SOURCE: Lazarus, Simon. “Perspective on Dissent.” New Republic 159, no. 23 (7 December 1968): 32-3.

In the following review of Disobedience and Democracy, Lazarus charges Zinn with romanticizing the politics of civil disobedience and confrontation.

In his widely distributed pamphlet, Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience, Mr. Justice Fortas condemned civil disobedience on the ground that America's formally democratic political system makes social change possible through legal means. This version of law-and-order liberalism is not invulnerable. Unfortunately, Howard Zinn's reply to Fortas succeeds mostly in inverting Fortas's principal difficulties.

Zinn agrees with Fortas that the propriety of civil disobedience depends on its relationship to the democratic principle. But whereas Fortas assumed, with little discussion, that American government offers adequate popular choice as well as social progress, Zinn considers it axiomatic that government can be treated as analytically separate from the people and hostile to their interests. He shares Fortas's tendency to confound the...