Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T03:48:19.121Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Citizenship, Cowardice, and Freedom of Conscience: British Pacifists in the Second World War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2015

Tobias Kelly
Tobias Kelly*
Affiliation:
Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
*
toby.kelly@ed.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Freedom of conscience is widely claimed as a central principle of liberal democracy, but what is conscience and how do we know what it looks like? Rather than treat conscience as a transcendent category, this paper examines claims of conscience as rooted in distinct cultural and political histories. I focus on debates about conscientious objection in Second World War Britain, and argue that, there, persuasive claims of conscience were widely associated with a form of “detached conviction.” Yet evidence of such “detached convictions” always verged on being interpreted as deliberate manipulation and calculation. More broadly, I argue that the protection of freedom of conscience is necessarily incomplete and unstable. The difficulties in recognizing individual conscience point to anxieties within liberal democracy. Not only strangers are suspect and mistrusted, but also those who claim to stand most strongly by the principles of liberal citizenship.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 694 - 722
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Allport, Alan. 2010. Demobbed: Coming Home after the Second World War. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Andrew, Edward. 2001. Conscience and Its Critics: Protestant Conscience, Enlightenment Reason and Modern Subjectivity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1972. Crisis in the Republic. New York: Harcourt.Google Scholar
Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barker, Rachel. 1982. Conscience, Government and War: Conscientious Objection in Britain, 1939–1945. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Baylor, Michael. 1977. Action and Person: Conscience in Late Scholasticism and the Young Luther. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bibbings, Lois. 2010. Telling Tales about Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service during the First World War. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.Google Scholar
Bourke, Joanna. 2000. An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in 20th Century Warfare. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Brockway, Fenner. 1977. Towards Tomorrow: The Autobiography of Fenner Brockway. London: Hart-Davis.Google Scholar
Brown, Wendy. 2008. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Calder, Angus. 1993. The People's War: Britain 1939–1945. London: Pimlico.Google Scholar
Ceadel, Martin. 1980. Pacifism in Britain, 1914–1945: Defining a Faith. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Ceadel, Martin. 2003. The Quaker Peace Testimony and Its Contribution to the British Peace Movement: An Overview. Quaker Studies 7, 1: 9–29.Google Scholar
Chadwick, Henry. 1969. Some Reflections on Conscience: Greek, Jewish and Christian. London: Council of Christians and Jews.Google Scholar
Cohen, Eliot. 1985. Citizens and Soldiers: Dilemmas of Military Service. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Connolly, William. 1999. Why I Am not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Das, Veena and Deborah, Poole, eds. 2004. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
De Jong, C. 2000. The Freedom of Thought, Conscience and Religion or Belief in the United Nations (1946–1992). Oxford: Hart.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena: Introduction to the Problem of Signs in Husserl's Phenomenology. In Speech and Phenomena and other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Allison, David B., trans. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Durbach, Nadja. 2001. Class, Gender and the Conscientious Objector to Vaccination, 1898–1907. Journal of British Studies 41, 1: 58–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engelke, Matthew. 2010. Religion and the Media Turn: A Review Essay. American Ethnologist 37, 2: 371–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, Carolyn. 2001. Freedom of Religion under the European Convention on Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, Illana. 2007. The Quaker Way: Ethical Labor and Humanitarian Relief. American Ethnologist 34, 4: 689–705.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Field, G. C. 1945. Pacifism and Conscientious Objection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1983. Afterword: The Subject in Power. In Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Rabinow, Paul, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy and Honneth, Axel. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition: A Political Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freeden, Michael. 1986. Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought, 1914–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glass, Charles. 2013. The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jurgen. 2006. Religion in the Public Sphere. European Journal of Philosophy 14, 1: 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halfin, Igal. 2001. Looking into the Oppositionists’ Souls: Inquisition Communist Style. Russian Review 60: 316–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, Denis. 1949. Challenge of Conscience: The Story of the Conscientious Objectors, 1939–1949. London: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 1996. The Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keane, Webb. 1997. Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kelly, Tobias and Thiranagama, Sharika. 2011. Introduction: Specters of Treason. In Thiranagama, Sharika and Kelly, Tobias, eds., Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State Building. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Killingray, David. 2010. Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War. Woodbridge: James Currey.Google Scholar
Kravel-Tovi, Michal. 2012. Rite of Passing: Bureaucratic Encounters, Dramaturgy, and Jewish Conversion in Israel. American Ethnologist 39, 2: 371–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuhlman, Jurgen and Lippert, Ekkehard. 1993. The Federal Republic of Germany: Conscientious Objection as Social Welfare. In Moskos, Charles C. and Chambers, John Whiteclay, eds., The New Conscientious Objection: From Sacred to Secular Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Laborde, Cecile. 2012. Protecting Freedom of Religion in the Secular Age. Immanent Frame Blog. At: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2012/04/23/protecting-freedom-of-religion-in-the-secular-age/.Google Scholar
Langbein, John. 2006. Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Levi, Margaret. 1997. Consent, Dissent and Patriotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locke, John. 1689. Letters Concerning Toleration. London: Millar.Google Scholar
Locke, John. 1695. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis.Google Scholar
Maclure, Jocelyn and Taylor, Charles. 2011. Secularism and Freedom of Conscience. Todd, Jane Marie, trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. 2006. Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation. Public Culture 18, 2: 323–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. 2012. Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East. Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, 2: 418–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mill, John Stewart. 2002. Utilitarianism. Indianapolis: Hackett.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha. 2010. Liberty of Conscience. New York: Basic.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha. 2012. The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age. Cambridge: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Orwell, George. 1942. Pacifism and the War. Partisan Review (Aug.–Sept.): 419–25.Google Scholar
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Rae, John. 1970. Conscience and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas. 1989. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rose, Sonya. 2003. Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sloterdijk, Peter. 1988. Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. 2010. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: Penguin.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sullivan, Winnifred. 2007. The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1992a. Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1992b. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition: Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. 1962. The Free-Born Englishman. New Left Review 1, 15: 43–47.Google Scholar
Thoreau, Henry David. 1983. Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Walzer, Michael. 1970. Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Weiss, Erica. 2011. The Interrupted Sacrifice: Hegemony and Moral Crisis among Israeli Conscientious Objectors. American Ethnologist 38, 3: 576–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiss, Erica. 2012. Principle or Pathology? Adjudicating the Right to Conscience in the Israeli Military. American Anthropologist 114, 1: 81–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wyckes, David. 1994. Friends, Parliament and the Toleration Act. Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45: 42–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.Google Scholar