Civil disobedience in a distorted public sphere

Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy (3):27-36 (2012)
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Abstract

Rawls’s notion of civil disobedience, which still dominates the literature on this subject, comprises at least these three characteristics: it involves breaking the law, is non-violent and public. But implicit in this notion is a certain tension: it shows pessisimism about the proper functioning of the public sphere as earlier normal appeals have failed, but it also displays a certain optimism about its proper functioning as it assumes that civil disobedience may be effective. In my paper I argue that Rawls cannot explain how civil disobedience may be effective as a public appeal for social justice because he does not fully understand what it means for civil disobedience to be public in relation to the public sphere. His analysis would require an additional notion of publicity which, as I argue, is the notion of hermeneutical publicity. From a Bourdieusian perspective I then make a case for the claim that public spheres always suffer from hermeneutic invisibility. This may explain why non-violent appeals for social justice fail as dialogical practices. Finally I suggest how we nevertheless could understand that civil disobedience can be effective as a dialogical practice.

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Martin Blaakman
Inholland University of Applied Sciences

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References found in this work

Outline of a Theory of Practice.Pierre Bourdieu - 1972 - Human Studies 4 (3):273-278.
Collected papers.John Rawls - 1999 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Edited by Samuel Richard Freeman.
Forms of Talk.Erving Goffman - 1979 - Human Studies 5 (2):147-157.
Forms of Talk.Erving Goffman - 1981 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 17 (3):181-182.

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