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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
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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 

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