The Persistence of Revolutionary Spirit - Civil Disobedience according to Hannah Arendt in reference to the Liberal Tradition

In this thesis, I compare Hannah Arendt's view on political disobedience with the positions of three liberal theorists, namely, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz. The aim of this comparison consists in identifying the difficulties found in these later theories to justify political and democratic disobedience and in discussing the way in which Arendt's approach to politics could help us to solve these difficulties. My main methodological hypothesis is that the political participation of citizens plays a secondary role in these liberal theories. For the latter, citizen participation should be limited either because of its possible disturbing effects on the necessary political and social stability, which would ensure the functioning of just institutions (Rawls), or because it would threaten the principles of democratic politics, namely the majority principle and the corresponding right to vote (Dworkin), or because liberal societies par definitionem ensure political rights and so civil disobedience is unjustified in most cases (Raz). Against this, Hannah Arendt proposes a theoretical model that could solve the aforementioned difficulties, because it has as its starting point a primacy of political freedom over the protection of rights. Her approach to the difference between negative and..