dissent

dissent, an unwillingness to cooperate with an established source of authority, which can be social, cultural, or governmental. In political theory, dissent has been studied mainly in relation to governmental power, inquiring into how and to what extent dissent should be promoted, tolerated, and controlled by a state. Dissent is often related to two other concepts, critical thinking and toleration. Both play into the problem of political legitimacy.

Dissent has primarily been associated with the activity of critical thinking, or thinking for oneself and questioning accepted notions of authority, truth, and meaning. Critical thinking itself has frequently been seen as activity that, in some sense, must necessarily involve dissent. To think for oneself, to be what the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant would call mature, or to pursue an “examined life” often involves developing positions that contrast with the conventions of a thinker’s age and society. This puts critical thinking individuals at odds with other members of their society and frequently with the state itself. Dissent, then, is a powerful source for developing effective public reasoning, itself necessary for determining the legitimacy of the actions and institutions of a given state as well as the customs and practices of a given society.

The question that arises is of what role dissent that flows from critical thinking should play in a functioning political association. For Plato and Kant, dissent was important for promoting either the capacity of individuals to examine their lives in relation to others or a collective capacity for public reasoning. However, dissent can go only so far. People can practice the examined life as much as they want and promote enlightened public reasoning as much as possible, but, ultimately, critical thinkers must obey the laws or sovereign power within their polity.

More recent thinkers—be they 19th-century liberals like John Stuart Mill or 20th-century critics of liberalism like Michel Foucault or the members of the Frankfurt School—considered dissent as a vital good, one whose relative absence in 19th- and 20th-century democracies went to the heart of the malaise that affected those states. Modern democracies are seen as fostering forms of self-censorship, pernicious ideals of normality, or intellectually asphyxiating forms of culture. Each of these inhibits critical thinking, thus minimizing dissent and limiting the development of effective forms of public deliberation.

Dissent’s relationship to toleration involves the role of minority groups in larger collectivities, whose practices are often seen by other members of the larger collective as dissenting from the norms of that collective. Frequently, the issue of dissent and toleration has involved religious minorities. In his famous piece “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689), John Locke argued that tolerance is indeed a Christian virtue and that the state as a civic association should be concerned only with civic interests, not spiritual ones. Locke’s separation of church and state stood at the beginning of a debate about the limits of religious dissent from civic authority in the name of not unduly hampering an individual’s or a group’s spiritual practices.

The toleration of dissenting religious practices can often be a vital force for expanding the scope of inclusion and consent within a state, thereby increasing the legitimacy of the laws and policies of a given state. Yet, it can also be a destabilizing force that undermines the legitimacy of the state by compelling the state to sanction practices that contravene what others see as basic and universal norms. Through simply tolerating but not critically scrutinizing such dissenting practices, the state might be involved in implicitly sanctioning, without directly legitimating, one set of metaphysical or theistic biases while marginalizing, and in some sense implicitly discrediting, the beliefs of those it seeks to accommodate.

Beginning in the late 20th century, numerous scholars have focused on the dissent of ethnic or cultural minorities. Here the claims often involve appeals for recognition of different identities. Individuals who belong to minority ethnic or cultural collectives, which often engage in dissenting practices, ask to have their differences accommodated so that they have an equal opportunity, vis-à-vis members of a majority group, to pursue their ideals of the good life. Many see the struggles for recognition of dissenting identities as integral to healthy democratic politics, as they promote more-reflexive understandings of identity and, with that, a more-inclusive pluralist political culture. Others worry about the spectre of fragmentation.