Filozofska istraživanja, Vol. 43 No. 3, 2023.
Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.21464/fi43306
When the Law Becomes a “Prison”. On the Occasion of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Death of John B. Rawls
Josip Berdica
orcid.org/0000-0003-4874-0326
; Sveučilište Josipa Jurja Strossmayera u Osijeku, Pravni fakultet Osijek, Stjepana Radića 13, HR–31000 Osijek
Dražen Rudan
; Kralja Krešimira 18, HR–32100 Vinkovci
Abstract
On the twentieth anniversary of the death of one of the most important contemporary political and social philosophers, John B. Rawls (1921–2002), in this paper the authors deal with his understanding of the relationship between civil disobedience and freedom within the framework of a liberal constitutional democracy based on the rule of law. The fundamental starting point of Rawls’s theory, and thus of this work, is that civil disobedience expresses disobedience to the law within the limits of fidelity to the law, although it is at the outer edge thereof. If the freedom of thought expressing disobedience to unjust laws is one of the fundamental freedoms, then civil disobedience can be understood not only as a corrective to liberal constitutional democracy but also as a realistic attempt to “save” it. This is an important topic of contemporary political philosophy, considering the increasingly widespread discourse about the crisis of liberalism in general today, and the impact of that crisis on the institutions of liberal constitutional democracy, among which the state stands out, but in fact law and the legal system as a whole.
Keywords
John Rawls; liberal constitutional democracy; civil disobedience; freedom; law; justice
Hrčak ID:
315520
URI
Publication date:
6.11.2023.
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