Students ask the most astutue questions, such that, sometimes I could either choke them or hug them. One of my students asked me, during office hours last week, what was the fundamental nature of a radical. I thought for a while and then offered him the following definition which I'll divide into three parts, since what started out as an informal exposition on the nature of a radical turned into a three session tutorial. Here are my thoughts that I shared with him.

The life of the radical is a life lived on the peripheries. It is one lived somewhere between the registers of the nomad, the outlaw and the civil disobedient.

The nomad lives on the outskirts of the law. He follows the law to the extent that it serves his purposes. He doesn’t completely evade the law. But neither does it regulate his life as it does that of the ordinary citizen. Wandering and exilic, the nomad is both law-abiding and law-evasive. He continues to live within the geographic jurisdiction of the state while remaining outside the strictures of society. He lives this in-between life without violating the laws of the state. Though his customs and mores are different from others,’ he is still not a complete anomaly.


The outlaw’s status is well known to all of us. Defiant to the core and asocial by necessity, he is the ultimate reactionary. His identity depends on the existence of law and his ability to live outside its reaches. Each victory of the outlaw is a romantic strike against the commitment to the rational basis of law: its capacity to mold human beings and to bring their moral sensibilities to reflect the will of the community. The outlaw exists as a problem for the state. His social identity is defined exclusively in terms of the negative.


The civil disobedient, captured in such moral exemplars as Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, does not view law as a nuisance or as restricting his self-expression and individuality. He respects the concept of law. He is so enamored of the civilizing notion of law that it provides him with the moral fuel that invigorates his commitment to disobey the law. It is this or that law he is disobeying because it betrays the spirit of law in general. It is unjust laws that he disobeys. The moral correctness of his principles and his implacable conscience are what give him the confidence to bring unjust laws to public scrutiny. He offers them up to the public and to lawmakers with the hope that the impulse to right action that is anchored in every heart will be moved when it recognizes the unfairness of a law, and its harm to human life. Laws restricting interracial marriage and forbidding racial groups from sitting in the front of a bus are degrading to human lives.

Law is designed to protect human well-being, not violate it. Human reason will acknowledge this travesty. The civil disobedient wants to reform law by utilizing the power of law. He does not want the law overturned by fiat. When that unjust law is overturned, this must never be reversed. This guarantee can be accomplished only by strengthening the concept of law and its moral power to coerce, reform, and restrain human conduct. The civil disobedient is not a rebel or even a revolutionary. His ruling principles are simply justice and fairness.

The shared feature of the nomad, the outlaw and the civil disobedient is what follows from their positions. Personal cost and sacrifice are built into the idea of radicalism. They are what give it its pathos and moral undertone. The radical is radical because, among other things, knowing what he knows he goes forth and he suffers. He affirms the vision and sacrifices himself to the lifetime scars of his battles. To sustain this is radical. To live this way unselfconsciously is to be an extraordinary human being. For this reason, the idea of the American professor in  the humanities as a radical intellectual is pretty amusing.