IB Philosophy 8.2.3 Social Discontent and Social Change Notes

The Nature of Social Discontent

1. The Unit 8 question, "How should we live together in a society?," assumes that the answer can change. Social discontent is the engine of that change: the force that drives societies to revise their institutions, redistribute power, and renegotiate the terms of collective life.
   1. Social discontent arises when a significant portion of a population perceives a gap between existing social arrangements and their sense of justice, dignity, or wellbeing. This perception may be triggered by economic deprivation, political exclusion, cultural suppression, or the recognition that supposedly universal rights are applied selectively.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) that discontent often intensifies not during periods of greatest oppression but when conditions begin to improve. As people gain a taste of freedom or prosperity, their expectations rise faster than institutions can adapt, producing what scholars call the revolution of rising expectations.
   1. Pre-revolutionary France illustrates the paradox: it was precisely the improving conditions under Louis XVI's reforms that raised expectations faster than institutions could satisfy them, turning modest progress into a catalyst for upheaval.
3. Karl Marx offered a structural account of discontent rooted in material conditions (the actual physical and economic circumstances of people's lives: whether they can afford food, housing, and healthcare). For Marx, social discontent is not a psychological aberration but the rational response of oppressed classes to their exploitation.
   1. The internal tensions built into any economic system generate pressures that eventually make the existing order unsustainable.
   2. Marx argued that class consciousness (the moment when workers realise their shared position and shared interests as a class, rather than seeing their suffering as personal bad luck) transforms individual frustration into collective action. Workers who recognise that their suffering is not personal bad luck but a structural feature of capitalism become capable of organised resistance.

Class Consciousness, Race, and the Critique of the Social Contract

1. Discontent becomes revolutionary when people develop a shared explanation of why things are unjust and a clear picture of how to change them. The industrial strikes of the nineteenth century illustrate this: individual workers who experienced exploitation as personal misfortune were powerless, but workers who recognised their shared structural position and organised collectively could challenge the system itself.
2. As Charles W. Mills argued in The Racial Contract (explored in 8.2.1), the social contract itself was historically structured to exclude non-white peoples, generating forms of discontent rooted not in individual grievance but in the very foundations of political order.
   1. Where Marx located the source of discontent in class exploitation, Mills revealed a racial dimension built into the contract from its inception.
3. Not all discontent is progressive. Reactionary discontent (discontent aimed at pushing society back toward older hierarchies, rather than forward toward greater equality) may arise when people feel that their traditional privileges or social position are being eroded.
   1. The philosophical challenge is distinguishing between discontent rooted in legitimate grievances (demands for equal treatment) and discontent rooted in the desire to preserve unjust advantages.
4. As discussed in 8.2.2, the limits of tolerance become visible when marginalised groups recognise that being tolerated is not the same as being treated as equals. The transition from acceptance of tolerance to the demand for genuine equality is itself a form of social discontent, one that challenges the terms on which coexistence has been structured.
5. Social discontent thus acts as a warning signal in political philosophy. Its presence indicates that existing arrangements are failing to meet the legitimate needs or aspirations of members of society.
   1. A political order that suppresses discontent rather than addressing its causes is, on this view, concealing rather than resolving injustice.

Civil Disobedience as a Philosophy of Protest

1. Henry David Thoreau coined the term "civil disobedience" in his 1849 essay, arguing that individuals have a moral obligation to refuse compliance with unjust laws. Thoreau's resistance to the US government's support of slavery and the Mexican War established the principle that conscience can override legal obligation when the law itself perpetuates injustice.

1. Mahatma Gandhi developed Thoreau's ideas into a comprehensive political strategy. Gandhi's concept of satyagraha ("truth-force" or "soul-force") held that nonviolent resistance was not merely a tactic but a moral practice that transforms both the resister and the oppressor.
   1. Through disciplined suffering (deliberately enduring arrest, beatings, or hardship without retaliating), the protester reveals the violence inherent in the unjust system. The 1930 Salt March, in which Gandhi led thousands on a 240-mile walk to the sea to make salt in defiance of British tax law, exemplified satyagraha in action.
   2. The marchers' disciplined nonviolence in the face of police brutality revealed the moral bankruptcy of the colonial system to a global audience.
2. Martin Luther King Jr. adapted civil disobedience to the American civil rights movement. In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963), King argued that there is a moral distinction between just and unjust laws.
   1. A just law uplifts human personality. An unjust law degrades it.