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not know how to choose between obedience to madness and dis–
obedience
in
the name of reason.
Over and above its specific local significance, the
Declaration
has a meaning that concerns us all. As fervidly as almost every
nation has heretofore claimed the right not to be oppressed, a clear
bold voice within one nation is raised upholding
the duty to oppress.
The assertion of the right to disobedience derives directly from
this duty.
We believe that the right to disobedience exists, and that it is
of the essence of democracy. It is an extreme right, to be exercised
only in extreme circumstances. But when such circumstances occur,
this right imposes itself by its own force. And we are well aware
that in the West as in the East there is still the possibility that the
individual citizen, confronted with inordinate state power, be forced
to choose between his narrow duty to the nation and every man's
higher and graver duty to the living community of men.
Lionel Abel
Hannah Arendt
A. J. Ayer
Eric Bentley
Isaiah Berlin
Italo Calvino
Nicola Chiaromonte
Willem De Kooning
William Demby
Georgio de Santillana
Federico Fellini
Herbert Ferber
Vittorio Gassman
Philip Guston
Elizabeth Hardwick
Richard Hoggart
Irving Howe
Paul Ignotus
Dan Jacobson
Alfred Kazin
Franz Kline
Stanley Kunin
Robert Lowell
Mary McCarthy
Dwight Macdonald
Norman Mailer
Paolo Milano
Elsa Morante
Alberto Moravia
Robert Motherwell
Ernest Nagel
Constantino Nivole
Willia.m Phillips
Guido Piovene
Norman Podhoren
Renato Poggioli
Vasco Pratolini
Salvatore Quasimodo
Philip Rahv
Harold Rosenberg
Mark Rothko
Bertrand Russell
John Russell
Meyer Schapiro
Ignazio Silone
Giuseppe Ungaretti
Edgar Varese
Lionello Venturi
Elio Vittorini
