SOURCE:

Faculty: Arts
Department: Department Of Philosophy

CONTRIBUTORS:

Onyeulor, B.C;
Umeogu, B;

ABSTRACT:

Liberty is the most crucial value intrinsic in the human being. There are many factors that contribute to the fulfillment and happiness of the human being in the society. Apart from liberty, the human being requires a systemic and organized political ideology that would bring liberation and self-realization. At this juncture, many political philosophers had suggested democracy as the best form of government. Though, Francis Fukuyama proposed that with the dawn of liberal democracy has come the end of history by which, in his own view, democracy is the only perfect political ideology that will liberate man, political analysts have raised a critique against the thesis of Fukuyama by demonstrating that liberalism and democracy are antithetical to each other.But Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatthad shown in How Democracies Die how countries can lose their democracy more slowly and insidiously.They assert that, beyond the obvious mechanisms we depend on, democracies work best when these mechanisms are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms of mutual toleration of competing parties and forbearance in deploying institutional prerogatives. They also develop a set of four behavioural warning signs to help identify an authoritarian. The crux of this dissertation lies in the use of the concept of liberty in John Stuart Mill to find philosophical implication for the socio-political and economic situation associated with the Arab Spring of 2010 to 2017. A pure intellection and articulation of the problem of liberty demands a critical examination of the problem in its dialectical form. Therefore, Mill proposed a balance between individual liberty and governmental authority. The events of Arab Spring began with an economic reasoning but then continued with liberal-democratic demands. The method of analysis is employed for logical clarification of concepts. The research reveals that liberty serves as the interface between Arab Spring and democracy: peoples’ rights and freedom and the clash of civilizations are behind these uprisings. Arab Spring suggests reformation that will find a suitable political system for the Arab region that would be peculiar to them, which will not suppress the individual and minorities liberties. This research suggests ‘Arabcracy,’ a new ideology as a possible political system that will require further inquiry and investigation.