Ervin Kondakciu

The contribution examines Rawls’ model of disobedient politics from the perspective of political ontology. The phenomenology of disobedience yields that it is a form of collective action with high potential costs. Thus, every model of disobedient politics must provide solutions to this particular collective action problem. In Rawls’s case such solutions must be found in his conception of personhood. Rawls views persons as entities with two fundamental capacities: rationality and reasonableness. I argue that Rawls’s political ontological assumptions enable a form of disobedient collective action that I term moral disobedience. However, I maintain that there is a downside: Rawls’s ontology depoliticizes disobedient politics by overlooking the transformative and critical nature of disobedience in challenging established social practices and institutions. This, I contend, narrows the scope of disobedient politics and does not fully address the needs of social movements advocating for broader changes.