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Disobedience and Democracy, Nine Fallacies on Law and Order, by Howard Zinn; Vintage Books; 124 pages...
When Abe Fortas put out his "little book" on civil disobedience earlier this year, it was only a matter of time until someone from the Left would step forward to challenge him. That Howard Zinn was the one who did is fortunate, for Zinn's new book, Disboedience and Democracy, Nine Fallacies on Law and Order, reveals at once some of the best and some of the worst of contemporary radical thinking...
...book is divided into nine chapters, each of which is a rebuttal to an aspect of Fortas' theory of civil disobedience. Zinn's best chapters are those which deal with Fortas' smug complacency over the role of the Supreme Court in contemporary American life...
Confronted with this statement, Zinn devastatingly probes into some of the Court's recent decisions on draft protests and civil rights and finds Fortas' view of the Court as a balancer more than a little one-sided--in fact, hypocritical and patently untrue. The Court is not our stalwart friend and defender, as Fortas would have us believe. What the Court should be doing, Zinn then argues, is standing squarely on the side of the individual's rights, protecting him as best it can from the already stifling massiveness of the federal bureaucracy...
...this, and much more in the book, is fine. But what is troubling is a question that Zinn raises in the first chapter, but never answers. Left unanswered, it seems to haunt and make slightly unreal all of the emotional energy of Zinn's attack on the Court and American society. If we justify one act of civil disobedience, he asks...