Rawls undertakes a somewhat phenomenonological and overtly political approach towards justifying civil disobedience, and one that, being addressed from a liberal-democratic perspective, unashamedly and openly presupposes such society to be ‘nearly just', a society in which there is a general respect for law and the constitution. Another major of criticism of Rawls' approach lies in the belief that the rights of the minorities are only accidentally overlooked by the majority, and can be rectified through civil disobedience. Amongst the proponents of such actions who would dispute this is Gandhi, who saw in colonial India an imperialist British Government fundamentally biased against the indigeneous peoples.

For Gandhi, everyone has a right to protest by means of civil disobedience, as it is essentially constitutional, in the sense that by consciously disobeying a law, and then consciously and peacefully accepting the penal consequences, this is an extreme demonstration of support towards the spirit of the constitution. Where Rawls was concerned with a limited spectrum of states in which civil disobedience was the most justifiable method of protest, Gandhi believes

"injustice always justifies resistance, so that political protest is fundamentally moral, and should take place equally in a non-democratic or democratic state" (Goodwin, 1992, p321).

The above examples appear concerned with civil disobedience as a form of mass protest, but need this always be the case?

Like Gandhi, the American anarchist philosopher Henry David Thoreau was imprisoned for his role in a civilly disobedient act, although under what are generally considered much less celebrated circumstances. Thoreau believed civil disobedience to be more of an individual mode of protest, and when opposed to taxation for the funding of a war against Mexico, he refused to pay, and found himself imprisoned for his troubles (Thoreau, 1969, pp40-44). Thoreau justifies this individualist approach to civil disobedience by claiming one should not wait until the majority have been persuaded to change the law, rather go ahead and demonstrate disobedience oneself. One may dismiss Thoreau as a kind of fluffy anarchist, opposed to majority rule on the basis of it oppresses minorities by definition, yet opposed to all-out revolutionary violence to overthrow the state; indeed Thoreau even admits himself that he accepts the notion of a government,

"I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well" (Thoreau, 1969, p48).

To reject Thoreau's contribution towards the justification of civil disobedience would however be foolish, and the fundamental strand to his argument is undoubtedly a prime influence in Gandhi's own philosophy, and that is that as an individual, everyone has a right to protest. For Thoreau this is because the individual is a ‘higher and independent power', whereas Gandhi saw the right to civil disobedience as an ‘inherent right' which could not be forsaken (Goodwin, 1992, p320). Both Gandhi and Thoreau share both a political and moral justification for civil disobedience, as opposed to Rawls who approaches justifying such actions from a purely political perspective.