The concept of civil disobedience is back to the center of contemporary political theory, being marked by intense debates among diverse and often-conflicting positions. William Scheuerman's recent book, Civil Disobedience, expresses vividly the disputes over the historical developments of this concept by reconstructing different interpretive traits and highlighting their major contentions. This article proposes an evaluation of Scheuerman's assess of one of these particular trends, the so-called democratic model, which finds in Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas their main theoretical exponents. I question the main criticisms directed by him to the Arendtian elaboration of civil disobedience and the supposed improvement of this concept in the work of Habermas. Finally, it is argued that in his depiction of the democratic model, Scheuerman expresses, albeit implicitly, his own substantial theoretical preferences, which will be challenged in the name of a more pronounced link between democracy and social transformation found in Arendt's work.
