Statues, Philosophy & Civil Disobedience

I look at the Black Lives Matter protests and the controversial debate around statues like Edward Colston, Cecil Rhodes, and King Leopold II. What can the philosophy of history and civil disobedience tell us about this moment? What exactly is a statue for? What is public history? How do we think about them ethically? And when is Civil Disobedience justified? I look at John Rawls, W.E.B du Bois, and Malcolm X in particular for some answers.

Statues are philosophical objects. They are clearly symbolic of something more than the material they’re cast in. They embody phenomena that philosophers often try to understand– publicness, memory, the nature of history, the abstract and the concrete. Across the world – from the coloniser Cecil Rhodes to slaver King Leopold III and confederate president Jefferson Davis - inanimate busts have become a battleground.

To their more mainstream defenders, the argument is usually twofold. That first, these monuments are legitimate because they memorialise a past that, for good or bad, is our history. And second, that even if memorialising a particular figure was not legitimate, removing statues extrajudicially at the whims of the mob is itself unethical and, furthermore, has dangerous consequences for democracy.

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Credits:

Stock footage provided by Videvo, downloaded from

Sources:

Carole Steedman, Dust.

Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights.

Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice

Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History

W.E.B du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice