Carl Cohen's Argument Against Civil Disobedience

In The Case Against Civil Disobedience the unknown author claims in his very first sentence that “the most striking characteristic of civil disobedience is its irrelevance to the problems of today” and that it is “the resort… exercised because the subject cannot or will not take up the rights and duties of the citizen.” What he fails to realize is that the rights and duties of a citizen is to keep an eye on the laws that rule the land and to revolt when those laws become unjust. It’s all part and parcel to the social contract thought up by Locke and heavily leaned upon by Thomas Jefferson. As Henry David Thoreau says in Civil Disobedience, “a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscious.” Civil disobedience can never become irrelevant because corruption will forever attempt to corrode even the best intentions of a government and so there will always be a need to revolt when unjust laws get pasted.
He then rebuttals these arguments with the completely true statements that civilly disobedient people act the way they do in an effort to improve the laws that govern us so that all of society might live in a freer and more just place –often at a great cost to themselves. Sacrificing themselves to create a positive impact on their society is in no way selfish. Especially if justice would never have been realized without someone drawing attention to the inherently moral wrongness the law enabled to