but how he should serve it. ‘The mass of men
serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their
bodies . . . Others serve the State chiefly with their heads.’ Thoreau will
be neither of these. ‘A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers
in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also,
and so necessarily resist it for the most part’ (p. 228, original emphasis).
Note that Thoreau says ‘with their consciences also’, again signifying that
one cannot help but be part of the state as body and mind. The question,
then, is how to serve the state conscientiously. In order to preserve the
purpose of the state – to end violence – he must resist it for the most part:

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that
would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay
them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent
blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any
such is possible. If the tax-gatherer . . . asks me, as one has done, ‘But
what shall I do?’ my answer is, ‘If you really wish to do any thing,
resign your office’. When the subject has refused allegiance, and the
officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.
(p. 235, emphasis added)

Kant’s concern is that we cannot perform any action which calls the state
into question, for in so doing we endanger the social contract that can
end violence. But what is to be done when the state is the primary
promoter of violence? Thoreau is quite explicit: we can end the violence,
62 Theory, Culture & Society 33(6)

preserve the purpose of government, and enact a ‘peaceable revolution’.

All we need is for the officer of the state to resign, and for the citizen to
refuse to pay for the war.
This is achieved by the bonding together of citizens into a collective
action such as the refusal to pay taxes.11 This solution itself will be
relevant in some historical contexts and not in others. The aim for the
tradition is not to repeat Thoreau’s actions so much as his creative dis-
position. In this instance, his refusal does not end the social contract, and
he does not show violent resistance. He simply refuses to obey those
commands that continue to create the conditions of violence. And
because Thoreau has this vision of citizens who can hold power together,
he need not, as Kant does, grant the legitimacy of coercion to the state.
He can call on his fellow citizens to serve the social contract, not neces-
sarily the liberal state, with conscience. While this opens the possibility
of an active nonviolent politics, it does not yet show how Thoreau
solved the question of how to respond to those who opposed slavery
with violent actions.

Thoreau’s Witnessing
In the days following Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Thoreau became
especially concerned with newspaper representations of Brown’s life and
cause. He aimed to ‘do my part to correct the tone and the statements of
the newspapers, and of my countrymen generally’. Thoreau’s aim is to
transform public consciousness so that Brown’s acts are understood
within the context of ending the terrible violence of slavery. To do so,
he will express his ‘sympathy’ and ‘admiration’, even though he will not
pick up arms himself (Thoreau, 1950: 683). His goal, in other words, is
not to spur another to act as Brown has, but to create a community of
conscience founded on Brown’s actions. Thoreau views his task as a
nonviolent spectator as showing how Brown’s violent actions were
aimed against violence. This may again appear as a contradiction, or
as a cynical act, but a close reading of Thoreau’s essay reveals that he
never once calls on his listeners to become violent. (In fact, in the closing
lines, he argues against it.) Rather, he insists that they form a community
of spectators whose witnessing of justice can transform the nation away
from the everyday violence of slavery.
This claim is not uncontroversial among readers of Thoreau’s essay.
Thoreau (1950: 702) writes: ‘I do not wish to kill or to be killed’, but
adds: ‘I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by
me unavoidable.’ The standard reading of this passage is that he here
approves the use of violence, and renders his position on nonviolence
equivocal (for example, Turner, 2005: 461). However, we can understand
Thoreau’s speaking of a time when he might have to kill in several ways,
none of which necessarily mean that he is preparing to take up arms in a
Alpert 63

revolutionary fight. He might simply, for instance, be referring to an

extreme case of self-defense. And we might also understand it with
another reference to Gandhi, who once wrote: ‘Nonviolence cannot be
taught to a person who fears to die and has no power of resistance’
(Gandhi, 1969: 103). The point of nonviolence for Gandhi was that it
had to be a choice to end violence, not an action taken from cowardice or
incapacity. In this statement, Thoreau may be affirming that he does not
fear death, and he does have the power of violent resistance, though he is
choosing not to use it.
As such, Thoreau calls not for violence, but rather a critique of pop-
ular memory. He is concerned that current writings about Brown make
him into an isolated figure and madman, whereas he is in fact being
cheered by his compatriots:

The newspapers seem to ignore, or perhaps are really ignorant of

the fact, that there are at least as many as two or three individuals to
a town throughout the North who think much as the present
speaker does about him and his enterprise. I do not hesitate to
say that they are an important and growing party . . . [Those writing
against Brown] are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the
fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the
free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had
succeeded. (Thoreau, 1950: 688–689)

Thoreau is claiming that there is a community of spectators who, even

if they abhor violence, hope for Brown’s success. Moreover, through his
witnessing, he is enabling these spectators to see the existence of this
community themselves. They no longer have to hide their opinions
from others in the fear of rebuke or censure. They can attach themselves
to Thoreau’s city of words. In fact, Thoreau, along with other dissenters
who wrote about Brown, was largely successful in transforming the
mainstream interpretation of the event (Beck, 2009).
Part of what this meant was changing Brown’s image from cold-
blooded criminal to the creator of a new kind of politics. ‘What sort of
violence is that’, Thoreau (1950: 703) asks, ‘which is encouraged, not by
soldiers, but by peaceable citizens, not so much by laymen as by ministers
of the Gospel, not so much by the fighting sects as by the Quakers, and
not so much by Quaker men as by Quaker women?’ (emphasis added). It
is the violence that these people have morally chosen not to do them-
selves, but which they cheer others for. Thus, Thoreau twice calls
Brown’s actions ‘a sublime spectacle’ which it is our duty to ‘recognize’
(pp. 695, 701). This recognition is not individual but communal. Thoreau
asks who Brown’s ‘constituents’ were, and he answers that it is anyone
who believes that the only legitimate government is that which ‘estab-
lishes justice’ (pp. 697, 699). These constituents unite in their desire for
64 Theory, Culture & Society 33(6)

justice, in their memorializing Brown, and in their refusal of vengeance

for his hanging.
The essay ends on this anti-vengeance note:

I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene . . . when at
least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall
then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till
then, we will take our revenge. (p. 707)

The point of nonviolence is to end the cycles of revenge, the frames by

which war is wrought time and again. The only revenge for Brown that is
possible is thus the ending of the violence of slavery. Thoreau is no
utopian here – he knows that this slavery (‘at least the present form’)
is but one mode of oppression. His words create a nonviolent community
that has a relationship both to the past, which it remembers, and the
future, which it calls on to continue the struggle. This linked tradition
forms Brown’s ‘constituents’.
And, indeed, Thoreau was not alone in this act of sympathetic with-
holding. William Lloyd Garrison, a nonviolent leader of the Abolitionist
cause, responded to Brown’s act by stating:

I am a non-resistant – a believer in the inviolability of human life,

under all circumstances; I, therefore, in the name of God, disarm
John Brown, and every slave at the South. But I do not stop there; if
I did, I should be a monster. I also disarm, in the name of God,
every slaveholder and tyrant in the world . . . as a peace man, an
‘ultra’ peace man – I am prepared to say: ‘success to every slave
insurrection at the South, and in every slave country’. (cited in
Losurdo, 2015: 15–16)

And WEB Du Bois (2014: 46), reflecting on the raid a half-century later,
wrote:

We do not believe in violence, neither in the despised violence of

the raid, nor the lauded violence of the soldier, nor the barbar-
ous violence of the mob; but we do believe in John Brown, in
that incarnate spirit of justice, that hatred of a lie, that willing-
ness to sacrifice money, reputation, and life itself on the altar of
right.

Thoreau, Garrison and Du Bois form a new political community by

refusing to take up arms while continuing to insist that peace is a funda-
mental political goal. They bear witness to John Brown not in spite of
this insistence, but because of it.
Alpert 65

The question of Brown’s constituents is perhaps more complex than

this presentation allows, however, since he has been used as a symbol by
violent anti-abortion activists such as Paul Hill (Smith, 2014: 101). It is
worth pausing here to explore a potential general problem for my argu-
ment: What is the criterion for bearing witness within this tradition? Can
it include anyone who claims to commit violence in the name of ending
what they view as systemic injustice? After all, anti-abortion activists like
Hill claim that they are only using violence to stop violence: ‘Force to
prevent abortion is not violence; it is the prevention of violence. Those
who protect abortionists are protecting violence; those who protect the
unborn are preventing violence’ (Hill, 2003). It is not difficult to imagine
that someone might respond to Hill’s acts as Thoreau did to Brown’s –
refusing to enact the violence themselves while also witnessing it as part
of a new political community that has different concepts of what counts
as a protected life. There are certainly ways and reasons to argue against
this claim, such as questioning what is being counted as violence here,
and asking whether the violence enacted on women’s bodies throughout
human history is not the more salient problem that needs to be
overcome.
Indeed, this would be the more general claim in response: the goals of
this tradition are to use witnessing to negate political violence. Anti-
abortion activists would have to show that they, like Kant or Thoreau,
are committed to this broader aim. That would involve, at the very least,
exceptions in the case of rape and when the life of the mother is at risk.
But more than this, it would require showing that the historical violence
against women in terms of sterilization, forced pregnancy, and general
lack of reproductive choice is also being combatted. And further still, it
would have to show that it is part of a broader political program, such as
Kant’s or Thoreau’s, that aims at the end of violence against persons as
such. Otherwise claims like Hill’s amount to opposing violence against a
foetus without regard to violence against the mother, or the world that
either the child or the mother will be a part of. Opposing slavery and
tyranny can clearly meet these criteria. But since it is structurally impos-
sible for Hill and others to hold all these strands together, their position,
as an anti-violent position, is incoherent.
Hill thus fails to be one of Brown’s constituents, and he and others like
him are not worthy of witness by this nonviolent tradition. The events to
which nonviolent revolutionary spectators bear witness are only those
whose broader claims are to a world of nonviolence, which is to say, a
world in which we continually act to negate the cycles of violence that
have so far structured human existence. To be part of this tradition
means not just claiming violent acts in the name of a particular peace.
It means doing extensive and all-encompassing anti-violent theorizing
and activity throughout one’s life.
66 Theory, Culture & Society 33(6)

The Nonviolent Revolutionary Spectator after Kant

and Thoreau
A different challenge to this tradition’s legacy in the present has come
to the fore over the past several years as social media activists in the
United States and elsewhere have been engaged in an ongoing critique
of nonviolence in the wake of police shootings and the protests against
them (for example, see al-Gharbi, 2015; Coates, 2014; Resnikoff, 2014).
These activists show increasing scepticism about nonviolence, arguing
that it is an asymmetrical demand that only applies to protestors. Police
have a ‘right’ to use force, as long as they do not misuse it, but protestors
never have the right to fight back. These critiques join a long tradition
of questioning how, in the words of Peter Gelderloos (2007), ‘nonviolence
protects the state.’12 Some of the power of these critiques has come
from the fact that nonviolence is presented less and less as a philosophi-
cally coherent position, and more and more as a fiat of media elites
(Shabi, 2015).
The tradition of nonviolent revolutionary spectatorship can respond
to these critiques by showing how it criticizes all forms of violence, while,
at the same time, taking the multiple structural conditions that lead to
violence as its target. We can begin to see this in the late speeches of
Martin Luther King. Although King is famous as a critic of violence on
behalf of political causes, he explicitly transformed this position later in
his career, bringing it closer to the tradition of revolutionary nonviolence
that I have been tracing here. In a speech in April 1967, he related this
transformation in his thinking:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young

men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not
solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compas-
sion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most
meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked . . . ‘What
about Vietnam?’ They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive
doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it
wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never
again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the
ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor
of violence in the world today: my own government. (1967,
emphases added)

Crucially, King does not here abandon his critique of nonviolence; he in

fact strengthens it by affirming that his goal is to speak out against
violence as such. He moves away from mere horror at violence, and
toward a position of expressing compassion, maintaining his ethic, and
shifting the burden of his critique to the highest scale of violence.
Alpert 67

Speaking in 1968, King also insisted on the need to respond to acts of

property destruction with sympathetic withholding. He again began by
insisting that his stance was against violence in all forms: ‘I would be the
first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive,
nonviolence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem
from a direct action point of view’ (King, 1968). But he refuses to merely
condemn the violence of protestors. Rather, he shows how this violence is
part of a reaction against violence, and is, as such, its own plea to end
violence:

But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and con-
demn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that
without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable
conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things
that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative
than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must
say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. (King, 1968)

King here perfectly embodies the double movement of the tradition of

revolutionary nonviolence: he opposes violence and refuses to engage in
it himself, but he does not stop there. Rather, he situates it within a world
of violence, and finds that violence as the grounding cause that must be
rooted out. He is sympathetic towards violence against oppression with-
out allowing it to become justified. He acts as a witness to that violence,
claiming it for those working toward a world beyond the frames of
political violence. Bearing witness to the language of the unheard, he
makes their signs visible.
King’s phrase ‘a riot is the language of the unheard’ has been con-
tinually evoked since the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri, in August 2014, and the riots that resulted both after the
murder and the non-indictment of the policeman who killed him,
Darren Wilson. Indeed, a Google search for the phrase ‘riot is the
language of the unheard’ and ‘Ferguson’ yields over 9,000 results.13
But this link was explicitly absent from official discourse, perhaps
most importantly in the speech given by Barack Obama (2014) shortly
after the failure to indict. Obama began by telling his listeners that ‘first
and foremost we are a nation built on the rule of law’. He then pro-
ceeded to preemptively condemn acts of property destruction. As Kant,
Thoreau or King would have insisted, the first point that he should
have made is that the purpose of the law itself is to end violence. When
the ‘rule of law’ protects rather than eradicates violence, it fails the very
first principle of the purpose of governmental law. And so if there is to
be any criticism made of violence here, it must first be against the
failure of the state – not only to not end violence, but in fact to be
its primary instigator.
68 Theory, Culture & Society 33(6)

Obama continued by calling on the police

to distinguish the handful of people who may use the grand jury’s
decision as an excuse for violence – distinguish them from the vast
majority who just want their voices heard around legitimate issues
in terms of how communities and law enforcement interact.

Obama here again ignored the tradition of revolutionary nonviolent

spectatorship by not recognizing, as King had, that the violence itself
was an expression of the fact that voices simply are not being heard when
they protest peacefully. What the protestors in Ferguson and around the
US are saying is that they want an end to the state’s violence. While the
White House was incapable of recognizing this, there were others who
returned to King’s message. The journalist Amy Goodman read an
extended citation from King’s speech on riots to Rev. Osagyefo Sekou.
He responded: ‘It [King’s speech] is quite relevant to this
moment . . . [when] the president calls for calm but [has] not dispatched
enough resource[s] to hold Darren Wilson and a draconian police force
accountable’ (Goodman et al., 2014).
In the context of such historical events, the task of this tradition
becomes precisely this kind of response, which, like Kant, does not
endorse the particular actions taken, but understands how their ‘enthu-
siasm’ is a plea for justice, and against violence. And the followers of this
tradition today also, like Thoreau and King, think about their own place
in this world of violence, working to conceive of measures to end the
violence of all sides against each other, while also insisting that the scale
of violence is of paramount concern. This tradition further demands that
we understand that society’s collective task – whether we govern or are
governed – is to use politics to end violence. It directs us to respond to
violence against oppression not only with horror, but also with a capacity
to see the human yearning for justice beyond the acts of violence, and to
begin to direct action toward a truly just and nonviolent community. The
final question then becomes: as the nonviolent revolutionary watches
those who fight and die, is he or she prepared to create a moral commu-
nity of those who have witnessed such acts, a world community of spec-
tators and actors, who, through their witnessing and organizing, through
their creation of a community of sense, judgment, and justice, make it so
that no one shall ever have to die for justice again? This is no easy task,
but it is the one that the tradition of revolutionary nonviolence bequeaths
to us.

Acknowledgements
This paper was first given at the Berlin Roundtables on Transnationality (2012).
My thanks to the Irmgard Coninx Stiftung for organizing the conference, and to the
Alpert 69

seminar participants there for their feedback. A long conversation with Robin Celikates
was particularly helpful. A later version was presented at Smack Mellon Gallery, New
York, in conjunction with their exhibit of art related to protests in Ferguson:
‘RESPOND’ (2015). My thanks to the organizers of that event as well. Tal Corem
provided helpful feedback on an earlier written version of this article, which was written
in part during a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Finally, several anonymous reviewers helped greatly in the reconceptualization of my
argument.

Notes
1. Of course, violence itself is difficult to define, like any general concept. For
the purposes of this article, I am mostly considering violence against bodies
and physical spaces, as well as the institutional violences that exploit and
oppress those bodies and spaces. For a review of the literature and a discus-
sion of the difficulty of definition, see May (2015: 33–69).
2. This is why, for example, anti-imperialist terrorist attacks on civilians in
Europe and the United States fall far outside of what is witnessed by this
tradition. While at least some of the attacks have been carried out in the
name of ending Euro-American imperialism in the Middle East (Pape,
2003), nothing in the claims or actions of groups like the Taliban or ISIS
has shown their sympathy with nonviolence as a general program. Indeed,
quite the opposite is true.
3. This kind of witnessing thus has something in common with what Michel
Foucault (2011: 56) called parresia: ‘the point at which subjects willingly
undertake to tell the truth, while willingly and explicitly accepting that this
truth-telling could cost them their life’.
4. All Kant references are given both to the Academy edition and the transla-
tion used. Page numbers from the Academy edition are given first, followed
by the translated citation.
5. Hans Reiss led me to look more closely at this footnote (Reiss, 1970: 31: n1).
6. I am not concerned here with whether or not Kant is correct in his reading of
Hobbes.
7. There are profound problems with this argument, especially in light of Kant’s
positive position on colonialism. The idea of the social contract such as we find
in Kant is based largely on bad anthropological observations and poor philo-
sophical interpretation of extra-European societies. As Pierre Clastres (1987:
30) has shown, forms of political governance exist in all societies. Moreover,
there are ways in which power can be held without the threat of coercion. This
does not invalidate Kant’s position as a whole, but it does support the idea we
find in Thoreau that the social contract is a fundament of human existence that
can be found in other forms than the liberal state. On Kant and colonialism,
see the debate between Muthu (2003) and Hobson (2012).
8. This is clearly different than Thoreau’s (1992) anarchistic politics, but it is
worth remembering that Thoreau only called for an end to government ‘when
men are prepared for it’ (p. 226).
9. For a critique of Hobsbawm’s teleological position from ‘archaic’ to
‘modern’, see Scott (1985: 278, n58), and, for a more general critique of
this teleology of social movements, see Calhoun (2012).
70 Theory, Culture & Society 33(6)

10. For an important rethinking of the activity of spectatorship as a way of

reorganizing what can be said and done in the sphere of politics, see also
Rancière (2011: 1–23).
11. On Thoreau’s use for a theory of organization, see Stout (2010: 278–282).
12. This concern is articulated in Frantz Fanon (1968: 61–62), and more system-
atically developed in Churchill (1998) and Gelderloos (2007). For a response
to Churchill’s argument about the limits of nonviolence, see George Lakey
(2001). Fanon himself, it should be remembered, only came to oppose non-
violence after its strategic failure in the context of the Algerian struggle
against the French. On this, see Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer (2000:
40–41). Unfortunately, I do not have the space in this article to deal with
Fanon’s writings sufficiently. I only note here that while Fanon is not part of
this tradition, he is arguably not as far from it as he might at first appear.
Fanon’s chapter ‘Concerning Violence’ is not a justification of violence so
much as an essayistic attempt to understand the tragic conditions that pro-
duce violence. As is clear from Fanon’s consistent rejection of ‘reactive’
politics, his aim is precisely to move humanity away from cycles of violence
and into a new humanism (Fanon, 1968: 311–316, 2008: 197). Fanon differs
from the nonviolent tradition in his willingness to engage in violent acts, but
I think it could be shown that he shares the same end desire. For a reading
of Fanon along these lines, see Gordon (1996).
13. As of July 2015.

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Avram Alpert received his PhD in comparative literature in 2014. After a

Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Cultural Analysis at
Rutgers University, USA, he will be a Fulbright Early Career Scholar at
the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, for 2016–2017. His essays have
appeared in diacritics, The Journal of French and Francophone
Philosophy, The Journal of Modern Literature, Postcolonial Studies,
Third Text, and elsewhere, and he has recently completed his first book
manuscript, Unbearable Identities: The Global Self from Montaigne to
Suzuki.