Disobedience and Colonial Power

With the affirmation of modern rationalism, disobedience stopped being discussed and criticized as a “sin” and became, after nearly a century of civil war and widespread social conflict, an intrinsically political problem. However, this also made disobedience a difficult “stumbling-block” for the full affirmation of the state and the need for order concentrated in it. In the refusal to follow orders, acknowledge authority, or respect the law (which are the main modalities of political expression in disobedience), this constitutive dimension of modern liberty is always alluded to – the absence of external impediments, Hobbes's “no stop in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do” – and modern political theory must deactivate it so that an ordered cohabitation is possible within the state. However, the social contract is not able to completely eliminate it. Baruch Spinoza, an anomalous rationalist, pointed out in a contractual perspective that obedience is always the rational and necessary fruit of an “internal disposition of the soul,” of the “constant will to execute that, which by law is good, and by the general decree ought to be done.” Consequently, an absolute sovereignty – in which everyone has to completely obey the supreme authority and absolutely follow all of its orders – would only be possible in the absence of the state, that is, without transferring natural individual rights to a third party, in a “democracy” where political society is the result of common participation and self-organization of individual potencies. It is only in this case that obedience is not an “abject slavery,” because “no one can ever so utterly transfer to another his power and, consequently, his rights, as to cease to be a man.” However, this “union of all men” only exists as “pure theory.” In reality, law is always the expression of force, in its capacity to obtain the consent of the majority of subjects until “the fear and respect” of sovereign power become “indignation.” For these same reasons, “resistance” can be applied to exceptional situations in purely abstract terms. Resistance is not, in fact, a question of civil law but of natural law (“law of war”); it is the liberty “of not being one's own enemy” (i.e., defending and withdrawing oneself, by all means necessary), for a sovereign whose ambitions for domination tend to transcend the limit of what the subjects will tolerate (variable over time and according to the context).