LAUSR

Recent citizen movements in Europe, the United States and the Arab World have prompted a revival of interest in resistance, as both a practice and a civic ideal. Yet contemporary political theory offers no clear perspective on the various meanings of resistance, its legitimacy or its limits. ‘Resistance to oppression’ was listed as one of the ‘natural and imprescriptible rights of man’ in the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and in this guise the ‘right to resist’ appears as one of the essential components of modern democratic citizenship. Republican thinkers have long stressed active civic resistance as a resource against arbitrary domination and tyranny. Yet canonical theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant argued that a right of resistance to sovereign power threatens to undermine the basis for a durable legal and political order, unleashing an anarchical world in which legitimacy and sovereignty are rendered dependent upon individuals’ private judgements. These difficulties are compounded by yet others, not all of which are specific to the world since the French Revolution. What problems are involved in resisting democratically legitimated governments, to which citizens have ostensibly given their consent? To what extent do our religious and ethical commitments offer justifications for resistance, and what happens if these do not coincide? How might we reconceive resistance in the light of the limitations on political sovereignty and individual agency that have been exposed by economic globalisation and by the rise of powerful, multinational corporations? How should we conceive resistance at the international level, and in the context of vastly unequal national and colonial struggles against imperial power? The articles collected in this Special Issue do not provide answers to all these questions, and we certainly do not aim to supply a comprehensive intellectual history of resistance. Nor do we seek to arrive at anything like an essentialist definition of the term. Rather, the aim has been to offer a sequence of snapshots of how resistance has been conceived in a variety of historical and intellectual contexts (albeit limited to Europe and North America) over a relatively extended time-frame. As regular readers of History of European Ideas hardly need reminding, resistance did not begin in the mid-twentieth century, with the Nazi occupation of France or with the struggles of formerly colonised nations throwing off the shackles of European colonial rule. Debates about resistance have been central to political thought throughout the entire period between the Protestant Reformation and the early twenty-first century. The following articles share a common ambition to understand the complexities of political thinking about resistance over this longue durée, and to grasp the