aristotle on citizenship essay

Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of Political Participation

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This chapter examines and summarizes Aristotle’s views about citizenship and education. Aristotle defines citizenship functionally, rather than by birth or status, and he understood participation and political authority to be essential to citizenship. Aristotle’s definition of citizenship is tied tightly to his theory of the good human life and to his ethics of virtue. A good citizen in the ideal state is identical to the fully ethically virtuous person. For Aristotle, the virtues of living a good human life are the same as those needed to rule and be ruled in turn. Because of the link between ethics and politics of the person, Aristotle’s (admittedly incomplete) program for civic education is connected to his program for ethical training. This makes the civic educational process intensive and somewhat foreign to modern conceptions of civic preparation. Despite this somewhat foreign idea of education, a number of influential thinkers today have drawn on Aristotelian ideas of citizenship to develop their own theories of governance for modern states today. Social democrats, communitarians, and others looking to revive the link between civic education and participatory communities have all looked explicitly (and sometimes implicitly) to Aristotle for guidance.

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Miller, B. (2019). Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of Political Participation. In: Peterson, A., Stahl, G., Soong, H. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67905-1_34-1

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Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship

Susan D. Collins, Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship , Cambridge University Press, 2006, 193pp., $70.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521860466.

Reviewed by Thomas W. Smith, Villanova University

Susan Collins seeks a renewed conception of citizenship through an investigation of Aristotle's political philosophy. This is necessary, she argues, because liberal political theory has failed to reckon with the fact that the human good has an unavoidable political dimension. Liberal theorists often flee from the fact that every political community "requires specific virtues, molds characters, and shapes its citizens' vision of the good" (2). Their deferral of the question, "What is good for us to be and do?" leads not merely to a kind of self-righteous blindness to the ways in which liberalism shapes the public and private lives of its citizens. It also eviscerates liberalism's ability to respond to the challenge of "creedal and salvationist religions" (166) which in their more vociferous forms argue that liberalism is morally bankrupt. So we need a more capacious understanding of the seriousness and nobility of citizenship, along with a sense of its proper limits.

The book can be divided into two parts. The first articulates the problematic character of various liberal conceptions of citizenship and argues persuasively that the anemia of these conceptions flows from the unwillingness to undertake a systematic investigation of the question, "What is good for human beings?" The second part is a sustained commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics . Collins argues that this turn to Aristotle is defensible precisely because he does not begin from liberal presuppositions (2). Insofar as he presents an argument about the human good and its relationship to political life, he adds something essential to our debate over the meaning of citizenship that liberalism needs but cannot supply.

The author's patient, thoughtful and articulate investigation of contemporary liberal political philosophy is the best part of the book. Increasingly, she points out, liberalism has called into question "its own principles of justice and morality" (9). For example, critics sympathetic to liberalism have picked apart the Rawlsian emphasis on procedural liberalism and justice as fairness. They have eviscerated the liberal pretension to neutrality. They have criticized the hard distinction between a public realm informed by liberal principles and a private realm unaffected by the social and political forces liberalism generates. Collins thinks that these sorts of arguments have brought clarity about the need to confront the question of the human good in our regime. Yet this clarity challenges liberalism at its core. Increasingly liberal theorists recognize that liberalism requires civic education in certain virtues. However, with certain prominent exceptions, they are unwilling to argue that liberalism ought to try to transform their citizens' comprehensive views or cultivate a way of life. Aristotle can rescue us from this bind because his account of civic education faces unapologetically the fact that regimes form citizens. At the same time he argues that the highest human good is distinct from the political good, and so requires an ironic appreciation of the limits of citizen virtue.

Collins says that Aristotle does not take his bearings from "the requirements of politics or the common good simply" (41-2). Rather, moral action is understood by the political community as "good for the one who performs it" as well (42). The law serves both the common good and the desire to make citizens noble and good (44). Collins argues that citizens are especially attracted to to kalon , which she translates as "the noble." She focuses her treatment of moral virtue almost exclusively on courage. In war the welfare of the entire community is at stake. This justifies the risk of death in battle. Why would such an action be in my interest, however? Devotion to the noble, Collins argues, involves an act of sacrifice or self-forgetting (53). It involves dedication to moral virtue, understood as in part distinct from our own interests (54). She says, "In performing a noble deed, the courageous human being is shown to perform a deed that is at once selfless, in being for the sake of a higher end, and self-regarding, in being for the sake of his own virtue" (57). This tension in moral virtue leads to a kind of crisis. In the absence of resources that would allow him to remain active in virtue, the virtuous person is idle. The problem inherent in moral virtue is this: the "means to the greatest scope of noble action are open only to the tyrant" (64). Yet justice -- fairness to the community -- precludes such an outcome. Longing for the noble leads us to a situation in which moral virtue requires us to both become tyrants, and to shy away from that tyranny.

Collins pursues this point further in her subsequent discussion of justice. Here she argues that it is impossible to reconcile the requirements of the common good with the dedication to one's own perfection in virtue (68). She says, "Justice as a mean is not defined in relation to our good or perfection, but in terms of a principle of equality that establishes what is equal and fair in relation to the common good and that accords with the equality constituting the 'regime'" (69). The common good and our own perfection are dichotomous (73). In fact, particular justice is necessarily defined "by a standard other than the good condition of an individual with respect to moral virtue" (78). The problem is not simply that civic education cannot reach out for the perfection of the human good in philosophy. It cannot even reconcile the tensions within moral virtue itself fully (80).

The question of the good life must be recast in light of these realizations. Law educates, and indeed, coerces, citizens in light of its efforts to promote virtue for the sake of the community. Yet again, virtue requires power in order to be active. Since law forbids us to acquire political power unjustly, and we need power to be active in virtue, those who love virtue are never wholly satisfied if they are subordinated to law (115). Aristotle recasts the human good in light of this problem by arguing that the longing for self-sufficient activity is completed in the life of philosophy, which suddenly appears as the highest human good (116). Yet the life of philosophy is antithetical to political life, in part because while law needs its wisdom, law's authority cannot tolerate wisdom as a competing authority (117). While noble, political life is an impediment to one's well-being in several respects (146). For the citizen who wishes for rule to afford him the opportunity to exercise virtue, the constraint associated with the demands of the common good will chafe. Indeed, in certain cases, ostracism is the right course of action for the community to protect its advantage from the claims of superior virtue. In short, "no regime can accommodate the common advantage in the full sense: the advantage of the whole city -- of every member who contributes to its existence and end -- and the advantage of those who, as citizens, merit ruling and being ruled in turn" (141). In addition, those who are devoted to the philosophic life are also constrained by the demands of politics. Collins says that political life is an "impediment to one's own well-being" for the philosopher (146).

Collins' response to the difficulties of citizenship is found in her explication of wittiness. Humor can "liberate a person from the conventions laid down by the lawgiver" (158). To laugh at a convention is to be liberated from it. Both citizens and philosophers have a shared interest in cultivating this liberation. Citizens do because the political community cannot reconcile the tensions within the moral virtues it seeks to promote. Philosophers do, because philosophy is associated with liberation from convention (162). "As part of moral virtue that points beyond the political life, wittiness occupies the middle ground between a dogmatic commitment to the law and skeptical alienation from it" (163). In its moderation, it pays respect to the attractiveness and seriousness inherent in the devotion to the noble. However, it still is able to laugh at convention when it claims to cultivate the whole human good. In sum, wittiness avoids the Scylla of cosmopolitan indifference to community virtue and the Charybdis of parochial and dogmatic patriotism.

Those familiar with the Straussian approach to political philosophy should be able to anticipate the conclusion of Collins' argument, although not its course, which is often very clever. One could question several of her interpretations of Aristotle. One focus of the argument, for example, is that moral virtue requires material to be active, and so tends to tyranny. However, Aristotle says explicitly that "we can do noble acts without ruling earth and sea" because what we actually need for such actions is not excessive (see Nicomachean Ethics X.8.1179a 1-15; also Politics VII.3.1325b1-5). Further, Collins asserts several times that the common good is against our individual interests (e.g. 109). If so, it is not clear what Aristotle's repeated use of the term "common" could mean. What would seem to be required here is a detailed investigation of Aristotle's discussion of the various meanings of the term philia as well as an explication of Aristotle's insistence that philia is connected to justice (e.g., NE VII.1.1155a25). The best kind of friends are "other selves" for Aristotle. Could an analogous relationship apply among fellow citizens or not? Unfortunately, Collins does not dwell on Aristotle's discussion of philia . Finally, for Aristotle, wittiness is the mean between boorishness and buffoonery, not necessarily between cosmopolitan cynicism about politics and patriotic moralism. In any case, it is not clear that comedy rightly understood can provide a public basis for reconsideration of what she takes to be our anemic conceptions of citizenship. Her argument is that the problems of liberal citizenship demand a compelling account of the human good. So the important issue is not whether her discussion of wittiness is true to Aristotle. It is whether it is capable of providing a publicly compelling solution to the problem she sets.

Since to quibble over the possible meanings of texts from Aristotle is to invite disagreements about hermeneutical strategies, it is helpful to articulate those strategies. One is the assertion of a definite meaning of a term, and the subsequent employment of that term in a univocal way. This consistently univocal use of terms generates tensions, contradictions, and dichotomies that might not otherwise appear if terms were employed in more subtle ways. In the most important case, Collins translates the term " to kalon " as "the noble," defining it as a self-sacrificing devotion to moral virtue. Yet this stacks the deck in favor of her critique of moral virtue and thus her subsequent argument about the problems of common life. If "the noble" means self-sacrifice for moral virtue, then by definition, moral virtue can never be completely in our interest, even though the community needs it. Another compelling translation of to kalon is, "the beautiful." Often, we are simply attracted to what is beautiful, and describe people's actions in this way. What is beautiful does not always demand sacrifice, however, yet Collins consistently makes the hard case of courage the central case for her articulation of the problems with moral virtue. Could her account hold for other virtues she does not discuss, such as temperance or generosity? Regardless, let us explore the problem of courage and beauty briefly. The Union defenders on Cemetery Ridge famously looked out at Pickett's troops crossing the Gettysburg farmland and wondered at their beauty. What questions do we have to ask to wrestle adequately with this strange experience? Can it be in our interest to engage in a beautiful act, even if we risk harm in other respects? How can we understand the implications of our attraction to different kinds of beauty, especially if we are attracted in the face of danger? Is an attraction to beautiful actions that arises in political life related positively to the desire for the good, and so even to a life of philosophy? What is the relationship of beauty to the good, anyway? Are there analogical extensions of the term " to kalon " that might help us understand what this experience means? Or must the term be used in a univocal way? Can self-gift and sacrifice somehow be in our interest? If so, is this a paradox or a contradiction? Raising such questions involves us in a host of difficulties, of course. It is important that they can only be raised and pursued by exploring the different possible meanings of a rich and complex term like to kalon . Insisting on a single meaning obfuscates questions our experiences of beauty bring about.

Yet even within the limits set by Collins' use of this term, a book that argues that what liberal democratic societies most need is a systematic investigation of the human good ought to raise other fundamental questions. What is this "self" that can be attracted to something that requires self-sacrifice? Are our desires fragmented? Are there "true" and "false" selves somehow? What would this mean for the human good? If the "good" is simply multifarious (Collins says that the various goods that politics needs are at odds with each other and with the highest human good, philosophy), what is the nature of the good, anyway? Is there a universal causal presence of good in the cosmos? If so, and if it is in some way rational, why is reason so alienating to most people, as Collins repeatedly hints that it is? If not, and the cosmos is deeply irrational, then why is a life of reason the highest human good in the first place? What does it say about a common human nature if there is no such thing as a common good? Does it mean we cannot share some deep conception of a good because there is no such thing as human nature, or because the good is not fecund enough to be shared?

A univocal treatment of language allows us to fix the meaning of even the most supple and complex of terms with precision, clarity, and certainty. It implies that language is controllable. However, this strategy lasts only so long as we do not investigate the term in play. In other words, the kind of certainty that is generated by the univocal use of a term relies on a refusal to question an authoritative definition of the term that settles its meaning. Collins gets her definition of the term to kalon from that great thinker, Leo Strauss. Ironically, for a certain kind of Straussian nothing is more unphilosophic than reliance on authority, and nothing is more philosophic than the liberation from convention. Yet the thrill of liberation is not philosophy. Indeed, genuine liberation seems to require much more than the ability to see through a convention using irony. Rather, philosophy consists in the search for wisdom and can only proceed in very small steps over a whole lifetime by patient argument over difficult questions like, "What is the human good?"

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Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of Political Participation

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• political participation Social Sciences 78%
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T1 - Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of Political Participation

AU - Miller, Benjamin

PY - 2018/10/13

Y1 - 2018/10/13

N2 - This chapter examines and summarizes Aristotle’s views about citizenship and education. Aristotle defines citizenship functionally, rather than by birth or status, and he understood participation and political authority to be essential to citizenship. Aristotle’s definition of citizenship is tied tightly to his theory of the good human life and to his ethics of virtue. A good citizen in the ideal state is identical to the fully ethically virtuous person. For Aristotle, the virtues of living a good human life are the same as those needed to rule and be ruled in turn. Because of the link between ethics and politics of the person, Aristotle’s (admittedly incomplete) program for civic education is connected to his program for ethical training. This makes the civic educational process intensive and somewhat foreign to modern conceptions of civic preparation. Despite this somewhat foreign idea of education, a number of influential thinkers today have drawn on Aristotelian ideas of citizenship to develop their own theories of governance for modern states today. Social democrats, communitarians, and others looking to revive the link between civic education and participatory communities have all looked explicitly (and sometimes implicitly) to Aristotle for guidance.

AB - This chapter examines and summarizes Aristotle’s views about citizenship and education. Aristotle defines citizenship functionally, rather than by birth or status, and he understood participation and political authority to be essential to citizenship. Aristotle’s definition of citizenship is tied tightly to his theory of the good human life and to his ethics of virtue. A good citizen in the ideal state is identical to the fully ethically virtuous person. For Aristotle, the virtues of living a good human life are the same as those needed to rule and be ruled in turn. Because of the link between ethics and politics of the person, Aristotle’s (admittedly incomplete) program for civic education is connected to his program for ethical training. This makes the civic educational process intensive and somewhat foreign to modern conceptions of civic preparation. Despite this somewhat foreign idea of education, a number of influential thinkers today have drawn on Aristotelian ideas of citizenship to develop their own theories of governance for modern states today. Social democrats, communitarians, and others looking to revive the link between civic education and participatory communities have all looked explicitly (and sometimes implicitly) to Aristotle for guidance.

KW - Aristotle

KW - Education

KW - Participation

KW - Citizenship

KW - Human nature

KW - Virtue

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-67905-1_34-1

DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-67905-1_34-1

M3 - Chapter

SN - 978-3-319-67905-1

BT - The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education

A2 - Peterson, Andrew

A2 - Stahl, Garth

A2 - Soong, Hannah

PB - Palgrave Macmillan

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Aristotle’s Politics: Critical Essays

Thomas smith , villanova university. [email protected].

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

This is a useful collection of essays, particularly for graduate students and high-powered undergraduates cutting their teeth on Aristotle, because it reflects a diversity of contemporary approaches to his political philosophy. All have been penned by scholars with impeccable credentials, and almost all have appeared previously. The chapters are not hagiographic, even when they agree with Aristotle’s approach. The editors point out that the implicit conversation among the contributors is whether Aristotle’s thinking has “some applicability to ongoing debates in contemporary political philosophy” (ix).

The volume gets off to a brisk start with Stephen Holmes’ “Aristippus In and Out of Athens.” Holmes argues that contemporary approaches to political legitimacy that rely on classical Greek underpinnings are anachronistic. Aristotle’s claim that the polis is prior to the individual has been rendered obsolete by historical changes such as the differentiation of imperium from sacerdotium in medieval Christendom, the separation of economy from polity beginning in the 1700’s, or liberalism’s distinction between state and society. Modern society’s compartmentalization should lead us to abandon Aristotle’s claims about the relationship of political parts to the whole. As a political thinker, he is not so much dangerous as useless.

In this reviewer’s opinion, the second chapter is the most provocative in the volume. Stephen Salkever argues that Aristotle’s distinctive approach to social science successfully avoids the difficulties in both empirical and interpretive approaches. In contrast to the reductionism and non-evaluative character of strict empiricism, Aristotelian social science proceeds from the lived sense that every society organizes itself around certain goals, discovered partly through common speech reflecting on practice. However, in contrast to the usual value-neutrality of interpretive approaches, Aristotle’s philosophic method provides revisable standards for judging social practices.

John Cooper’s classic essay makes the case that flourishing political communities require civic friendship. Cooper’s Aristotle claims that human beings have the natural tendency to develop conceptions of the good and organize their social life in pursuit of a common good. By contrast, Malcolm Schofield argues in Marxist fashion that Aristotle’s high-minded claims to philosophy serve as ideological justification for a set of class interests. This is most apparent in his argument for natural slavery. Schofield says that appeals to human nature construct that concept in the image of some “contingent, historically situated, and conditioned view of man” (98). The concept of human nature in play for Aristotle was the “racist” notion that barbarians deserved to be enslaved (110).

Fred D. Miller takes up the question of property in Aristotle. He inquires into such central problems as how property is justified, how property acquisition is limited by a concern for flourishing, and the quasi-public nature of property in Aristotle’s political thought.

The next three chapters revolve around the question of the relationship of Aristotelian political philosophy to various dimensions of contemporary liberal democratic practice. Jeremy Waldron’s chapter seeks to uncover some hidden implications of Aristotle’s doctrine of the wisdom of the multitude for contemporary democratic practice. What can we tease out of Aristotle’s claim that as a body, the people “may make better, wiser, and abler decisions” that the one “best man” (146)? Waldron extrapolates from Aristotle’s insight to justify the kind of pluralism of opinion that he thinks characterizes the best sorts of democratic practice. Dorothea Frede investigates Aristotle’s conception of citizenship in order to disrupt the view that his political philosophy is a corrective to Platonic elitism. For Frede, despite his “democratic-sounding language,” Aristotle is “far from being a liberal” (171). His functionalism reduces the status of citizens to the kinds of work they perform in the polis. In turn, Aristotle’s insistence that certain sorts of people must perform the lower functions on which politics partly depends, and his argument that such functionaries neither possess practical reason in the full sense nor are eligible for full citizenship, renders him just as much a proponent of class as his teacher. Frede ends her criticism on an incisive note: that we may not be as far from her Aristotle as we would like to think. Life in modern societies can render invisible the fact that our comfort “depends on the hard labor” of the less fortunate (82). Aristotle can be criticized for his class politics but not for his honesty. Finally, Jonathan Barnes inquires into the status of Aristotle’s conception of political liberty. Barnes thinks that Aristotle’s political thought tends toward totalitarianism insofar as he defines all manner of questions as political, thus subsuming too wide a swath of human life into areas the legislator can legitimately claim to control.

The last two chapters stand alone thematically. David Keyt explores dimensions of anarchism in Aristotle’s political thought. Josiah Ober employs his considerable scholarly acumen to argue that “certain features of democracy were … treated by Aristotle as emergent properties of human nature” (223). For Keyt, paradoxically, posing Aristotle’s questions about the naturalness of slavery may cast doubts on the legitimacy of all political rule. This is because the “wholesale challenge of political authority is but a short step from the wholesale challenge of slavery” (203). In the end, Keyt argues that Aristotle does not equate all rule with despotic rule; coercion is not an “essential feature of political rule” (218). Ober’s is the only essay in the volume that has not been previously published. His argument is nuanced and complex, and I cannot reproduce it here. However, his conclusion is that we can extend Aristotle’s “teleological naturalism” to argue that virtually all human beings have the capacity to become political animals. This means for him that most democratic citizens have the capacity to deliberate and that this deliberation must include a diversity of knowledge and expertise.

Of course, one can dispute particular arguments in an edited volume that tackles a wide range of issues in so complex and controversial thinker as Aristotle. Yet as a whole, the essays in this book are crisp, insightful, and representative of some of the main conventional approaches to Aristotle’s political thought. This is the volume’s strength.

My question is whether at least some of the approaches to Aristotle’s political philosophy reflected in this volume continue to be relevant. The editors claim that the aim of this book is to sharpen the issue of whether Aristotle’s Politics “has any contribution to make to contemporary debates about political life and political theory” (ix). The essays are loosely bound together. Some explore common topics, such as slavery, or the status of freedom in Aristotle’s thought. Yet they do not do so in conversation. So the editors seem correct that what unites them is their various judgments as to Aristotle’s relevance for contemporary political philosophy. Most of these excellent essays were first published in the early 1990’s. One wonders how different the question of the applicability of Aristotelian political philosophy appears post-9/11. Clearly, thinkers like Aristotle are used in various ways by people with various interests. During the Cold War, political theorists often trotted out reliable thinkers like Augustine or Aristotle to point out the proper limits of political life in contrast to communism. Since the end of that struggle, a central focus of those still interested in classical political philosophy has been its relationship to liberal democracy. Some have beaten Aristotle with the stick of individual freedom to show that his concern with civic virtue is dangerous. Proponents of classical virtue have used Aristotle to try to fill what they see as the moral vacuum of liberal neutrality. All this is very interesting — old disagreements are often the best kind. Yet if the point of the volume is to explore whether Aristotle is relevant today, one could assess the political landscape afresh since these essays were written. Perhaps September 11th forced the popular realization that liberal democracy is not self-evidently good to all, but rather rests on a set of controversial goods and virtues that are vociferously opposed by religious fundamentalists. Perhaps it also forced the realization that some of the goods that liberal democracy fosters, such as freedom and security, are in tension. Hopefully, it also forced the realization that a certain kind of zealous defense of these goods can put them in jeopardy. Finally, we may have realized that the use of power to defend and indeed, to advance, these goods has effects that are impossible to control. Taken together, these realizations add up to the kind of tragic wisdom we associate with classical political philosophy at its best. It is a rare and precious thing for tragic wisdom to become recognized as relevant, and perhaps classicists could think about ways to build upon this before the moment has passed, as it inevitably will. Finally, where does the current revival of interest in Aristotle stand in relation to our global religious divisions? It is not clear that Aristotle can provide a neutral conception of human reason that might provide the common ground for the kind of respectful inter-religious dialogue we require. Perhaps our situation resembles certain features of the Middle Ages. At that time, thinkers like Aquinas or Avicenna used Aristotle to help sharpen their understanding of their own faiths, as well as lay the groundwork for the possibility of a conversation across religious traditions. Such inquiries into the various receptions of the Aristotelian tradition would be highly relevant in part because they would give us a better sense of what unites and what divides us.

Jonathan Barnes, “Aristotle and Political Liberty”;

John M. Cooper, “Political Animals and Civic Friendship”;

Dorothea Frede, “Citizenship in Aristotle’s Politics “;

Stephen Taylor Holmes, “Aristippus in and out of Athens”;

David Keyt, “Aristotle and Anarchism”;

Fred D. Miller, Jr., “Property Rights in Aristotle”;

Josiah Ober, “Aristotle’s Natural Democracy”;

Stephen G. Salkever, “Aristotle’s Social Science”;

Malcolm Schofield, “Ideology and Philosophy in Aristotle’s Theory of Slavery”;

Jeremy Waldron, “The Wisdom of the Multitude: Some Reflections on Book 3 of Aristotle’s Politics “.

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Notes to Citizenship

1. The Encyclopédie defines the citizen as “celui qui est membre d’une société libre de plusieurs familles, qui partage les droits de cette société, et qui jouit de ses franchises.” (Translation: member of a free society of many families, who shares in the rights of this society and enjoys its immunities.) For the Encyclopédie , a citizen can only be male and families are the uncontested building blocks of society.

2. If a central element of citizenship consisted in participating in the business of ruling, as Aristotle and the republican tradition claimed, the corollary was that citizenship is impossible in a monarchy, where one can obly be a ‘subject’: having the obligation to obey the law of the realm and enjoying its protection, without the right to participate in its formulation. In other words, citizen and subject would be opposites. Against this dangerous idea, Hobbes had argued that “Whether a Common-wealth be Monarchicall, or Popular, the freedome is still the same” (Hobbes 1991, 149). According to Hobbes, whether we live in a monarchy or a republic, our obligation to obey the law is the same and our liberty “lyeth therefore only in those things, which in regulating [our]actions, the Soveraign hath praetermitted” (Hobbes 1991, 148).

3. As Rousseau famously wrote: “obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom” (Rousseau, 1978, 56).

4. See, for instance, bk. I, chaps. vi and bk. III, chaps. xv of On the Social Contract .

5. Here I follow Jean-Fabien Spitz’s reading of this passage (Spitz 1995, 481–484). For a different interpretation, see Holmes, 1984.

6. There is an abundant critical literature on Marshall’s conception. See Giddens, 1982; Turner 1992, 34–47 and Lister 2005.

7. See the essays published in Kymlicka and Norman 2000. See also Spinner 1994; Parekh 2000; May, Modood and Squires 2004; Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev 2005.

8. New issues have emerged since the 1990s. First, there has been a growing interest in the relation between education, citizenship and social inequalities. Some theorists (Levinson 2012) argue that schools should contribute to social justice by empowering children and young people from marginalized groups. This leads to the promotion of social and political activism (see Maxwell 2023 for a critique). Second, there is an important debate about the appropriate contexts and methods of citizenship education. Positions on this issue vary with one’s conceptions of citizenship and of education. For instance, while some theorists emphasize the importance of developing democratic emotions through, for instance, the teaching of literature and the arts that, by stimulating the imagination, contribute to the development of empathy and enlarged thinking (Nussbaum 2010), others highlight the fact that the schools themselves must become a democratic context in which students learn to cooperate and act together (Dewey 1916; Levinson 2012). See Culp, Drerup and Yacek 2023 for an extensive overview of the field.

9. According to Brown Prener (2023), while denationalisation made an initial comeback in the wake of 9/11 and the “War on Terror”, the 2011 Syrian revolution and the ensuing radicalisation of thousands of Westerners who joined Islamic terrorist organisations to fight for the Caliphate accelerated its expansion. As the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) faced increasing loss of territory and defeat, Western states expressed grave concern at the prospect of seeing “foreign fighter-citizens” return home. This fear has fed the constant expansion of denationalisation measures in many Western states (e.g. United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark, Austria, etc.).

10. The academic debate on the relation between multiculturalism and women’s rights was originally sparked by the publication in 1999 of Susan Okin’s provocative essay “Is multiculturalism bad for women?” (Okin 1999) and has been ongoing ever since. See, in particular: Shachar 2001, Okin 2005, Deveaux 2006, Song 2007, Phillips 2010 and 2016, Olufemi 2020. For a thoughtful study of the relation between religion, citizenship, and gender based on interviews with women of faith (Christian and Muslim) in Norway, Spain, and the UK, see Nyhagen and Halsaa 2016. See also Peucker 2018 on the wider issue of (muslim) religiosity and civic engagement in liberal democratic states.

11. There are variations between liberal nationalists. Miller’s conception of the public culture goes beyond the political realm to cover social norms (like honesty in filling tax returns) and may include certain cultural ideals (Miller 1995) while Kymlicka’s conception is comparatively thinner (Kymlick 2003). Still by attempting to put forward a thin conception of nationhood without entirely eliminating its cultural dimension, the liberal nationalist view can be said to undercut the familiar contrast between ‘civic’ and ‘cultural’ conceptions of the nation. This contrast is often illustrated by referring to the French and German traditions. See for instance: Brubaker 1992; Schnapper, 1994.

12. For Kymlicka’s euroscepticism, see Kymlicka 2001, 324–326. See also Miller 1995, 160–165. For the postnationalists, see Habermas 1996, 1998, 2001 a, b. The failure of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe to gain ratification has not fundamentally changed Habermas’s views. See Habermas 2009 and 2012.

13. David Miller (2010) has tried to refute Abizadeh’s argument by purporting to show that immigration controls are not coercive, but rather preventive. See Abizadeh’s reply to this criticism in Abizadeh 2010. For more recent discussions of Abizadeh’s argument, see Lepoutre 2016 and Steinhoff 2020.

14. In “Law of Peoples”, Rawls considers that a nation’s prosperity is determined less by exogenous factors than by endogenous factors (e.g. a nation’s political culture; the religious, philosophical, and moral traditions supporting its basic structure; the moral qualities of its citizens, etc.) (Rawls 1999, 109). He has been strongly criticized for this by authors like Charles Beitz (1979), Thomas Pogge (2002), and Seyla Benhabib (2004).

15. However, this should not make us complacent about the deep injustices upon which the state system is built and that it reproduces. As C. Lu writes, reflecting on the situation of Indigenous peoples, “reliance on states as agents of global justice can obscure the extent to which the expansion and entrenchment of a state-centric international society has generated a structural legacy of injustice and alienation for those who continue to experience subjection to the state and the international system as a colonizing project” (Lu 2019, 253).

16. See Carens 1987, 2013. Bader (1995, 217–21) formulates a sociological critique of Walzer’s argument focusing on the gap between his conception of the political community and the modern state.

17. Ferracioli highlights a problem for liberal accounts of the state’s right to exclude: the issue of discriminatory forms of exclusion (i.e. excluding some immigrants for reasons that are impermissible from a liberal perspective, for instance because of their race or religion). See her discussion of Miller’s and Wellman’s positions, as well as her own proposal, in Feraccioli 2022.

18. This consensus over the fact that wealthy liberal states are not presently doing their fair share should not obscure what remains a fundamental difference between theorists like Tan and Brock, on the one hand, and Miller and Wellman, on the other: the issue of whether it is legitimate to give more weight to the interests of compatriots rather than to count the interests of all persons equally. On this issue, see Brock 2020.

19. For an early statement, see Soysal 1994. See also Bosniak 2006 and Song 2009.

20. But see Ottonelli and Torresi (2014) arguing that if the objective is to provide temporary migrants with “a form of political voice that fits their life plans”(580), it may be more important to secure their effective right to join trade unions and migrant organisations instead of voting rights (though the two are not mutually exclusive). See also Eisenberg 2015, warning against potential tensions between extending local voting rights to long-term migrants and securing the right of national minorities to exercise self-rule in municipalities where they are the majority.

21. One may distinguish between “cash-for-passports” programs under which an individual can obtain citizenship in return for a substantial sum of money (e.g. in the case of the Maltese program: €650,000) and more traditonal programs under which “multimillionaires can receive an admission visa through a designated business-investment stream, but would then have to more or less comply with standard residency and naturalisation requirements” (Shachar and Hirschl 2014, 246). Shachar and Hirschl’s analysis also covers those individuals who are offered a fast-track to residency and citizenship because of their exceptional skills and achievements. They call this ensemble of phenomena “olympic citizenship” and offer a nuanced discussion of the normative issues that each sub-category raises.

22. Note that theorists have also been interested in discussing the increasing global acceptance of dual citizenship in the last 50 years from a normative perspective and in terms of its impact on conceptions of citizenship. See e.g. Spiro 2016, Bauböck and Haller 2021, Irving 2022.

23. Following Tan (2017), one may distinguish between three main conceptions of cosmopolitan (i.e. transnational or global) citizenship: First, citizenship under a world state; second, a “functional” or “democratic” conception focusing on the individual’s capacity “to participate in global decision-making through new transnational institutions, empowered international organizations”, etc.; third, a normative conception, spelling out the moral perspective that an individual “should adopt when considering her moral obligations and duties of justice to others” (Tan 2017, 695–696). Here I focus on the second conception since the first finds very little support in current debates while the third has no direct institutional implications (see Tan 2017, 695; 705–710).

24. For a more optimistic assessment and normative defence of English as a global lingua franca, see Van Parijs 2011.

25. For a more positive assessment, see Bohman 2004 and 2007.

26. For a critical discussion of Tully’s conception of civic citizenship, see Dunn and Owen 2014; Leydet 2023. For an attempt to develop “the potential of the concept of civic freedom for approaches to global governance”, see Wiener 2023.

27. “[T]he more the people are aware of each other’s opinions, the stronger the incentive for those who govern to take those opinions into account. When a number of individuals find themselves expressing similar views, each realizes that he is not alone in holding a particular opinion. People who express the same opinion become aware of the similarity of their views, and this gives them capacities for action that would not have been available had they kept that opinion to themselves. The less isolated people feel, the more they realize their potential strength, and the more capable they are to organize themselves and exercise pressure on the government. Awareness of a similarity of views may not always result in organization and action, but it is usually a necessary condition. … [O]ne of the distinguishing features of representative government is the possibility for the governed themselves to become aware of each other’s views at any time, independent of the authorities.”

28. Donaldson and Kymlicka are committed to a social conception of membership, which grounds membership in the existence of “ dense webs of trust, communication and cooperation with others”(Donaldson, Kymlicka 2016, 170). Domestic animals, brought by humans into significant webs of relations with them, are members of the society. Since citizenship should map onto membership in the society, domestic animals within the boundaries of a particular society ought to be recognized also as citizens. Since wild animals live outside of human society, they are not included in the argument.

29. Hooley (2018), who supports the position that we should consider domesticated animals as fellow citizens, criticizes Donaldson and Kymlicka’s account for putting too much emphasis on political agency as a criteria for citizenship (which animals fail to meet) and argues that social membership is where the emphasis should be put. In a recent article, Kymlicka (2022) seems to be moving in a similar direction.

Copyright © 2023 by Dominique Leydet < leydet . dominique @ uqam . ca >

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• Aristotle on citizenship

Aristotle on citizenship - Essay Example

• Subject: Psychology
• Type: Essay
• Level: High School
• Pages: 2 (500 words)
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• Author: chadd27

Extract of sample "Aristotle on citizenship"

Aristotle has included several very powerful chapters about citizenship in his Politics. The great philosopher believed that citizens are people who should be aware of the characters of each other on order to be responsible and able to perform the duties appropriately. Of course, this definition applies only to the very small communities and is much idealized. Aristotle proposed that a citizen is the man who has the opportunity to enjoy the rights of being the participant in deliberative or judicial office for some period of time.

As it becomes clear, women and children had no right to be called citizens for their inability to be the political figures. Citizenship for Aristotle was of great importance and, in his understanding, every man strived to participate in politics in order to be called a citizen. Therefore, citizenship was considered to be the social standing for men - political activity has become the major activity of male behavior and only in politics the full potential of personality could be achieved. However, there were other factors which made citizenship very attractive for every men - tangible benefits which made the life better.

Just to name few, citizenship was the way to freedom, pursuing well being and the opportunity to win honor through guiding and taking the side of the general community (Bambrough 19-20). Only those individuals who already had higher social standing and were respected by the majority of people had the chance to be called citizens. Being the member of polis was not enough for a man to become the citizen. Citizenship had to be earned and the citizen had to prove to the community that he deserves such name.

Those who set aside their civil duties, did not attend assemblies, voting and neglected the military service were given another name "idions" which was not only humiliating but destroying for the former citizens . The modern word for idion is idiot and its meaning has not changed since the time of Aristotle (Cohen 154-155). In the contrary to idions, good citizens were required not only to have enough knowledge to lead the community but have the capacity both to rule and be rules. Privileges to rule were not given to all who expressed the desire to participate in the polis.

Children, women, foreigners, slaves and workers were excluded from the candidate lists. Aristotle invested a lot of effort in distinguishing between the true citizens and those who failed to justify the given title. Other factors which excluded people from the right to become citizens were immaturity and infirmity. Moreover, those who could decide which side to take in the most important decisions have lost their membership in the polis. The modern politicians have the better working conditions and if they are not decided in some case, they receive additional time.

Probably, at the time of Aristotle being the citizen was more about the responsibilities rather than benefits and tights which could be claimed by entitled. As it is clear from the above passages, the citizen may not be a good man (being a nice person) but he has to do the god service to people he is responsible for. Citizen is the one who is able to rule as well as obey. The roots of this Aristotelian position are very easy to understand because at the time of Aristotle the democratic moods started to spread among the members of assemblies (Adler 116-118).

Politicians favored the system when the greatest good for the common people was sought. In the past most of the rulers were tyrannical and thought only about personal benefits. With Aristotle such ruling became unacceptable. In conclusion, citizenship is something which needs to be held in the great esteem and if Aristotle would live today he would argue to crave citizenship in the United States. For this philosopher, citizenship was more than just simple living in the particular place.

For him it was participating in the government and accepting all the duties which come with the privilege to decide on the lives of thousands. Moreover, he believed that citizens should be highly cooperative and belong to one another as well as to the state. The democratic political system is probably the best to fit the definition of citizenship by Aristotle. Under democracy people are encouraged to take an active role in the government through electing the candidates. The political individuals are most often rich, influential people who strive to rule responsibly and for the greatest good.

Works CitedAdler, Mortimer. Aristotle for Everybody. Touchstone Press, 1997. Bambrough, Renford, Creed, J. L. and A. E. Wardman. The Philosophy of Aristotle. Signet Classics Publishing, 2003. Cohen, Elliot. What Would Aristotle Do Self-Control Through the Power of Reason. Prometheus Books, 2003.

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