ABSTRACT
Dissenters, resisters and révoltés have been shunned and hounded but also glorified and protected over the centuries as political regimes and philosophers have debated whether, why and how dissent, disobedience and revolution should have a place in their system of governance. Prior to social contract theory, dissenters were generally perceived as the worst kind of traitors – traitors that no one was willing to protect (Baumgold 1993; Post 2006). But with the espousal of theories such as those of Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, dissenters came to be seen as respectable ‘competitors’, and by the early days of the French Revolution, dissent was encouraged by some as a healthy bulwark against tyranny (Kittrie 1981; Mably 1972). French legal scholar Georges Vidal (quoted in Kittrie 1981: 292-3) wrote in 1916 that the ‘political criminal’ once treated as a ‘public enemy’ had become ‘a friend of the public good, as a man of progress, desirous of bettering the political institutions of his country, having laudable intentions, hastening the onward march of humanity’.
