ABSTRACT
In a piece on civil disobedience, Jürgen Habermas suggests that we take the treatment of civil disobedience as a litmus test of the maturity of the political culture of a constitutional democracy. 1 ‘Every constitutional democracy that is sure of itself’, he writes, ‘considers civil disobedience as a normalized—because necessary—component of its political culture’. 2 In this chapter, I take Habermas's treatment of civil disobedience as a litmus test of the way he deals with the imperfectness of a deliberative, constitutional democracy. Civil disobedience precisely points to a lack in the legitimacy of the law. I am interested in what Habermas's writings on civil disobedience tell us about his notion of deliberative, constitutional democracy ‘before the revolution’, to quote the title of a recent paper on deliberative democracy and civil disobedience by Archon Fung. 3
