What then of the opponents of civil disobedience? Perhaps the earliest example of a condemnation of a civil disobedience is to be found in Plato's chronicle of the discussion between Socrates and Crito. Although Socrates had been sentenced to death he refused to escape his native Athens as he believed this would be damaging to the very constitution itself,

"Do you imagine that a city can continue to exist and not be turned upside down, if the legal judgments which are pronounced in it have no force but are nullified and destroyed by private persons?" (Socrates to Crito, Plato, 1969, pp21-22).

This view, perhaps paranoid, definitely expresses reservations in the strength of a democratic framework.

In more modern, and infinitely more developed, democratic states, there are two basic arguments against civil disobedience (Goodwin, 1992, p321). The first point is concerned with the notion that an individual has consented to majority rule under a democracy, and is therefore subject to all majority decisions; this is ultimately a product of ‘social contract' theory. The second argument relies on a belief that a democracy provides adequate opportunities to change majority views, and as a result there can be be no justification for any form of protest outwith the scope of this democratic framework.

Again, we see here in these theories opposed to civil disobedience, a pre-suppostion that a liberal democratic society is the only pure and superior form of existence. Perhaps the insistence that all attempts to enact change must be conducted within the democratic rules of engagement (of which, according to its opponents, civil disobedience is definitely not) is to insist that the contest must take place under one teams own rules, and on their own territory. As discussed above, Thoreau believed the individual to be both ‘higher' and ‘independent' of the state, and an old chestnut again rears its head here - who amongst us has actually signed a ‘social contract'? This reply to the above arguments may be somewhat crude and ideologically unsound. However, by far the strongest flaw in the view that the democratic system must not be jeopardised or bypassed is the paradox that democracy, in providing the very means to address the majority when searching for support, should be cohesive enough to allow such deviance,

"the practical case for accepting the right to protest rests on the view that a democratic society is strong enough to absorb dissent" (Goodwin, 1992, p326).

Is there then any real grounds against civil disobedience, if the very system claimed to be under threat is simultaneously championing itself as the fairest and strongest method of governance?

The underlying justification for any form of civil disobedience would then appear to be a belief that the individual (be they part of a group, which may be a minority or a majority) is themselves sovereign, as opposed to being subject to another. Thoreau's belief that the individual as higher and independent, indeed the general anarchist view that no-one has any rightful authority over another, is perhaps the best articulation of this, and although criticised above for failing to consider any moral justifications, even Rawls upholds this view,

"each person must decide for themselves whether the circumstances justify civil disobedience" (Rawls, 1971, p120).