Do citizens of liberal democratic states have a moral right to engage in civil disobedience? Famously, Joseph Raz argued that they do not. In this article, I defend his argument against some recent challenges, but show how it is tied to a particular model of civil disobedience. On this model, the purpose of civil disobedience is to protest and prevent particularly egregious violations of justice. A moral right to civil disobedience can be grounded on a different model, where the function (...) of civil disobedience is to identify and counterbalance democratic deficits. Against the widespread tendency amongst theorists of civil disobedience to want to defend civil disobedience as the exercise of a moral right, however, I do not then argue for the adoption of the democratic model. Whilst I acknowledge the reasons behind wanting a rights-based defence, and concede that different kinds of civil disobedience might have to be defended on different grounds, I sound a note of caution. The meta-theoretical relation between moral grounds and political function uncovered in this article works both ways. It should make theorists more mindful of the self-understanding to which a rights-based moral defence of civil disobedience commits protesters. (shrink)

Democracies worldwide are under stress. Two distinct families of explanation can be identified by the relative emphasis they place on the cultural versus the economic. Protesting against this dichotomy, there are those who insist that economic and cultural grievances interact. A conceptual scheme which ties together the economic and the cultural through interaction, however, rests on a prior separation. In this article, a richer and more plausible account of the relationship between transformations of work and contemporary democratic decay is developed. (...) This account is based on a social practice model of work, in which the economic and the cultural are entirely intertwined. The social practice of work is among other things a privileged site for the realisation of certain ‘goods of work’. These include self-respect, self-esteem and self-realisation. It is by altering expectations about the realisation of the goods of work that transformations of work have contributed to an environment within which democracies are under stress. (shrink)

Democracies worldwide are under stress. Two distinct families of explanation can be identified by the relative emphasis they place on the cultural versus the economic. Protesting against this dichotomy, there are those who insist that economic and cultural grievances interact. A conceptual scheme which ties together the economic and the cultural through interaction, however, rests on a prior separation. In this article, a richer and more plausible account of the relationship between transformations of work and contemporary democratic decay is developed. (...) This account is based on a social practice model of work, in which the economic and the cultural are entirely intertwined. The social practice of work is among other things a privileged site for the realisation of certain ‘goods of work’. These include self-respect, self-esteem and self-realisation. It is by altering expectations about the realisation of the goods of work that transformations of work have contributed to an environment within which democracies are under stress. (shrink)