Right of revolution

History

Early examples

Ancient China

To justify their overthrowing of the earlier Shang dynasty, the kings of the Zhou dynasty (1122–256 BCE) of China promulgated the concept known as the Mandate of Heaven, that Heaven would bless the authority of a just ruler, but would be displeased and withdraw its mandate from a despotic ruler. The Mandate of Heaven would then transfer to those who would rule best. Chinese historians interpreted a successful revolt as evidence that the Mandate of Heaven had passed on. Throughout Chinese history, rebels who opposed the ruling dynasty made the claim that the Mandate of Heaven had passed, giving them the right to revolt. Ruling dynasties were often uncomfortable with this, and the writings of the Confucian philosopher Mencius (372–289 BCE) were often suppressed for declaring that the people have the right to overthrow a ruler that did not provide for their needs.

Ancient Rome

The populist leader Tiberius Gracchus tried to justify depriving power from tribune Marcus Octavius by arguing that a tribune "stands deprived by his own act of honours and immunities, by the neglect of the duty for which the honour was bestowed upon him". For Gracchus, he "who assails the power of the people is no longer a tribune at all".

He strengthened his argument by highlighting the precedent of the overthrow of Tarquin the Proud "when he acted wrongfully; and for the crime of one single man, the ancient government under which Rome was built was abolished forever." As historian Edward Gibbon observes, after Tarquin's overthrow, "the ambitious Roman who should dare to assume their title or imitate [Tarquin's] tyranny was devoted to the infernal gods: each of his fellow-citizens was armed with the sword of justice; and the act of Brutus, however repugnant to gratitude or prudence, had been already sanctified by the judgement of his country."

After the death of Augustus, the soldier Percennius fomented mutiny in the legions of Pannonia. Believing they had the right to violently rebel to get better treatment and greater appreciation from the state, he rhetorically asked the common soldiery why they submitted to the centurions while military life entailed such low pay and so many years in service. Many soldiers shared his feelings. According to the historian Tacitus, "The throng applauded from various motives, some pointing to the marks of the lash, others to their grey locks, and most of them to their threadbare garments and naked limbs."

The Praetorian Subrius Flavus justified his right of revolution against Emperor Nero on the grounds that Nero's crimes meant he no longer deserved the love of the people: "I began to hate you when you became the murderer of your mother and your wife, a charioteer, an actor, and an incendiary."

In 285 C.E., Maximian suppressed a rebellion of Gallic peasants violently resisting exploitation by their masters. These fought for their natural rights against the miserable conditions they were placed under. Gibbon says that they "asserted the natural rights of men, but they asserted those rights with the most savage cruelty".

Medieval Europe

One example of the emergence of a right of revolution can be traced back to Þorgnýr the Lawspeaker, who in 1018 had a dramatic confrontation with the King of Sweden. The lawspeaker claimed the King of Sweden was accountable to the people and would be overthrown by them if he continued with his unpopular war with Norway.

Another example were the semi-mythical Charters of Sobrarbe, allegedly issued in the Pyrenees in the 850s, which enshrined the Iberian legal principle that "laws come before kings." Specifically, the 6th charter of Sobrarbe (first mentioned in 1117) specified that "If He [the King] should hereafter tyrannise the kingdom against the fueros or liberties, the kingdom should be free to choose another king, even if he were a pagan," thereby enshrining the right of rebellion against the King. During the High Middle Ages, the Charters of Sobrarbe were used both in the kingdom of Navarre and in the kingdom of Aragon to thwart royal authority, and in the medieval kingdom of Aragon to create the figure of the Justicia de Aragón, an office first mentioned in 1115, appointed by the Aragonese parliament, and with ample powers to veto any action of the King deemed to against the customs and laws of the kingdom; this provided a uniquely complete institutional and constitutional framework with which to disobey the King. The legal lemma "Obedezco pero no cumplo" [I obey, but do not comply] found in Castilian law, likewise stemming from this tradition, was used to justify disobeying the King's orders that were deemed to go against the law; this legal principle was used in everything from bypassing censorship to justifying open rebellions, as e.g. was famously exploited by Hernán Cortés to justify his otherwise illegal invasion and conquest of Mexico against the explicit orders of the King of Castile and his officers in Cuba.

Another example is Magna Carta, an English charter issued in 1215, which required the King to renounce certain rights and accept that his will could be bound by the law. It included a "security clause" that gave the right to a committee of barons to overrule the will of the King through force if needed. Magna Carta directly influenced the development of parliamentary democracy and many constitutional documents, such as the United States Constitution. The Golden Bull of 1222 was a golden bull, or edict, issued by King Andrew II of Hungary. The law established the rights of Hungary's noblemen, including the right to disobey the King when he acted contrary to law (jus resistendi). The Golden Bull is often compared to Magna Carta; the Bull was the first constitutional document of the nation of Hungary, while Magna Carta was the first constitutional charter of the nation of England.

Thomas Aquinas also writes about the right to resist tyranny in the Summa Theologica. He considers a law not to be a law at all, but an act of violence, if it contradicts either human or Divine good, overextends the power of the lawgiver, or hampers different parts of society unequally. For Aquinas, overthrowing a tyrant does not make a population seditious. Rather, the tyranny of tyrants means they commit "sedition", by which Aquinas means disturbance of those who work together lawfully for the good of the multitude:

Indeed it is the tyrant rather that is guilty of sedition, since he encourages discord and sedition among his subjects, that he may lord over them more securely; for this is tyranny, since it is ordered to the private good of the ruler and to the injury of the multitude.

Nicole Oresme, in his Livre de Politiques, categorically denied any right of resistance. John of Salisbury advocated direct revolutionary assassination of unethical tyrannical rulers in his Policraticus.

Early modern Europe

Theological notions of the right of revolution were elaborated in the early modern period. The Jesuits, especially Robert Bellarmine and Juan de Mariana, were widely known and often feared for advocating resistance to tyranny and often tyrannicide—one of the implications of the natural law focus of the School of Salamanca.

John Calvin believed something similar. In a commentary on the Book of Daniel, he observed that contemporary monarchs pretend to reign "by the grace of God", but the pretense was "a mere cheat" so that they could "reign without control". He believed that "Earthly princes depose themselves while they rise up against God", so "it behooves us to spit upon their heads than to obey them". When ordinary citizens are confronted with tyranny, he wrote, ordinary citizens have to suffer it. But magistrates have the duty to "curb the tyranny of kings", as had the Tribunes of the Plebs in ancient Rome, the Ephors in Sparta, and the Demarchs in ancient Athens. That Calvin could support a right of resistance in theory did not mean that he thought such resistance prudent in all circumstances. At least publicly, he disagreed with the Scottish Calvinist John Knox's call for revolution against the Catholic Queen Mary I Tudor of England.

The Catholic Church shared Calvin's prudential concerns – the Pope condemned Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot, and Regnans in Excelsis was widely considered to be a mistake. Instead, the safest course of action for the people was to endure tyranny for as long as it could be borne, rather than run the larger risks of armed revolution.

The right of revolution was expounded by the Monarchomachs in the context of the French Wars of Religion, and by Huguenots thinkers who legitimized tyrannicides.

In the last chapter of The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli exhorts the Medici family to take up violent insurrection "to liberate Italy from the barbarians". He explains why contemporary circumstances justify the Medici's right of revolution:

Italy, left without life, waits for him who shall yet heal her wounds and put an end to the ravaging and plundering of Lombardy, to the swindling and taxing of the kingdom and of Tuscany, and cleanse those sores that for long have festered. It is seen how she entreats God to send someone who will deliver her from these wrongs and barbarous insolencies. It is seen also that she is ready and willing to follow a banner if only someone will raise it.

Philosophical views

John Locke

Perhaps no other major philosopher wrote as much about the right of revolution as Enlightenment thinker John Locke. He developed the concept in his Two Treatises of Government, especially the last two chapters, "Of Tyranny" and "Of the Dissolution of Government". The right formed an important part of his social contract theory, in which he defined the basis of social relationships. Locke said that under natural law, all people have the right to life, liberty, and private property; under the social contract, the people could instigate a revolution against the government when it acted against the interests of citizens, to replace the government with one that served the interests of citizens. In some cases, Locke saw revolution as an obligation. For him, the right of revolution acted as a safeguard against tyranny.

Locke defended the right of revolution in Two Treatises of Government in this way:

Whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society; and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty.

For Locke, these governments undid themselves by standing in the way of a citizen's right to property. He believed that "governments are dissolved" when "they endeavour to invade the property of the subject", since it is the right of the people to "choose and authorise a legislative" and accompanying institutions that act "as guards and fences to the properties of all society". In other writings, he used the analogy of a robber to explain why tyrannical infringement on property makes for unjust law: "Should a robber break into my house, and, with a dagger at my throat, make me seal deeds to convey my estate to him, would this give him any title? Just such a title by his sword has an unjust conqueror who forces me into submission. The injury and the crime is equal, whether committed by the wearer of a crown or some petty villain." Thus, according to Locke, if a government acts against a citizen's right of property, that citizen may exercise his right of revolution against that government.

Locke drew on the Old Testament story of Hezekiah's rebellion against the King of Assyria to make the case that God supported any people rebelling against unrighteous rule, saying that "it is plain that shaking off a power which force, and not right, hath set over any one, though it hath the name of rebellion, yet it is no offence before God, but that which He allows and countenances".

Like Aquinas, Locke believed that the truly seditious or rebellious individuals are not those who change the legislative to ensure public wellbeing, but the despots who violated public wellbeing in the first place with their illegitimate laws: "For when men, by entering into society and civil government, have excluded force, and introduced laws for the preservation of property, peace, and unity among themselves, those who set up force again in opposition to the law, do rebellare – that is, bring back again the state of war, and are properly rebels". Also like Aquinas, Locke considered it just for a subject to disobey any ruler overextending his political power. In A Letter Concerning Toleration, he argued that "if the law, indeed, be concerning things that lie not within the verge of the magistrates authority, ... men are not in these cases obliged by that law, against their consciences."

However, Locke was not only a proponent of fighting tyranny through civil disobedience of unjust laws. He also suggested using violent insurrection in situations where an illegitimate centre of power, such as a rogue executive, has used force to subdue the supreme power in the land, that is, the legislature:

For having erected a legislative with an intent that [the people] should exercise the power of making laws, ... when they are hindered by any force from what is so necessary to the society, and wherein the safety and preservation of the people consists, the people have a right to remove it by force. In all states and conditions the true remedy of force without authority is to oppose force to it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would be in agreement on Locke's point about force, stating in his work On the Origin of Inequality that:

The contract of government is so completely dissolved by despotism, that the despot is master only so long as he remains the strongest; as soon as he can be expelled, he has no right to complain of violence. The popular insurrection that ends in the death or deposition of a Sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and fortunes of his subjects. He was maintained by force alone, it is force alone that overthrows him.

Immanuel Kant

Not all Enlightenment thinkers supported the rebellion principle. Immanuel Kant would have strongly disagreed with Locke and Rousseau as regards the notion of there being any general principle of a right to revolution. He believed that "if the ruler or regent, as the organ of the supreme power, proceeds in violation of the laws, as in imposing taxes, recruiting soldiers, and so on, contrary to the law of equality in the distribution of the political burdens, the subject may oppose complaints and objections (gravamina) to this injustice, but not active resistance." He reaffirms this repeatedly in The Metaphysics of Morals, stating that "there is no right of sedition, and still less of revolution", the reason being that "it is only by submission to the universal legislative will, that a condition of law and order is possible." Moreover, Kant believed that any "forcible compulsion of [the dethronement of a monarch], on the part of the people, cannot be justified under the pretext of a right of necessity (casus necessitatis)".

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill believed in a morally justifiable form of right to revolution against tyranny, placing him firmly in the tradition of Aquinas, Locke, and Rousseau. In his introduction to On Liberty, he gave an account of the historical limitation of kingly power by the multitude, a conflict he termed "liberty". This progress was sought "by obtaining a recognition of certain immunities, called political liberties or rights, which it was to be regarded as a breach of duty in the ruler to infringe, and which if he did infringe, specific resistance, or general rebellion, was held to be justifiable". On the question of tyrannicide, Mill came down firmly in favour of the virtue of "the act of a private citizen in striking down a criminal, who, by raising himself above the law, has placed himself beyond the reach of legal punishment or control, [since it] has been accounted by whole nations, and by some of the best and wisest of men, not a crime, but an act of exalted virtue".

Samuel Johnson

Scottish biographer James Boswell noted the literary critic Samuel Johnson's attack on the widespread assumption that "the King can do no wrong":

If the abuse be enormous, Nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

Boswell emphasised this sentence "with peculiar pleasure, as a noble instance of that truly dignified spirit of freedom which ever glowed in his heart". Johnson seemed to believe that some form of a right to revolution inhered in natural law. He considered "that in no government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government. Had not the people of France thought themselves honoured as sharing in the brilliant actions of Louis XIV, they would not have endured him; and we may say the same of the King of Prussia's people."

Use in history

Revolutionary movements subsequent to this, all drew on Locke's theory as a justification for the exercise of the right of revolution.

The Glorious Revolution

During the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Parliament of England effectively deposed James II of England and replaced him with William III of Orange-Nassau, due to the former's unacceptable leanings towards absolutism and Catholicism. Although Locke's treatise was published the year after, his ideas were already widely current in the English political system at the time.

Although Locke claimed that his book's purpose was to justify William III's ascension to the throne, it has been argued that the bulk of the writing was instead completed between 1679 and 1680 during the Exclusion Crisis, which attempted to prevent James II from ever taking the throne in the first place. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, Locke's mentor, patron and friend, introduced the bill, but it was ultimately unsuccessful. Alternatively, the work is better associated with the revolutionary conspiracies that swirled around what would come to be known as the Rye House Plot.

The American Revolution

The right to revolution played a large part in the writings of the American revolutionaries in the run up to the American Revolution. Thomas Paine's political tract Common Sense used the concept as an argument for rejection of the British monarchy and separation from the British Empire, as opposed to merely self-government within it. The right was also cited in the Declaration of Independence of the United States, written by Thomas Jefferson, two thirds of which consists of a list of the wrongs committed by King George III which violated the colonist's natural right to life, liberty, and property. According to the declaration:

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

However, the Revolution did change course to set certain limits on the right of rebellion. In Federalist No. 28, Alexander Hamilton successfully made the case for a federal standing army, in opposition to Locke's principle that a republican government rules not by violence, but by law. Hamilton thought:

That seditions and insurrections are, unhappily, maladies as inseparable from the body politic as tumours and eruptions from the natural body; that the idea of governing all at all times by the simple force of law (which we have been told is the only admissible principle of republican government) has no place but in the reveries of those political doctors whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction.

Simply put, "An insurrection, whatever may be its immediate cause, eventually endangers all government." However, Hamilton did point out that the wide geography of the United States meant that a federal army could not provide absolute limitation on the right of revolution, since, "If the federal army should be able to quell the resistance of one State, the distant States would have it in their power to make head with fresh forces."

The French Revolution

The right of revolution was also included in the 1793 preface to the French Constitution of 1793 during the French Revolution. This preface from 24 June 1793 contained a declaration of the rights of man and citizen including right to rebellion in §35: "When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people, and for every portion thereof, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties."

The Texas Revolution

The right of revolution is a principle element of the Texas Declaration of Independence, signed November 7, 1835 by a convention of delegates representing the collective interests of Tejano and Texian settlers in the newly designated District of Texas, part of the Mexican state Coahuila y Tejas until President Antonio López de Santa Anna enacted the Seven Laws which stripped states of autonomy and divided them into administrative districts subject to a strong central government. The declaration lists grievances and asserts the right to secede from a tyrannical government based on the natural right to self-defense and boldly establishes Texas to be an independent republic.

We are, therefore, forced to the melancholy conclusion, that the Mexican people have acquiesced in the destruction of their liberty, and the substitution therefor of a military government; that they are unfit to be free, and incapable of self government. The necessity of self-preservation, therefore, now decrees our eternal political separation. We, therefore, the delegates with plenary powers of the people of Texas, in solemn convention assembled, appealing to a candid world for the necessities of our condition, do hereby resolve and declare, that our political connection with the Mexican nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a free, Sovereign, and independent republic, and are fully invested with all the rights and attributes which properly belong to independent nations; and, conscious of the rectitude of our intentions, we fearlessly and confidently commit the issue to the decision of the Supreme arbiter of the destinies of nations.

American Civil War

The inherent (rather than constitutional) right to revolt was cited in the year prior the civil war's start as justifying the secession of the Confederate States of America.

Coups in El Salvador

The right to insurrection was invoked in the Revolution of the 44, 1931 Salvadoran coup d'état, and 1979 Salvadoran coup d'état.