In his book, Raffaele Laudani discusses the “absence,” the “spectral presence,” and the “dissolution” of disobedience from the ancient world to the globalized neoliberal order of today (p. 5). Despite its title, this book is not simply a genealogy or a conceptual history of disobedience. More ambitiously, it seeks to show the link between disobedience and “destituent power,” understood as an extra-institutional form of action. It is “the immanent movement of an excess” that considers “conflict as a process of continual and generally open ended withdrawal” from the various forms of institutional domination (pp. 4–5). Such a perspective implies a rejection of more commonly accepted forms of disobedience, such as the “civil” variant as found in Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Rawls. Laudani’s work hence provides a fresh, somewhat controversial, and potentially novel perspective on disobedience and destitution that warrants the attention of scholars of political theory.

Laudani defines disobedience as “a political practice that acquires sense and theoretical depth in relation to the way the agents that practiced it assumed, re-elaborated, and criticized the fundamental concepts of modern politics” (p. 3). Thus, disobedience can only be missing from ancient and medieval political life. In ancient Athens, the two paradigmatic instances of disobedience, Antigone and Socrates, are convincingly presented as dealing with issues other than that of a politics of disobedience. Antigone stubbornly obeys “parental piety” (p. 13), while Socrates in the Apology is preoccupied with parrhesia—truth-speaking, or obedience to a higher order of truth. In Rome, obedience to a “tempered political constitution” is the bedrock of politics, as Laudani’s reading of Cicero, the patrician political thinker par excellence, indicates (p. 17). Oddly, for a scholar looking for traces of destituent power, Laudani characterizes the plebeian practice of secession in Rome as a “general strike” that is “never a subversive political action” because it “operates as a reequilibrator of the concordia ordinum” (p. 19). While a minor aspect of the book, this is a counterproductive reading of plebeian politics. By seceding from Rome and setting up camp on Mount Aventine, the plebs are indeed demonstrating, in situ, the point that the author is trying to make: that there exists a destituent disobedience, the extrainstitutional manifestation of an “excess,” that practices politics on the mode of a withdrawal. This interpretation of the plebeian experience does not correspond neatly to his overall reading of the trajectory of disobedience, however. In any case, the emergence and affirmation of Christianity in early and late medieval times will not help advance the cause of disobedience. Indeed, disobedience is here entirely apolitical, and even secession must be rejected in favor of martyrdom (p. 23). Even the late medieval articulation of a “right to resistance” is subordinated to the obedience to God, the highest of authorities.

It is with the appearance of Étienne de La Boétie’s seminal work, Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1548), that disobedience as destitution appears. La Boétie teaches that tyranny provides the logic upon which all forms of power are founded: the logic of One. Institutions are driven by the “will to dominate” that “lurks in the logic of unitary command” (p. 36). For La Boétie, disobedience is the extrainstitutional expression of the political dignity of the many, as well as of the natural liberty that is at the core of the human experience. Laudani argues that La Boétie’s invitation to avoid clashing with power should not be understood as lacking in courage. Instead, it should be seen “as a way of conceiving political conflict” in its “destituent form” (p. 38). But the heredity of this thought will not be found with the Reformation or with the monarchomachs, who did not accept the unfounded or contingent nature of power as understood by La Boétie (p. 39). Instead, Laudani locates it in the sailors and commoners, the “many-headed hydra,” of the revolutionary Atlantic world.

The modern history of destituent disobedience is characterized by a struggle between attempts to neutralize it, by contract theorists such as Hobbes and Locke, and its reappearance in the form of praxis during the American Revolution and other postcolonial struggles. To complete this portrait of the “spectral presence” of disobedience in modernity, Laudani analyzes civil disobedience in the United States, from its intellectual origins to its practice in the Civil Rights Movement, as well as in the more radical variants found in the student uprisings of the 1960s or with the creation of the Black Panthers. Without explicitly saying so, the radical variant seems closer to destituent disobedience than does civil disobedience. In fact, in a persuasive interpretation of Rawls’s “justification” of civil disobedience, Laudani identifies the fundamental limit of the liberal democratic attitude toward disobedience: “In Rawls’s perspective, the whole element of challenging the political order is completely absent” (p. 113).

For Laudani, the globalization of the neoliberal order brings about a return to the practice of disobedience in its destituent form. Following the analyses of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the author argues that the crisis of sovereignty opens a space for the creation of new forms of protest, such as “temporary autonomous zones” and hackerism. These new forms are tangible manifestations of the extrainstitutional action of the “multitude” that does not try to develop institutions that would neutralize conflict (p. 153). But the “multitude” is ambiguous. It is less a constituted political subject (being-multitude) than a “doing-multitude.” It “must therefore be ‘governed’ and ‘organized’” in order to allow for the passage from destitution to constitution. Indeed, Hardt and Negri are fixated upon the creation of a constituent power that would allow for the revolution to occur and, with it, the creation of a “democracy of the common.” For Laudani, disobedience as destitution experiences here nothing less than a “recession”: “[D]isobedience takes a step back, waiting to find a new existence beyond itself” (p. 154).

In order to conceptualize destituent power, the reference to Hardt and Negri’s multitude is an unhelpful one. For the authors of Empire, only constituent power provides the key to revolutionary change. Because they cannot find it in the multitude forever toiling in destitution, they assume a vanguardist position, close to that of Lenin. Such a position implies disregarding the political capacity of the many, the possibility of radical democracy, and the grassroots efforts to foster a more egalitarian society. Instead of borrowing from potentially authoritarian strands of Marxism, Laudani could have explored certain post-Marxist theorists who place democracy, understood as the concerted action of the many against all forms of domination, at the core of their thought.

In Democracy Against the State,^{Footnote 1} French political theorist Miguel Abensour develops the notion of “insurgent democracy,” which could enter into a fruitful dialogue with Laudani’s destituent disobedience. Abensour argues that insurgent democracy practices conflict outside of the state and against it. This interpretation echoes Laudani’s idea of conflict as a never-ending process of withdrawal from the “logic of One.” Alternatively, Claude Lefort’s enigmatic concept of “savage democracy”^{Footnote 2} could help analyze the politics of destituent disobedience today. Indeed, for Lefort, the term “savage” points to the excess or surplus of democratic energies that can never be fully neutralized by the political institutions of modernity. In addition, Abensour and Lefort recognize, as does Laudani, the centrality of La Boétie and of his critique of the will to dominate rooted in unitary logic.

Strangely enough, Laudani was not compelled to enter into a fruitful dialogue with either thinker. His genealogy of destituent disobedience is certainly a compelling one. At the same time, it would have been even more compelling had he fully engaged other contemporary theorists writing on similar themes.