Bruce E. Levine is an American clinical psychologist, often at odds with the mainstream of his profession (see critical psychology), in private practice in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Profiling a diverse group of US anti-authoritarians—from Thomas Paine to Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Lenny Bruce, and Noam Chomsky—in order to glean useful lessons from their lives, Resisting Illegitimate Authority provides political, spiritual, philosophical, and psychological tools to help those suffering violence and vilification in a society whose most ardent cheerleaders for “freedom” are often its most obedient and docile citizens.
The book provides an alternate approach that encompasses what Levine describes as the whole of our humanity, society, and culture, and which redefines depression (as a problematic strategy to shut down pain) in a way that makes enduring transformation more likely.
Levine is also the author of Commonsense Rebellion: Taking Back Your Life from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations and a World Gone Crazy (New York-London: Continuum, 2003), a protest book.
The 26 alphabetically ordered chapters of Commonsense Rebellion detail Levine's contention that the high national rates of mental illness in the United States are really just natural reactions (e.g., discontent and disconnectedness) to the oppression of what he terms an "institutional society," which he argues causes many to break down psychologically.