James Field

James Field (PhD in Political Theory and Philosophy, 2024), Democratic Constitutions, Disobedient Citizens: Conflict and Culture in Habermas’ Political Theory

This thesis reads Habermas’ political theory in light of his arguments about civil disobedience. I argue that the concept of civil disobedience stands in as a model of democratic conflictuality that is otherwise absent from Habermas’ formal political theory. The idea of social conflict within boundaries, formed not by legality but by a democratic ethos, is the basis of what I term ‘disobedient citizenship’, a concept implicit in Habermas’s theory that nonetheless displaces his model of procedural civic patriotism as the cultural centre of democratic politics.

I argue that Habermas’s central programmatic claim that “democracy and the rule of law are internally related” can be revisited from this perspective. In addition, his writings on religion and interstate relations indicate that the notion of disobedient citizenship is central to spaces of ‘complementary freedoms’ that are constituted by a culture of tolerance, rather than procedural secularism or international law. The thesis argues that both conflict and tolerance are core values in his democratic theory.

The thesis therefore presents a critical but sympathetic reading of Habermas’ ‘unwritten monograph’ on political theory. It argues that the modernity of democracy emerges in Habermas’s work not primarily through epistemic or cognitive rationality but, rather, through the openness with which the democratic imagination approaches disagreement and conflict, evaluates and sets limits to it.

Supervisors: Professor John Rundell, Dr Gerhard Wiesenfeldt