5—
Citizenship

The world is still too young to fix many general truths in politics.
—David Hume

A revolution was needed to bring men back to common sense.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

For twenty-nine days in the autumn of 1969, for reasons that are somewhat obscure, the Strategic Air Command of the United States went on full alert. Nuclear-armed B-52s "were pulled off their routine training and surveillance duties and placed in take-off positions on runways across the United States, fully armed, fueled, ready to fly attack missions anywhere in the world."^[1] No public announcement was made of the orders to initiate the alert. No newspapers reported the alert. Only a handful of American citizens had any awareness that something out of the ordinary was occurring. "The alert amounted to a secret between the White House and [military and political leaders inside] the Soviet Union."^[2] It is difficult to conceive of anything of more immediate and more urgent interest to ordinary citizens, both in the United States and throughout the world, than the possibility of one superpower readying itself for all-out nuclear war against its rival superpower (and doing so for no apparent reason!). Yet no civilians anywhere were privy to this confidence between the White House and the Kremlin. This puz-

[1] Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983), p. 124.

[2] Ibid.

zling episode may therefore stand as a fateful allegory of the predicament of the contemporary citizen.^[3]

Liberal Citizenship

From an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection.
—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Even in theory, citizenship seems to be a shrinking status. Let us consider, for instance, the conception of citizenship articulated by one leading contemporary liberal theorist. Bruce Ackerman, in his influential book Social Justice in the Liberal State, presents a systematic account of liberal citizenship.^[4] Defined negatively, citizenship excludes beings (stones, lions, Martians) with whom it would be impossible to have an argument about social justice. Or put positively, citizenship in the liberal state may encompass any creature with whom we could have a justificatory dialogue about power relations, including talking apes or Martians with whom we could communicate about the disposal of scarce resources. Citizenship, as Ackerman formulates it, involves competent participation in a conversation in which moral claims to the appropriation of material resources are either upheld or rebutted.

On Ackerman's account, a liberal citizen is anyone who can utter the magic words: "I am at least as good as you are, therefore I should get at least as much." Ackerman refers to this "thin thread of mutual intelligibility" as the "minimal dialogue" requirement for citizenship.^[5] Even a being from a different planet or an ape, if capable of uttering "No" when confronted with human appropriation of resources to which the Martian or ape objects, and if able to accompany this "No" with a set of noises bearing a semantic content that could be interpreted to be "interrogatory, not imperative"

[3] The mystery has perhaps now resolved itself. The Soviets admitted, twenty years later, that the Soviet military was involved in combat activity in Egypt commencing in October 1969.

[4] Bruce A. Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), chap. 3.

[5] Ibid., p. 75.

(not merely "No. Stop taking that! It's mine!" but "No. Why is it yours? Why not mine?"), would have a putative claim to citizenship.^[6] A talking ape, Ackerman notes, would have a stronger claim to citizenship than a human being whose brain was damaged to the extent of precluding participation in an intelligible dialogue about the justifiability of power relations.^[7]

Ackerman bases his conception of citizenship on a notion of participation in political dialogue, but it is a dialogue where the topic of conversation is always the same and the parties to the discussion always utter the same monotonous formula. The object of political talk is always the distribution of material resources, and claims in this domain are always put forward and repelled by the same "thin, but fundamental, assertion": "because I'm at least as good as you are."^[8] It is no wonder, then, that Ackerman limits the occasions for such exchanges, lest the "civic dialogue" become too wearisome for the participants.^[9] This might be less of a problem if the topic of conversation in a liberal polity extended to the substance of the common life shared by these shapeless "citizens."

Citizens within this polity do not debate the substance of civic ties that give life or richness to the community of which they are members. They do not debate whether there are social or collective resources that they might wish to devote to beautifying or ennobling their shared living space. For instance, Ackerman seems to rule out the legitimacy of even the most modest state-funded grants for the arts, let alone more ambitious collective projects.^[10] There is

[6] Ibid., p. 71.

[7] Ibid., p. 80.

[8] Ibid., p. 78. This assertion, says Ackerman, should occupy "the entire conversational field."

[9] Ibid., p. 96.

[10] Ibid., pp. 182-185. Cf. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 331-332: while public funds for the arts and sciences are permissible if those who do not benefit directly are satisfied that they are receiving adequate indirect or compensating benefits, "the principles of justice do not permit subsidizing universities and institutes, or opera and the theatre, on the grounds that these institutions are intrinsically valuable." But Ronald Dworkin parts company with his fellow liberals on this issue in "Foundations of Liberal Equality," in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 11, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), p. 85 n. 44.

no conversation about the kinds of individual or social purposes that might be worthy of pursuit, since questions of this sort would violate the whole liberal agenda, premised on the bracketing of any content.^[11] Instead, the citizens discuss one thing and one thing only: who gets what for the pursuit of individual life-projects. Where power is used to hog resources, the power holders are compelled by argument to make the supreme community-defining acknowledgment that no one is better or worse than anyone else. As Ackerman puts it, "it is this chain of questions and answers that binds all citizens together to form a liberal state."^[12] Needless to say, the citizens of this community would never have occasion to deliberate in common about whether there are, in fact, more important subjects of political conversation than the distribution of material resources for individual purposes. ^[13] Indeed, citizens are even barred from forming a societywide judgment that the very existence of future citizens constitutes a collective good, since this would put too great a constraint on the judgments of individuals about their own good. Consequently, Ackerman does not even allow a legitimate interest of the state in promoting a stock of future generations of citizens (say, through family allowance benefits) unless this accords with the individual preferences of the existing generation.^[14] As always, the very thinness of the civic affiliation is elevated into the defining principle of liberal citizenship.

[11] As Ackerman puts it, "a liberal state cannot justify its use of power when this requires us to weigh the intrinsic merit of competing conceptions of the good affirmed by different citizens." Social Justice in the Liberal State, p. 115.

[12] Ibid., p. 96.

[13] The question of a societywide collective good goes by the board in Ackerman's political philosophy: "The liberal rejects the idea that a political community may legitimately further a collective good. . . . For him, the overriding fact is that he finds himself among a large number of individuals, each one of whom affirms his own good" (ibid., p. 227). And "citizens create a society of individuals by talking to one another about their social predicament" (p. 100). Political community exists strictly to preside over the fair allotment of life-options for individuals.

[14] Ibid., pp. 126, 225-227. If "lifestyle" choices dictate that the present generation exercises its right to "call it quits forever," so be it. This is at a far extremity from Burke's idea of politics as a partnership between the living, the dead, and the yet to be born. As Roger Scruton says, "liberals have great difficulty in seeing how [such a partnership] might be justified, the dead and the unborn being excluded in the nature of things from thesocial contract among the living." "In Defence of the Nation," in Scruton, The Philosopher on Dover Beach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), p. 318; cf. pp. 306, 319.

We seem to be very distant indeed from the substantive ideals of citizenship articulated by liberal political philosophers at the end of the nineteenth century. ^[15] Nor is Ackerman alone among contemporary liberal theorists in emptying the concept of citizenship of virtually all meaningful content. With welfare liberalism, the chief focus is on individual entitlements and the amelioration of inequalities. Since in the just society the state is merely the agent of moral principles that are in principle universal, it is hard to see why a theory of fair distribution would have much to say about the kinds of political attachment that are bracketed behind the veil of ignorance along with other contingencies of personhood. As the grounding affirmation of liberal thought is that of the equal moral worth of all individuals in abstraction from any substantive roles or attributes, perhaps the only coherent liberal idea of citizenship is some notion of world citizenship.^[16] Although Rawls nods in the direction of the grander themes of Mill's Representative Government,^[17] he emphasizes that his own principle of participation (stipulating an equal chance for all to be involved in the constitutional process of government) delineates a more modest vision: "The principle of participation applies to institutions. It does not define an ideal of citizenship; nor does it lay down a duty requiring all to

[15] See Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: The Life and Thought of the British Idealists (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), chaps. 1 and 9 (pp. 1-5 and 162-183); and C. B. Macpherson, "Do We Need a Theory of the State?" Archives europeennes de sociologie 18, no. 2 (1977): 223-244.

[16] Joseph Carens undertakes to show that the underlying logic of each of the leading versions of liberalism (Rawlsian, Nozickian, utilitarian) tends in this cosmopolitan direction. "Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders," Review of Politics 49, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 251-273. Cf. Scruton, "In Defense of the Nation," p. 320. The leading liberal theories, whether contractarian, utilitarian, or Nozickian rights theory, all seek what Rawls in section 41 of A Theory of Justice refers to as "an Archimedean point." That is, one is called upon to imagine that one did not inhabit any particular society, and then to ask oneself what kinds of rational standards or moral principles one would find compelling from such a contextless perspective. Is it, then, surprising that citizenship, to the extent that it is a topic at all, tends to be a self-dissolving category within such theories?

[17] Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 233-234.

take an active part in political affairs. . . . In a well-governed state only a small fraction of persons may devote much of their time to politics. There are many other forms of human good."^[18] As for libertarian liberalism of the Nozickian variety, the status of citizenship seems to vanish altogether. As Joseph Carens observes: "Citizens, in Nozick's view, are simply consumers purchasing impartial, efficient protection of preexisting natural rights. Nozick uses the terms 'citizen,' 'client' and 'customer' interchangeably."^[19] These features of liberal theory also have their counterpart in an attenuation of the language of citizenship at the level of political practice: "It is a symptom of the crisis of citizenship in the 1980s that most political rhetoric, whether of left or right, addresses the electorate not as citizens but as taxpayers or as consumers."^[20] It is difficult to imagine how members of a liberal society can hope to be citizens of something, somewhere, when even the ideals of citizenship developed in liberal theory leave them adrift, as "citizens of nowhere."

These theoretical dilemmas are likely to remain irresolvable as long as the liberal injunction on judgments of content remains in place. As we have seen, liberal conversation as Ackerman sets it up is based on the ultimate conversation stopper: "For my judgment in these matters is at least as good as yours is."^[21] Upon this non

[18] Ibid., pp. 227-228.

[19] Carens, "Aliens and Citizens," p. 272 n. 3. Cf. George Armstrong Kelly, Hegel's Retreat from Eleusis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 106.

[20] Michael Ignatieff, "The Myth of Citizenship," Queen's Quarterly 94, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 981.

[21] Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State, pp. 176, 182. Ackerman's formulation of liberalism requires us to assume not only that each citizen is as good as every other and, less evidently, that each citizen's judgment about what is worthwhile in life is as good as every other's, but, even more ambitiously, that each citizen, qua participant in the decision-making process, is as good a liberal statesman as every other (pp. 279, 284, 319). This would require us to base our liberal political system on the extraordinary assumption that, on principle, Neville Chamberlain was as good a liberal statesman as Winston Churchill (on the grounds that it would be illiberal to assume otherwise!). Given this mandatory abstraction from judgments of substance, it is not surprising that Ackerman argues that decision by lottery is perfectly consistent with the moral postulates of political liberalism (pp. 285-289, 298, 301). Lottery, in common with majoritarian procedures, offers a method of political decision making "that recog-nizes each citizen's standing as a statesman whose political judgments are entitled to equal respect" (p. 289). Imagine choosing between the policies of Chamberlain and the policies of Churchill by random selection! Yet if the general moral structure of liberalism is exhausted by the proposition "X is as good as Y and Y is as good as X," then this is indeed perfectly consistent.

sequitur Ackerman builds an entire theory of citizenship. It is striking that a political philosophy that exalts dialogue as the heart of the liberal vision at the same time looks for ways to cut short the discourse so as to avoid what would otherwise be an inevitable fate: the tedious repetition by all citizens, in all contexts, of one and the same mantra.^[22] As an alternative to the liberal theory of citizenship, I propose a definition of citizenship that is the exact converse of that offered by Ackerman. Instead of citizenship defined as participation in a dialogue whose basic premise is the impermissibility of weighing the intrinsic merit of competing conceptions of the good, let us have citizenship defined as active participation in a dialogue that indeed weighs the substantive merit of competing conceptions of the good and that aims at transforming social arrangements in the direction of what is judged, in this active public dialogue, as the best possible (individual and collective) good.

Whither Citizenship?

Full Canadian citizenship is worth all the oil in Arabia and all the fish in any sea.
Brian Mulroney, speaking at the First Ministers' Conference on Aboriginal Rights, 1987

In the sections that follow, I turn from liberal theory to liberal practice. The outlook here is, if anything, even bleaker. Before I offer my appraisal of contemporary realities, let me begin with some preliminary clarifications. It might be thought that a theory of citizenship is merely another name for democratic theory; however, this is not quite the case. What is the difference between democracy and citizenship?^[23] Democracy is a mode of social and political orga-

[22] Ibid., p. 254. Cf. p. 96.

[23] The distinction between citizenship and democracy is illustrated by John Burnheim's book Is Democracy Possible? (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1985), which offers an argument for radical democratiza-tion, conjoined with an argument for radical dissolution of political (i.e., state-focused) citizenship. See, for instance, pp. 117-118: "The illusion that democracy can be assured by so-called democratic control of the state is disastrous. The state cannot be controlled democratically. It must be abolished."

nization within the political community. Citizenship is a form of attachment to the political community itself; it implies, as well, the capacity to give effect to this attachment through various kinds of competent social, legal, and political praxis. In the ideal case, citizenship is active membership in a political community where the very fact of such membership empowers those included in it to contribute to the shaping of a shared collective destiny. But one can be impelled to forms of democratic activity without being moved by bonds of citizenly commitment; conversely, it is possible to feel a strong sense of citizen identity in the absence of provisions for broad democratic activity. The republican theorist, in contrast to the pure partisan of democracy, is concerned not only with securing the greatest civic participation for the greatest number, but also with elevating the quality of civic participation. So while the republican theorist obviously prefers good citizenship exercised by many to good citizenship exercised by a few, good citizenship exercised by a few may be preferred to ignorant and intolerant citizenship exercised by many. For example, as we see from John Stuart Mill's ideas about a differential franchise, with extra votes for intellectuals,^[24] Mill was not always concerned with maximizing democracy; he was, however, always concerned with maximizing good citizenship. However, to the extent that enlarged democratic participation serves to offset feelings of disaffection that would otherwise beset the political community, and helps to strengthen forms of political competence (as it regularly does), citizenship theory includes but is broader than democratic theory, and the inquiry into citizenship subsumes the inquiry into democracy.

Our definition above indicates two dimensions to the theory of citizenship, which we may for convenience label as civic identification and civic competence. Let us start with the question of competence. The most forceful challenge to the standard faith in possibili-

[24] J. S. Mill, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government, ed. R. B. McCallum, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), pp. 216-222 (Representative Government, chap. 8).

ties of meaningful democratic citizenship has been stated by Schumpeter. "In the realm of public affairs," he writes, "there are sectors that are more within the reach of the citizen's mind than others. This is true, first, of local affairs. Even there we find a reduced power of discerning facts, a reduced preparedness to act upon them, a reduced sense of responsibility." And, he goes on, "when we move still further from the private concerns of the family and the business office into those regions of national and international affairs that lack a direct and unmistakable link with those private concerns," we are, he claims, struck by "the fact that the sense of reality is so completely lost. Normally, the great political questions take their place in the psychic economy of the typical citizen with those leisure-hour interests that have not attained the rank of hobbies, and with the subjects of irresponsible conversation. These things seem so far off; they are not at all like a business proposition; dangers may not materialize at all and if they should they may not prove so very serious; one feels oneself to be moving in a fictitious world." The private citizen musing over national affairs, Schumpeter concludes, "expends less disciplined effort on mastering a political problem than he expends on a game of bridge."^[25] The counterchallenge to this stark account can of course be that what Schumpeter treats under the heading of "human nature in politics" in fact reflects contingent, and corrigible, historical conditions, and that Schumpeter's presentation, in common with all universalizing propositions about human nature, hypostatizes a particular set of social relationships and historically shaped social practices. One wishes that this could suffice to dispose of Schumpeter's pessimism about democratic citizenship. But his description, whether universal or not, fits the existing realities so accurately that, with respect to the corrigibility of this condition, the onus of proof surely remains on the shoulders of the partisan of democracy.

The following example exposes the gravity of the problem. According to a survey conducted in 1984, fully 81 percent of Americans polled thought that current U.S. policy is to resort to nuclear

[25] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 260-261.

weapons "if, and only if, the Soviets attack the United States first with nuclear weapons"; however, it has always been open government policy that nuclear "first use" is a legitimate military response to Soviet conventional attack.^[26] In other words, more than fourfifths of the American people found themselves completely in the dark about the stance of their own government on this preeminent, and possibly life-and-death, public issue. In the face of reports like these, it is hard to say whether one feels dismay or relief in learning that, for instance, in the U.S. congressional elections in 1986, only 33.4 percent of potential voters exercised their franchise (a postwar low).^[27] How does modern citizenship fare if it depends upon the effectiveness of modern democracy? A clear indication of the depth of the problem is the fact that leading democratic theorists have had resort to the desperate hope that technological gadgets of some kind will furnish salvation of the democratic ideal, as Robert Paul Wolff, Benjamin Barber, and Robert Dahl have variously proposed.^[28] Far from achieving the required positive reciprocal relationship between citizenship and democracy spoken of at the beginning of this section, the forms of citizenship presently available do little to bolster democratic practice, just as available modes of democratic activity provide a very inadequate support to a healthy citizenship.

Let us now turn to consider the question of citizen identification. Citizenship is a problem for liberals for the following reason. According to the pure liberal model, the state ideally acts as guarantor of maximal latitude and minimal hindrance in the forming of preferences by individual choosers and consumers. But this pure liberal model surely cannot govern the citizen's relation to the state itself. To be sure, some are immigrants, refugees, or exiles. But most of

[26] Cited in McGeorge Bundy et al., "Back from the Brink," Atlantic Monthly, August 1986, p. 36.

[27] Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 14 March 1987, p. 485. This figure represents a percentage of the voting-age population.

[28] Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 34-37; Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 273-278, 289-290; Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 338-341; and Dahl, Controlling Nuclear Weapons: Democracy Versus Guardianship (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), chap. 5.

us find ourselves in the midst of a political community we have not chosen, and the state would be in very serious trouble if we all adopted the stance of radical distanciation required for free consumer choice in respect of the political communities to which we belong. Liberal citizenship taken to the extreme would put everyone in the position of the emigrant who can choose to go anywhere, and whose choice remains in principle subject to supersession by a further choice. We find an instance of this extremity of the liberal mentality in a book by A. John Simmons entitled Moral Principles and Political Obligations, the arguments of which issue in a kind of bizarre hyperliberalism:

We will normally have good reasons for obeying the law, and for supporting some types of governments of which our own may be one. But the reasons we have for obeying the law will be the same reasons we have for obeying the law when we are in foreign countries. And if we have reason to support our government it will be the same reason we have for supporting any other similar government. Thus . . . we are not specially bound to obey our laws or to support our government, simply because they are ours (or because of what their being ours entails). Insofar as we believe ourselves to be tied in some special way to our country of residence, most of us are mistaken.^[29]

On a modest interpretation, it may appear that this tells us no more than that no doctrine of political obligation can oblige us to be led into folly and wickedness simply because we happen to belong to one tribe rather than another ("my country right or wrong"). However, examining this passage more carefully, we can detect far more radical implications. Simmons's purpose is not merely to warn against the excesses of patriotism (citizenship as tribalism); he is saying that even where what is legally and politically required of us is reasonable and just, our reasons for complying will always coincide with those of, say, a foreign tourist subject to the political authority of an alien power. If this is correct, it is hard to see how any sense at all could be made of citizenship as a normative principle. Although Simmons is suspicious of analogies between family and polity, it may help us to appreciate what is

[29] A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 194.

jarring about the statement quoted above if we consider our reaction to someone who claimed that the fact that our child or our spouse was ours offered no special reason for privileging our moral commitment to their welfare (except that their proximity tended to make them natural recipients of general moral reasons for advancing the welfare of other individuals). Like citizenship, devotion to one's family would then appear as an indefensible prejudice. To be consistent, this hyperliberalism should apply the same attitude of detachment to family life as it does to political community. This would spell the end of the family no less than it spells the end of citizenship.

To put the problem in Rousseauean terms: A civic relationship to the state presupposes an underlying attachment to a settled political community. This in turn presupposes an attachment to a set of customs, traditions, historical practices, and established norms that are particularistic and therefore necessarily in some measure exclusive (even if benignly so). If the relationship to the state is not mediated by a sense of commitment to an enduring political community, then citizenship is something hollow (as, for instance, commitment to East Germany as a political unit proved to be hollow as soon as the means of state coercion were removed). Yet the whole of modern existence, of which liberalism tends to function as a theoretical encapsulation,^[30] eats away at the sources of these solidaristic attachments; so that we are ultimately driven to the opposing alternatives of spiritless cosmopolitanism and reactionary nationalism: General Motors and Panasonic on the one side, Armenian and Azeri atavism on the other. The citizen is left to choose, as it were, between rule by remote functionaries in Brussels and rule by local zealots.^[31]

[30] Cf. John Gray, Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 82: "Liberalism . . . is the political theory of modernity."

[31] This dialectic is given a succinct formulation by Alain Touraine in an interview with Le Figaro (9 October 1990, p. 11), in which he refers to "une évolution trés générale de la société vers une formidable dissociation du culturel et de l'économique. Plus le domaine économique se mondialise, plus celui de l'identité individuelle se localise" (a very general evolution of the society toward a formidable dissociation of cultural and economic matters. The more the economic domain is globalized, the more the domain of individual identity is localized). In consequence, citizenship issqueezed out from both ends, namely, globalizing tendencies on the one hand, and localizing tendencies on the other.

The globalization of contemporary politics and economics has enormous implications for a theory of democratic citizenship. When we are concerned with the repair of cracked sidewalks or a dilapidated drain system in our local community, we can at least in principle convene an assembly of the whole community to decide on priorities and allocations of resources (even if in fact we choose to delegate responsibility for such issues to administrators or political representatives). But when the issues to be deliberated include what action to take in response to the thinning of the ozone layer, how to regulate relations between the developed and the developing halves of the planet, how to manage nuclear proliferation, and so on, it is not even in principle possible for the five billion citizens of this planet to gather on the hillside of some stupendous Pnyx to deliberate about problems of global scale. (It would, I suppose, be possible in principle to attach plebiscitary voting devices to a billion television sets, but that prospect hardly offers much reassurance in this context.) If the phenomenon of globalism presents troubling difficulties for a theory of citizenship, so does the national question, with its opposing challenge of particularism. It is no doubt true that, as T. H. Green put it, "just as there can be no true friendship except towards this or that individual, so there can be no true public spirit which is not localized in some way."^[32] This poses no problem for those who base citizenship on national exclusivity. But it certainly remains a problem for those inclined to see nationalism as the Pandora's box of modern politics (and Mr. Gorbachev is surely not alone among contemporary statesmen in having good reason to see it as such!). Indeed, it is not impossible to imagine that once this Pandora's box of European nationalism is reopened among the newly liberated peoples of the Soviet bloc, one might come to look back upon the preceding forty years of Stalinism as a golden age of interethnic harmony.^[33]

[32] Thomas Hill Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (London: Longmans, Green, 1955), P. 175; quoted in Leslie Green, The Authority of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 218.

[33] It is the fear of tribal citizenship (not an idle fear) that prompts Ralf Dahrendorf's emphatically liberal idea of citizenship as the provision of a set of common entitlements "in order to set people free to be different."See "Blind to the Greater Liberty," London Times, 9 November 1990, p.

Roger Scruton has offered what he presents as a Hegelian argument that a political identity capable of sustaining itself must be rooted in prepolitical forms of allegiance and membership. However, Scruton departs from Hegel when he insists that "the liberal state must depend . . . upon some other loyalty than loyalty to itself,"^[34] for Hegel himself placed a heavier emphasis upon attachment to the Staat than upon attachment to the Volk. George Armstrong Kelly seems to be more faithful to Hegel in arguing that citizenship must have a primary political focus, and that focus must be the state.^[35] As Rousseau correctly anticipated, the core identity of the modern citizen consists in being a payer of taxes—not a condition likely to foster deep bonds of attachment toward the political community (or alternatively, political community is experienced above all else as a community of those sharing in a gargantuan national debt).^[36] The characteristic relationship of the citizen

[14] Perhaps what theorists of citizenship need to think about, in order to surmount the quandary of liberal citizenship without losing what is best in liberal politics, is the possibility of a "cold patriotism" centering on political and constitutional traditions, as opposed to the "hot" patriotisms of national, religious, ethnic, and class filiation. Dahrendorf notes that ideas of this kind are the subject of some recent work by Habermas, but he doubts that a philosopher's patriotism can solve the problem: either it will make demands on citizenship that involve too much of a departure from liberalism or it will, for those who long for more, leave the heart unmoved. See Jurgen Habermas, "Historical Consciousness and Post—Traditional Identity," in Habermas, The New Conservatism, ed. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 249—267.

[34] Scruton, "In Defence of the Nation," p. 319.

[35] George Armstrong Kelly, "Who Needs a Theory of Citizenship?" Daedalus 108 (1979): 21—36. See, in particular, Kelly's critical judgment on John Dewey: he "believed intensely in the value of citizenship . . . without much respect for its focus" (p. 34). Those faulted by Kelly for disparaging the state include a range of thinkers of diverse persuasions: "welfare liberals like Rawls, minimalists like Hayek and Nozick, conservatives like Oakeshott, and communitarians like Nisbet" (p. 22). For further elaboration, see chapter 4 of Kelly, Hegel's Retreat from Eleusis, especially pp. 100—109. Cf. Vincent and Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship, p. 170.

[36] According to Jürgen Habermas, the very genesis of the modern state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was defined by the rising need for capital in the mercantilist era: "The modern state was basically a state based on taxation, the bureaucracy of the treasury the true core of its administration." Citizenship as a relationship to the state is therefore from its inception a relationship to a national entity organized for fiscal pur-poses. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), p. 17. Cf. Max Weber, General Economic History, trans. Frank H. Knight (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1984), p. 337.

to the locus of political authority resembles the situation of one's being hit for yet another never-to-be-repaid handout by a sponging distant relation. Nietzsche described the state as "the coldest of all cold monsters";^[37] this comes unattractively close to how ordinary citizens increasingly experience their relationship to the state. Kelly goes to the heart of the matter when he writes: "If it should be asked, 'Who needs a theory of citizenship?' my answer would be, 'The state,' " and then confesses that, however urgent the need, he has no theory of citizenship to make available, "for it cannot be done under present conditions."^[38] It goes without saying that before one can come up with solutions for our dilemmas, one must first become aware of what those dilemmas are. But the latter are not likely to make themselves apparent within a liberal theoretical framework and liberal categories that render thinking about citizenship well-nigh unintelligible.

One writer on citizenship correctly describes the development of citizenship in modern capitalist societies as governed by a steady movement from the particular and ascriptive to the universal and abstract, conceived according to the image of a series of outwardly expanding concentric circles; he then lets himself be carried by the implacable logic of this development to embrace the notion of extending civic privileges to encompass the "citizenship" of infants and fetuses, of insects and bacteria, and even of plants and rocks.^[39]

[37] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, first part: "On the New Idol."

[38] Kelly, "Who Needs a Theory of Citizenship?" p. 35. It should be noted that Kelly's argument is based on a distinction that he develops, not relevant for my purposes, between "the normative state" and "the empirical state." Kelly appears to want the majesty of the state, but without its familiar day-to-day functions: the empirical state in the twentieth century has exhibited a growing proclivity to be "telocratic" (purpose governed), whereas the normative state is obliged to be "nomocratic" (rule governed). The crux of Kelly's analysis seems to be that "the crisis of citizenship" (p. 30) is mainly to be traced to this discrepancy between what the state ought to be (a dispenser of justice) and what it has largely become (a dispenser of bureaucratic favors).

[39] Bryan S. Turner, Citizenship and Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 92-105. For a rebuttal of Turner on this point, see J. M. Barbalet,Citizenship: Rights, Struggle and Class Inequality (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988), p. 18.

While some readers may dismiss this vision of universal citizenship as merely perverse, it helps, I think, to illustrate the incoherence of the underlying assumptions of much modern thinking about citizenship. In fact this infinite extension of the scope of citizenship is the natural outcome of the liberal conception (pursued to its conclusion by some contemporary socialists and social democrats) that the decisive problem of citizenship is the elimination of varieties of exclusion from the rights and privileges of membership in civil society, and that therefore a theory of citizenship can proceed in abstraction from questions of the substance of civic relationships.^[40] This can be illustrated by theoretical debates about immigration (the liberal question of citizenship par excellence). In "Aliens and Citizens,"^[41] Joseph Carens challenges Michael Walzer's argument that, except in special cases, the admission of outsiders to citizenship should be at the discretion of the existing political community.^[42] However, both Carens and Walzer, at least in this context, are in agreement in defining the issue of citizenship in terms of the moral principles governing rightful admission to membership. Yet this reflects the liberal conception focusing on questions of formal membership, of inclusion and exclusion, entry and nonentry, as opposed to the classic theories of citizenship of Aristotle and Rousseau devoted to the substantive functions of political membership. The former concerns how one becomes a citizen (what entry requirements must be met); the latter, what one does as a citi-

[40] As George F. Will rightly says, "it is a question how much the density of a society can be thinned before the idea of citizenship becomes too attenuated to hold meaning." Statecraft as Soulcraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 55.

[41] Carens, "Aliens and Citizens," pp. 264-270.

[42] Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 31-63. As Carens rightly argues in an unpublished essay entitled "Migration, Morality, and the Nation State," the theoretical warrant for closure cannot be, as it is for Walzer in chapter 2 of Spheres of Justice, simply that that is what is willed by the community that excludes would-be citizens; rather, it must rest upon the substance of what is worth preserving in the way of life that is under threat from outsiders. Though Walzer's conclusions in this context are moderately illiberal, his unwillingness to base them on judgments of substance is eminently liberal.

zen.^[43] According to the liberal conception, once one has secured formal entry into the political community, one may be a citizen in good standing and yet do absolutely nothing after having attained to membership: not vote, not participate in jury service, not read newspapers or keep oneself informed politically. Even conformity to the laws does not count toward citizenship, since breaking the laws does not deprive one of citizenship in this formal sense. It is just this sort of nonactive membership that would be intolerable from the point of view of an Aristotelian or Rousseauean (or even Millian) account.^[44] The most that a liberal theory of citizenship can envisage is a more extensive civic membership, whereas what is needed is theoretical reflection, in the tradition of the classic theories, on possibilities of a more intensive civic experience. The paradox of liberal citizenship is that while it limits the question of citizenship to formal considerations of inclusion and exclusion (who is a citizen), it offers the barest resources, theoretical or practical, for answering this very question. Therefore, finding such an answer to the question set by the problem of liberal citizenship itself requires that we shift to another way of setting the problem of citizenship (what is a citizen).^[45]

Canadian Prime Minister Mulroney, in the quotation that heads this section, feels called upon to affirm the pricelessness of citizenship in his polity precisely because those with whom he must negotiate the terms of continued federation insist upon putting a price tag on this citizenship (dollars for oil in the case of Albertans; dollars

[43] For an illuminating presentation of the Aristotle-Rousseau tradition of what Richard Flathman calls "high citizenship," and a critical probing of that tradition as well as of the opposing "low citizenship" tradition of Hobbes and Oakeshott, see "Citizenship and Authority: A Chastened View of Citizenship," in Richard E. Flathman, Toward a Liberalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 65-108.

[44] The Australians at least try to incorporate a minimum condition of more active citizenship with mandatory voting requirements. To be sure, an exceptional democracy like Israel goes much further with a very heavy dose of compulsory military service; and military service is included as a component of citizenship to a lesser extent in the case of certain other liberal democracies.

[45] For a similar distinction between the "who" and the "what" of citizenship, see Morris Janowitz, The Reconstruction of Patriotism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 4.

for fish in the case of Newfoundlanders). Actually, one wonders how many of Mulroney's fellow citizens would share his conviction that the status of being a citizen has a worth that is beyond price and beyond calculation. A recent opinion poll in Mulroney's home province of Quebec is very interesting from the point of view of a theory of citizenship. A mere 38 percent of Quebeckers (French and English) define their political identity primarily in terms of Canada; given a chance to reaffirm or repudiate their citizenship in another referendum, a bare majority of 51 percent would choose to remain full members of the Canadian political community. (Both of these figures would obviously be substantially lower if only francophone Quebeckers had been polled.) Yet "a strong majority would refuse to pay more taxes to get an independent state."^[46] Contemporary citizenship, it seems, judging at least by those surveyed in this poll, is like membership in a club for which one has little or no enthusiasm; but equally, one has no wish to exchange it for membership in an alternative club if the latter involves paying a new set of membership fees.

Modern Quandaries

On the whole, our present situation more or less resembles that of a party of absolutely ignorant travellers who find themselves in a motor-car launched at full speed and driverless across broken country
—Simone Weil Oppression and Liberty

The theme of citizenship has been at the heart of the tradition of Western political thought. Many of the classic texts of theory in the West have been in effect treatises on citizenship: book 3 of Aristotle's Politics, Rousseau's Social Contract, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, and the writings of Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. I think it is fair to say that the late twentieth century has yet to produce a work approaching these masterpieces of the tradition, and that a global theory of citizenship remains one of the leading desiderata of con-

[46] "For Quebeckers, the Ties That Bind Seem to Be Mainly Economic," Toronto Globe and Mail, 14 April 1990, p. D2. Details of the poll, conducted by Sorécom, can be found in L'Actualité, 1 May 1990, pp. 7-13.

temporary social theory.^[47] However, before we allow ourselves to indulge hopes for a full-blown treatise on citizenship in the manner of the traditional classics, we should, more modestly, at least attempt to survey the problems and perplexities in the character of modern social and political life that impede the writing of such a treatise.

If the modern experience of citizenship is largely incoherent, liberal theory, as we glimpsed in the preceding two sections, tends to reflect this incoherence rather than help to resolve it. Needless to say, this is not an incapacity unique to liberals. As Sheldon Wolin points out: "The democratic citizen does not appear in any substantial form in the writings of Barry Commoner, the titular leader of the Citizens' Party, or Michael Harrington, the theoretician of Democratic Socialists of America. Most Marxists are interested in the 'masses' or the workers, but they dismiss citizenship as a bourgeois conceit, formal and empty."^[48] At the opposite end of the political spectrum, in Canada a pressure group calling itself the National Citizens' Coalition actually devotes its energies to mobilizing opinion against what are thought to be excessive public responsibilities of the state, and thus effectively campaigning against citizenship on behalf of "individual liberty." In the nineteenth century, social critics like Tocqueville and Mill argued powerfully for the central human worth of political citizenship, and they spelled out the social and cultural requisites of such an experience of citizenship.^[49] The complexities and traumas of life in the twentieth century have not rendered less urgent this case for citizenship. Yet our understand-

[47] That this theoretical desideratum has a political salience as well is expressed in the following lament uttered by a British journalist in 1988: "Something is rotten in the state of Britain, and all the parties know it. . . . The buzz-word emerging as the salve for this disease is something called citizenship. . . . Somewhere out there is an immense unsatisfied demand for it to mean something." Hugo Young, quoted in Derek Heater, Citizenship: The Civic Ideal in World History, Politics and Education (London: Longman, 1990), p. 293.

[48] Sheldon S. Wolin, "What Revolutionary Action Means Today," Democracy 2, no. 4 (Fall 1982): 18.

[49] The Mill referred to here is the Mill of Considerations on Representative Government and the reviewer of Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Of the Mill of On Liberty and Utilitarianism, a rather different judgment might be made.

ing of what citizenship is, and our sense of its place within our life, is today terribly unfocused. Few if any social critics speak to our current discontents with the power or authority of a Tocqueville or Mill. Citizenship rings hollow within the context of our established political vocabulary, failing to draw forth resonances of an older idiom of politics.

There was no "problem of citizenship" when Aristotle formulated his famous definition of citizenship in book 3, chapter 1, of the Politics.^[50] The citizen is "a man who shares in the administration of justice and in the holding of office," or one who "enjoys the right of sharing in deliberative or judicial office," that is, one who performs the "function of deliberating and judging." Here Aristotle merely articulates in a theoretically satisfying way the reality of the polis as it would have been unreflectively conceived by anyone who exercised the responsibilities or fulfilled the duties of citizenship.^[51] Today, however, it is otherwise. Citizenship is a problem to be pondered rather than a reality to be described. Indeed, where amidst our multiple identities as clients of the state, as constituents of various pressure groups, or merely as privatized consumers can we locate anything that we may characterize as pertaining specifically to the status of citizen?^[52] To be sure, we can cite the case of jury duty, or even the periodic ritual of voting.^[53] But is there really

[50] The phrase "the problem of citizenship" comes from Michael Walzer's essay of that title in Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970).

[51] This is not to deny that Aristotle might at the same time have known, by the time he wrote the Politics, that the understanding of citizenship of which he was the spokesman had already had its day. As M. I. Finley notes, "Aristotle and the classical polis died at about the same time. When his contemporary Diogenes said, 'I am a cosmopolites [citizen of the universe],' he was proclaiming that citizenship had become a meaningless concept." The Ancient Greeks (New York: Viking Press, 1970), p. 113.

[52] Cf. Barber, Strong Democracy, p. 221: "The very term constituent has been transmogrified from a noble word signifying constitutional author into a term for voter and thence into an almost derisive synonym for client— for the individual whom representatives must please and pacify in order to retain their offices."

[53] For a good statement of the liberal case that voting is not to be so easily dismissed as constitutive of modern citizenship, see Judith Shklar, "American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion," in Tanner Lectures, vol. 11, ed. Peterson, pp. 387—413.

anything less episodic in our experience of political life that can give substance to modern citizenship? Is it even meaningful for us to invoke this classical notion in a time of highly attenuated public involvement, where the imperatives of private consumption overwhelm the satisfactions of collective responsibility, and where the complexities of modern life tend to defeat the possibility of a privileged political identity that stands out from the fragmented plurality of social roles?

If citizenship is associated with a stable sense of principles of coherence within a society and a firm sense of one's place within the structures of social order that confer such coherence, it does not require high theoretical acumen to detect a crisis of citizenship in Western societies. We all feel ourselves to be more and more at the mercy of large and impersonal bureaucracies, subject to technological forces beyond our comprehension, driven hither and thither by global economic conditions that appear increasingly inscrutable. Unemployment and inflation, like two imperious bullies, take their turns in tormenting us. At the same time, modern societies are today prone to a variety of social dislocations: a serious and pervasive crisis of the family; a profound realignment of gender roles; major convulsions in the distribution of work and leisure; a substantial intellectual challenge to and political assault upon the modern welfare state; a devaluation of standards of general cultural and intellectual life that begins to resemble a plunge into the abyss; and a detachment from political involvements and institutions bearing political authority. It would be reassuring, but a false reassurance, if we could at least pin the blame for all of this on one large villain, such as capitalism or the permissive society. The bottom line, from the point of view of citizenship, is that these conditions make it hard to sustain any real sense of efficacy or to continue to draw a sense of worth from political membership. Traditionally, political philosophy has sought to discipline and focus our reflection in such moments of confusion and uncertainty. What resources can our traditions of political reflection make available amid our present perplexities?

Going back to Aristotle's classic statement in the Ethics and Politics, political membership has been considered to be, not a partial role or discrete set of activities, but the most encompassing and comprehensive status within human life. Politics was taken to be

what Aristotle termed the architectonic science: that which organized all less inclusive activities into a meaningful whole.^[54] It followed that the status of citizen did not constitute one role among others, but rather was that privileged identity that served to integrate and make sense of a person's other roles in society and that thereby defined what it was to be fully human.^[55] This classical sense of politics, which is easily assumed to be impossible in a modern setting, was briefly reborn in the public spirit of student demonstrators in Tienanmen Square, firing the moral imagination of spectators in the West. Relative to this ancient conception, it is not easy to imagine what day-to-day citizenship could mean in a context where the civic functions of deliberating and judging are largely the monopoly of politicians and bureaucrats. We are left not with the definition of a concept but merely with the statement of a puzzle.

John Dunn characterizes the dilemma of citizenship quite sharply in his observation of "the increasingly alienated vision of the nature of human societies and politics which has developed over the last two and a half centuries": "If the entire field of political and social relations surrounding an individual agent is taken as given, and his or her potential contribution to politics is then assessed in purely instrumental terms, virtually all political action will appear as necessarily futile; and the balance between comparatively certain cost and highly uncertain gain will become prohibitively discouraging to political agency."^[56] As the sense of efficacy shrinks, so too do the bonds of civic allegiance to the political community. In the early nineteenth century it was still possible for Hegel to conceptualize the state as a substantive moral community, express-

[54] The fact that we today deny that politics is an architectonic science, and deny that the idea of an architectonic science makes sense, does not prove that we don't have one, as I try to argue in the last section of this chapter. The architectonic science of our society is economics as a science of production bereft of a telos. In Aristotelian terms, this is as if the architect were subject to the sovereign authority of the bricklayer; as if the latter, convinced that bricklaying is an end in itself, obliged the former to design a set of plans for bricks to be laid upon bricks right up to the heavens.

[55] On citizenship as a role among other roles, see Barber, Strong Democracy, pp. 220-221, 228-229.

[56] John Dunn, Rethinking Modern Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 38.

ing and enveloping the cultural and historical identity of its members—as a locus for collective self-consciousness. For us today, near the end of a century characterized in significant measure by experiences of moral and political estrangement in the citizen's relation to bureaucracy and the state, it is difficult to credit or recapture this grand vision of the moral authority of the state. Perhaps more compelling for us are the insights of Rousseau in the eighteenth century concerning the overpowering obstacles to the experience of a genuine Sittlichkeit in the modern state.

The barriers to effective citizenship are many. One basic problem may be formulated as follows. Much of what most profoundly affects the destinies of human beings today far surpasses the competence of individual states, however gigantic: global degradation of the environment, the planetary scale of economic activity, the power of multinational corporations, issues of hemispheric redistribution between the affluent and the starving halves of the Earth, and so on. States as we know them are scarcely equal to such challenges, let alone political communities closer in scale to the ancient polis. Conversely, demands for democratization and popular participation would necessarily mandate the shifting of responsibilities for political deliberation and decision to the level of local assemblies or even neighborhood councils. One suspects that the kind of deliberative bodies that would make possible a sense of meaningful participation could tackle issues of only a trivial nature, while those capable of dealing with the truly fateful issues of our time would inescapably be located at a level utterly remote from the common citizen. Present political realities seem to require the realization of something like the ancient Stoic image of a cosmopolis, a universal polis, for a citizenship that would be neither intangible nor pointless. (Nicely symbolic of our predicament is the question of a political response to the AIDS menace: our plagues today all seem to be global plagues.) The impossibility of this Stoic vision hardly needs utterance.^[57]

Another major stumbling block is that the typical political debates of today are so technically specialized (budgets, weapons sys-

[57] Cf. Michael Walzer, "The Moral Standing of States: A Response to Four Critics," Philosophy & Public Affairs 9, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 227-228.

tems, coordination of economic and technological growth, management of energy demands without uncontrollable deterioration of the environment, centralized command of the total resources of the society, etc.) that it is difficult to imagine how the ordinary nonexpert citizen could hope to contribute at all.^[58] Perhaps the centuries-old ideal of meaningful citizenship, dating back to the polis, is now simply outdated.^[59] The local concerns and forms of competence, relations of community and sentiments of membership, of the popular citizenry are largely, and increasingly, an irrelevancy to the reality of the modern state; the state itself is not yet an irrelevancy, but much in the historical evolution of the present-day world is tending in this direction.^[60] These challenges to the idea of citizenship in a modern republic are merely the most obvious ones.

Where do we look for solutions? One possibility would be to trace the quandaries of contemporary citizenship back to the term itself. The Latin-derived words citizen and citizenship— like the Greek-derived words politics and political— refer back inextricably to local realities: the city, the polis.^[61] Obviously, these original connotations have been all but effaced, and perhaps therein lies the root of our dilemma. Thus some theorists have proposed a return to the city as the only meaningful locus of citizenship.^[62] But as I

[58] For a helpful account of these problems as they have figured in the writings of Robert Dahl, see H. D. Forbes, "Dahl, Democracy, and Technology," in Democratic Theory and Technological Society, ed. R. B. Day, R. Beiner, and J. Masciulli (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1988), pp. 227-247. See also my commentary in the introduction to the same volume, pp. ix-xii.

[59] Such is the view of, for example, Henry Kariel in "Beginning at the End of Democratic Theory," in Democratic Theory and Practice, ed. Graeme Duncan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 251-262; and also John Dunn in chapter 1 of Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 1-27.

[60] For a very measured response to such anxieties about the looming obsolescence of the existing nation-state, and hence of national citizenship, see Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, pp. 318-321.

[61] For discussion, see Nancy L. Schwartz, "Communitarian Citizenship: Marx and Weber on the City," Polity 17, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 530-548, especially pp. 531-532. As Schwartz notes on p. 531 n. 2, city and citizen share the same etymological root.

[62] See, for example, Robert A. Dahl, "The City in the Future of Democracy," American Political Science Review 61, no. 4 (December 1967): 953-970.

have noted above, it seems fanciful to think that town-hall democracy will prove equal to our political needs in a world where the most pressing political crises have to do with war and peace, depletion of global resources, the imperial power of megacorporations, and so on. Another version of the same line of thought proposes that we seek out forms of quasi citizenship within civil society that will offer alternatives to state-oriented citizenship. The pluralist route to a theory of citizenship plays down the importance of a direct relationship to the state and highlights the relationship to substate forms of community. At the end of his book The Twilight of Authority, Robert Nisbet offers a nice encapsulation of "the view that citizenship must be rooted in the groups and communities within which human beings actually live":^[63]

Every voting study has shown us that the impulse to participate in politics, to the degree that it exists at all, is closely dependent not upon primarily political values and objectives but upon economic, social, and cultural ones. If there is to be a citizenship in the useful and creative sense of that word, it must have its footings in the groups, associations, and localities in which we actually spend our lives—not in the abstract and now bankrupt idea of patrie, as conceived by the Jacobins and their descendents.^[64]

Nisbet distinguishes two main traditions of thought about citizenship in the West: one, which he associates with Plato, Hobbes, and Rousseau, that extinguishes all loyalties other than that to the state in the interests of the state; the other, identified with Hegel, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Kropotkin, and above all Burke, situates

[63] Robert Nisbet, The Twilight of Authority (London: Heinemann, 1976), pp. 286-287. As George Kateb notes, in recent decades the Left has engendered its own versions of Nisbet's vision of pluralist citizenship. "Comments," in Participation in Politics, NOMOS 16, ed. J. Roland Pennock and J. W. Chapman (New York: Lieber-Atheron, 1975), pp. 89-97. Commenting on the student movement of the sixties, Kateb writes: "The aim is to rehabilitate the idea of citizenship and to extend the practice of citizenship into as many areas of life as possible; from the original locus of citizenship, i.e., public affairs, to private institutions and associations and activities of almost every sort" (p. 91). Needless to say, the Left anarchist tradition has always gone in this direction (as Nisbet's invocation of Kropotkin attests).

[64] Nisbet, Twilight of Authority, pp. 285-286. This theme of local versus national citizenship is pursued also in Nisbet's "Citizenship: Two Traditions," Social Research 41, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 612-637.

citizenship in the plural loyalties of ethnicity, localism, regionalism, religion, and kinship. However, the Hegelian-Tocquevillean solution of intermediary citizenship breaks down (as it does, arguably, in the prevailing political order) if the intermediate associations, instead of conducting us toward forms of political loyalty at a higher level, function merely to channel demands made on the state by self-seeking social groups. This is what we know today as interestgroup politics. Rather than furnishing an education in citizenship, it offers an education in anticitizenship. Rather than serving to alleviate the problem of cultivating allegiance to the state under modern conditions (as it does on the Burke-Hegel-Tocqueville model), it serves to exacerbate that very problem. All individuals know what they want from the state, all have their wish-lists, all are taught and encouraged by the groups and associations to which they belong to dwell on these insistent demands; but no one knows why they might wish to belong to a larger political community, of which state authority is the most visible incarnation. In the words of George Armstrong Kelly, "there is a darker side to pluralist citizenship."^[65]

The intuition that I am trying to explore in this chapter is that participation in political community is a real human good. But if such participation is to be meaningful, it must be upheld by a source of enduring commitment. What is to sustain this commitment? Liberalism, in principle, finds it theoretically impossible to locate a substantive basis for this commitment. Modernity has offered, in the last two centuries, an answer to this puzzle about citizenship, but I must confess that this answer—nationalism—makes me feel extremely uncomfortable. It is the strength of liberalism that it articulates what is unattractive about this modern answer to the puzzle of citizenship. It is even more embarassing to confess that I have no alternative answer to suggest. My contribution, I hope, is to clarify that the puzzle is indeed a puzzle, whereas the liberal will tend to assume that there is really nothing much to worry about here.

Other quandaries are yet to be addressed. Many would hold that the ideal of equal citizenship will necessarily remain hollow until it

[65] Kelly, "Who Needs a Theory of Citizenship?" p. 33.

can be set upon the foundation of fully egalitarian gender relationships—in the household and in the sphere of work as much as in the political arena. I do not deny the power of this challenge to the civic status quo, but it raises a host of questions that still await examination: Does equal citizenship presuppose a transcendence of gender? Does the very distinction between citoyen and citoyenne undermine the republican ideal? Can citizenship be genderless? These questions will appear irrelevant to some feminists who, in order to enlarge the participation of women in the civic arena, will put more rather than less emphasis on gender differences. However, to the extent that feminism begins to take on the features of yet another of modern society's group egoisms (a kind of gender nationalism), it raises in another guise the same kinds of quandaries of pluralism dealt with elsewhere in this section. Other theorists of citizenship will contend that the chief obstruction to effective citizenship lies in the deep cleavages of class in liberal societies, and that a redemption of the ideal of citizenship can consist only in a transcendence of class division.^[66] This is, no doubt, a promising and indeed urgent path of political aspiration. For instance, the spectacle of class-segregated pubs in England ("lounge bars" and "public bars"—a form of class apartheid) is, no less than racially segregated facilities in other benighted parts of the world, a notorious affront to the very idea of common citizenship. But what would a class-transcendent social membership actually look like? Were it possible, would we want a universal middle class? Unspeakable! A universal working class? Even worse. A universal aristocracy? Self-evidently impossible. (I think that universal aristocracy is what socialism means for many socialists, and that it is what communism probably meant for Marx.) But what would it mean to conceive a classless society, where the members were associated with no class in particular? I know of no form of political reflection, Marxist or non-Marxist, that begins to address this perplexing dilemma.

[66] The classic theorist of citizenship and class is of course T. H. Marshall. Marshall's legacy for contemporary theories of citizenship is reexamined in Turner, Citizenship and Capitalism, and Barbalet, Citizenship. See also David Held, "Citizenship and Autonomy," in Held, Political Theory and the Modern State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 189-213.

In sum, I cannot pretend to have the answers to these and other quandaries of modern citizenship. But one needn't see, in all of this, grounds for despair—not, at least, if one takes one's bearings by the great tradition of theory from Plato to Rousseau to Marx to Nietzsche, whose leading strength consists more in the critical location of ills than in the supplying of nostrums. Ultimately, whether these quandaries turn out to be impassable or not may depend much more upon the practical imagination of actual political agents than upon the contrivances of theorists. I shall return to this question in the epilogue.

Spiritual Impasse

I do not have to tell you, my dear Mill, that the greatest malady that threatens a people organized as we are is the gradual softening of mores, the abasement of the mind, the mediocrity of tastes; that is where the great dangers of the future lie.
—Alexis de Tocqueville,
letter to John Stuart Mill, 1841

A serious threat is hovering over European culture. . . . The threat emanates from an onslaught of "mass culture" from across the Atlantic. We understand pretty well the concern of West  European intellectuals. Indeed one can only wonder that a deep, profoundly intelligent and inherently humane European culture is retreating to the background before the primitive revelry of violence and pornography and the flood of cheap feelings and low thoughts.
—Mikhail Gorbachev,
Perestroika, 1987

In the previous section we scanned a number of deep quandaries at the social and political level, in the face of which the creation of a less enervated citizenship looms as an immense puzzle. However, it may be that these quandaries are as nothing compared with the phenomenon of cultural and spiritual torpor that blocks richer possibilities of political membership in liberal societies. According to a recent poll, 39 percent of the Canadian public believes in horoscopes.^[67] What hope is there for an educated citizenry if four out

[67] Toronto Star, 27 June 1987, p. A₄ .

of ten members of an advanced, Western liberal democracy believe in astrology?

It is impossible to reflect on citizenship with any seriousness without attending to the cultural dimension. This raises, inescapably, questions of political and cultural education, modes of socialization, as well as forms of economic practice that shape, and are shaped by, a dominant social and political culture. We have to be socialized to citizenship. Either we inhabit a culture that stimulates political energies and enlivens political imagination or we inhabit one that stifles and dulls the cultural resources that nourish citizenship. In order to participate in civic life one must be fitted for it, and this in turn presupposes a certain level of public culture. The contemporary "citizen" is unfitted for citizenship, not merely because of deficiencies in the political system, but because the nature of modern modes of consumption thoroughly privatizes individuals and renders them incapable of experiencing anything genuinely public.

Political citizenship depends on a shared culture and a sense of rootedness.^[68] The point of this emphasis on a common culture is surely not to intellectualize politics. As Christopher Lasch remarks in reply to the charge that his criticism of mass culture aims at a universal intelligentsia: "I can't imagine a less attractive prospect than a society made up of intellectuals."^[69] The political problem with mass culture is not that it renders people uncultured or philistine, but that it privatizes and deracinates them, that is, undermines the cultural conditions of citizenship.^[70] Henry Fairlie, in a wonderful essay entitled "The Decline of Oratory," marvels at the enthusiasm with which long political speeches could be relished by large popular audiences in the small towns of mid-nineteenth-century America (his example is the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858), as

[68] An argument along these lines is spelled out in Wilson Carey McWilliams, "Democracy and the Citizen: Community, Dignity, and the Crisis of Contemporary Politics in America," in How Democratic Is the Constitution? ed. Robert A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1980), pp. 79-101.

[69] Christopher Lasch, "Popular Culture and the Illusion of Choice," Democracy 2, no. 2 (April 1982): 88.

[70] See Christopher Lasch, "Mass Culture Reconsidered," Democracy 1 , no. 4 (October 1981): 7-22.

compared with the boredom induced by contemporary speechmaking.^[71] Walt Whitman's dictum, "To have great poets there must be great audiences, too," applies no less to politics, and it takes a special kind of audience to elicit "the flame of great oratory."^[72] Part of Fairlie's diagnosis of this decline is "that there are almost no common allusions that a politician can make":

As recently as a few decades ago, a politician could refer to Job or even to Balaam's ass and be confident that his audience would understand the reference. It made a great difference when even in semi-literate families everyone heard the Old Testament read every Sunday, and when in the homes of the humblest there were likely to be copies of the Bible and of Shakespeare. The constituents of the great English radical, John Bright, were cotton spinners and weavers in the mill town of Rochdale. When they asked why he had refused office, he answered with the story of the Shunammite woman who, when Elisha said, "Shall I do aught for thee with the king?" replied, "I dwell among my own people." Cotton workers who left school at the age of 8 did not need the allusion explained to them.^[73]

However urgent the need for citizenship, all the ingenuity of political scientists like Barber and Dahl,^[74] with their designs for the fabrication of new modes of democracy, will be to no avail; for citizenship, dependent on the ethical and spiritual resources of a political community, cannot be manufactured. Exposed by the history of the modern West to the triple solvent of Protestantism, capitalism, and the liberal ethos, it is not to be wondered at that our cultural resources for the cultivation of citizenship are slender.

Just as we can (and must) be socialized to the exercise of citizenship, so we can (and in our circumstances inevitably are) socialized to its nonexercise. The ethos of a liberal civilization in this regard is captured well by Robert Dahl when he writes, commenting on industrial democracy but with application to democratic citizenship

[71] Henry Fairlie, "The Decline of Oratory," New Republic, 28 May 1984, PP. 15-19.

[72] Ibid., p. 18. The line from Whitman is quoted from Todd Gitlin, "New Video Technology: Pluralism or Banality," Democracy 1, no. 4 (October 1981): 60.

[73] Fairlie, "Decline of Oratory," p. 17. The story of the Shunammite woman is in 2 Kings 4: 13.

[74] See note 28 above.

generally, that "affluent American workers, like affluent workers in many other advanced countries and the middle class everywhere, tend to be consumption-oriented, privatistic, and familycentered. This orientation has little place for a passionate aspiration toward effective citizenship in the enterprise (or perhaps even in the state!)"^[75] It has been a staple of the republican tradition, from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Rousseau, that a life of free self-government presupposes a certain political economy—in particular, modes of ascetic discipline and self-restraint. The assumption was that there must be a "political economy of freedom," to use a phrase of Oakeshott's that he employed in a sense antithetical to the one intended here.^[76] But the economic practices of contemporary societies seem to rule out the very possibility of restraint of wants and desires in the interest of political liberty. If, as the classic theorists all assumed, endless desire-fulfillment is incompatible with the sober demands of citizenship, then it would appear that for us, infinite consumption is in and citizenship is out.

What I would call the pure liberal doctrine of citizenship has received a provocative recent statement in a Time essay by Charles Krauthammer:

[The current] triumph of apolitical bourgeois democracy has been a source of dismay to some. They pine for the heroic age when great ideologies clashed and the life of nations turned on a vote in Congress. On the contrary. I couldn't be happier that the political century is over, and that all that's left is to shuffle cards on the cruise ship. . . . A few weeks ago, a producer from U.S. public television came to ask my advice about planning coverage for the 1992 elections. Toward the end, she raised a special problem: how to get young adults interested in political coverage. I offered the opinion

[75] Robert Dahl, "Power to the Workers?" New York Review of Books, 19 November 1970, p. 22.

[76] Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 37-58. For an example of analysis of the political economy of freedom in my sense (or what one might also call "moral economy"), see Emile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, trans. Cornelia Brookfield (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), pp. 1-41, 71-72. Oakeshott's idea is that a free society is one that minimizes the regulation of economic life; Durkheim's idea is that regulation of economic relationships can be a good thing if it helps to build up agencies of moral solidarity within the society.

that 19-year-olds who sit in front of a television watching politics could use professional help. At that age they should be playing ball and looking for a date. They'll have time enough at my age to worry about the mortgage and choosing a candidate on the basis of his views on monetary policy. To say that, of course, is to violate current League of Women Voters standards of good citizenship. Let others struggle valiantly to raise the political awareness of all citizens. Let them rage against the tides of indifference. They will fail, and when they do, relax. Remember that indifference to politics leaves all the more room for the things that really count: science, art, religion, family, play.^[77]

Relative to this statement on behalf of "apolitical bourgeois democracy," John Stuart Mill would certainly have to be counted as an intrepid civic republican! Now obviously, few self-professed liberals would express themselves as bluntly as Krauthammer does here, nor would many of them actually share his disparaging view of political participation; but the more important point is that the pure liberal doctrine of citizenship (or anticitizenship) aptly expresses the realities of a liberal society.

What exactly is wrong with the pure liberal theory? Isn't it true that "there are many other forms of human good" besides politics?^[78] Isn't it true that we have a lot else to worry about (and a lot else to get satisfaction from) than budgets and defense policies and welfare reform? In any case, why should the relationship to the political sphere be anything other than an instrumental one? I am not confident that I can answer these objections adequately, but the beginning of an answer can be sought by reflecting on the unprecedented responsibilities borne by politics in our day. The stakes are of an entirely novel scale. In the words of John Dunn:

At a time when the leaders of the most powerful nations on earth may at any moment find themselves with at best a few minutes in which to decide whether or not to unleash thermonuclear war, it is hardly open to rational dispute that human beings have a more urgent and a more baffling need to grasp what prudence really is than they have ever had before. Nor is it readily disputable that the political project of reconstructing the states and societies to which we

[77] Charles Krauthammer, "In Praise of Low Voter Turnout," Time, 21 May 1990, p. 82.

[78] Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 228.

belong to embody such prudence is apocalyptically more complex and formidable than it must have looked to a would-be Legislator in the Greece of the fourth century B.C. or in eighteenth-century Geneva. ^[79]

Citizens in ancient states never had to fear that poor political calculations could obliterate the species, or could contaminate the environment irreversibly for all succeeding generations, or could make the planet uninhabitable for billions of human beings. Today, these things are necessarily in the balance, and they utterly transform the toll of noncitizenship. So it is not just a case of saying that it would be great for us to be Aristotelian citizens again (or for the first time). It is rather that the alternative to at least minimal citizenship, which is still far beyond what the majority of us can exercise, is that we are effectively excluded from deliberations that will decide not only our own fate but that of our descendants, and perhaps the fate of the species as a whole. Can we really accept that we will be denied a voice in the determination of issues of this magnitude? It is the "apocalyptic potential"^[80] of contemporary politics that renders citizenship that is more than formal membership not a privilege but a moral necessity.

As I sought to consider in earlier chapters, what a liberal public culture makes available is a phony individualism and a phony pluralism, and what ultimately prevails is neither the individualism nor the pluralism but merely the phoniness.81 The outstanding liberals of the nineteenth century were not debarred from raising the kinds of questions I have been broaching, but present-day liberal philosophers seem to have been mysteriously relieved of the anxieties of their forebears. Herein lies, in important measure, the inadequacy of contemporary liberal theory; it offers modes of criticism of

[79] Dunn, Rethinking Modern Political Theory, p. 11.

[80] This is the theme of Hans Jonas's important book The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For commentary, see my essay "Ethics and Technology: Hans Jonas' Theory of Responsibility," in Democratic Theory and Technological Society, ed. Day, Beiner, and Masciulli, pp. 336-354.

[81] For a discussion of how easily it can come to pass that the language of autonomy serves merely to legitimize a culture in which everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator, see Alain Finkelkraut, La Defaite de la pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 149-179.

liberal practice, to be sure, but leaves unjudged, and in principle beyond judgment, much of what most demands criticism. A just society that offered even the most perfect realization of the egalitarian ideals articulated by Rawls and Ackerman could well leave intact some of the most debilitating and demoralizing features of life in a modern society. Social equality by itself can refer to a mode of existence that is either high or low, the equality of Marx's race of aristocrats or the equality of Nietzsche's race of "last men," depending on the conditions of life in which individuals participate equally. This is why the redressing of inequalities cannot on its own lead us to the vision of a way of life that is substantively enriching (which necessarily implies attention to the substance of that way of life, not merely to the fair distribution of its spiritful or spiritless benefits).^[82] As Wilson Carey McWilliams writes, "indignity, not inequality, is our real complaint. A great many Americans would forgo material gains if they felt they were listened to or even that their listening mattered." But the problem, as McWilliams sees it, is that "in the mass state, indignity is inherent."^[83] This is in no sense a disparagement of egalitarian aspirations. To the contrary, it is an indispensable condition for the effectuation of more promising possibilities of citizenship that Western societies become a great deal more egalitarian than they are presently (as I try to explore in the next chapter). But then equality as such is not the ultimate goal, it is the conduit to a further destination.

Liberalism counsels us to abstain as far as possible from moral judgments (which the liberal identifies with moralistic judgments)

[82] This negativism of contemporary liberal theory is a trait shared with certain contemporary versions of neo-Marxism—for example, the later work of Habermas, which has come increasingly to approximate to liberal formalism. A theory focusing on the lifting of constraints upon dialogue and the leveling of asymmetries of power needs to say more about why the postemancipatory society embodies a positive good. Having emancipated ourselves from the countless inequalities that still remain, what precisely will we have emancipated ourselves for? This is, of course, a problem that goes back to Marx himself, with his rhapsodizing of contentless freedom; it is, one might say, the mark of Marx's own philosophical liberalism. Cf. Serge-Christophe Kolm, Le Libéralisme moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984), p. 92.

[83] McWilliams, "Democracy and the Citizen," p. 000. Cf. p. 99: "Those social critics who suggest that capitalism and private wealth are the rootof all the ills of American democracy are guilty of making our problems appear less severe than they are."

concerning the chosen ways of life of individuals within society. Yet the very concern to articulate an ideal of citizenship already violates this proscription. Imagine the following alternative to the model citizen: someone hooked on cocaine, committed above all to the satisfying of his or her physical urges (even if this involved no criminal behavior, apart from the purchase of the drug), apathetic as regards public affairs in one's own society and beyond, and indifferent to the plight of other human beings, including those immediately affected by this "lifestyle." From a civic republican perspective, it would be impossible to avoid judging this a defective way to exist. Even if the only one in any way affected by this behavior is the individual himself or herself (though this is virtually unimaginable and probably incoherent), the judgment would have to be the same. The liberal would necessarily see this as an encroachment upon the moral space of the individual agent. Or rather, one is allowed to make private judgments about the satisfactoriness of such ways of life, but these can admit neither of theoretical sanction nor public enforcement. Beyond the reactions of personal morality (how we respond to such behavior as private individuals), this is a matter for individuals to work out for themselves. It is their own affair. To this, the republican must answer: If this constitutes moral encroachment upon the prerogatives of the individual, then both at the level of theory and at the level of politics, moral encroachment is the only course of sanity.^[84] It would be insane, theoretically and politically, to regard choice of "lifestyles" as a private affair, not a public affair; for if it is not a matter of public concern whether members of a society are good citizens or bad citizens, what is of legitimately public concern? If the political community cannot permissibly concern itself with this, what can it concern itself with?

[84] It is the prospect of entailments like these that motivates Richard Flathman's critique of civic republicanism, in "Citizenship and Authority." Flathman's argument is that a more ambitious exercise of citizenship would go hand in hand with a strengthening of political authority, and that this invigorated fusion of citizenship and authority would have deleterious consequences for liberal individuality. One way in which he characterizes this fear is that civil disobedience would be "a logical and a psychological impossibility" in a regime of energetic citizenship (p. 104 n. 44).

One can also picture from other angles, ways in which the minimalist moral vision of liberalism runs afoul of a more demanding ideal of citizenship. Consider the political problem of pornography. The standard liberal response is to say that while one may not approve personally of these practices, female models who make themselves available for such purposes are exercising legitimate rights and prerogatives as "owners of their own bodies" that ought not to be subject to state interference (such as the municipal antipornography ordinances in Minneapolis). One typical way in which the liberal will criticize such state action is by appeal to John Stuart Mill's classic distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding acts. But this distinction assumes that one can differentiate neatly between actions that impinge on others, which can be politically and juridically regulated, and actions that impinge only on oneself, for which state regulation is strictly illegitimate. But do the choices of adult female models to exhibit themselves in pornographic publications affect only themselves? Is it not the case that all women must contend with the consequences arising from the propagation by such publications of demeaning and degrading images of the status of women? If this is so, there may be good grounds, overlooked by the libertarian liberal, for submitting the question of pornography (or even ordinary television advertising, in many cases) to public and not just private deliberation. One might restate this challenge to liberalism in the language of citizenship by saying that women who exercise these career options injure the prospects of common citizenship for the entire class of their fellow women. (Reasoning of this sort no doubt prompted legislators of the state of New York recently to ban the sport of dwarf tossing practiced in certain taverns in that state. That the dwarfs being tossed were consenting adults was not considered decisive; what was decisive was that they were allowing themselves to be degraded, and thereby helping to degrade the status of equal citizenship of fellow dwarfs.) So we see how, by framing problems of political theory in terms of an egalitarian conception of citizenship, often-debated issues within liberal society may be reformulated in nonliberal categories.

Throughout the last two hundred years of our intellectual tradition, grave fears have been expressed of the unavoidable advent of universal mediocrity, leveling, and homogenizing banality in

modern democratic societies—from the last-ditch efforts of Burke in the eighteenth century to uphold the waning symbols of regal grandeur in Europe, to the anguished aristocratic pathos of nineteenth-century liberals like Tocqueville and J. S. Mill, to the more radical cries of warning of Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger. It would require childish naivety to imagine that these concerns do not pose an immense challenge to any reflection on the possibilities of an invigorated experience of politics within liberal societies.^[85] It suffices to consider the range of periodicals available in the average North American corner store, and to ask oneself what percentage of these contain any significant political or socially critical content (or what percentage of the general North American periodical readership is presently capable of being moved by such content). The results of this thought experiment are not encouraging. What one will encounter are "flesh magazines, tennis and golf magazines, skiing and surfing magazines, model railroad magazines, needlecraft magazines, camera magazines, stereo magazines, fitness magazines, car magazines, field and stream magazines, hairdo magazines, romance magazines, horoscope magazines, gun magazines, stamp and coin magazines, music magazines, upscale city magazines, and celebrity magazines."^[86] No one who pursues this reflection can be in very much doubt about what constitutes the liberal way of life.^[87] What scale of moral revolution would be required for

[85] For a highly relevant survey of mass culture—relevant, that is, to its bearing upon possibilities of competent citizenship—see Habermas, Structural Transformation, section 18.

[86] Gitlin, "New Video Technology," pp. 68-69. Gitlin juxtaposes the fringe of opinion magazines that "address their readers much of the time as citizens" (The Nation, The New Republic, Harper's, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, National Review, The American Spectator) to this dominant magazine culture: "depoliticized, indeed anti-political, valuing private goods over public needs. In this culture, the common good is always being parcelled out into separate pursuits of private happiness." For a survey of the most widely read periodicals in the United States, see The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1990 (New York: Pharos Books, 1989), pp. 363-364. By way of contrast, see the report on Soviet newspaper culture in Lawrence Martin, "Press Is a Prime Example of Life in the Slow Lane," Toronto Globe and Mail, 2 March 1987, p. A7.

[87] The U.S. Information Agency has recently arranged to have unsold copies of glossy American magazines shipped every month to Eastern Europe. A leading publisher involved in the venture observed, with a theoretical perspicuity that eludes some of the notable political philoso-phers of our day: "Magazines like House Beautiful and Road and Track are a reflection of the American way of life and we want to expose that way of life." Quoted in the Toronto Star, 5 February 1990, p. A16.

the ordinary liberal citizen to be attracted to the kind of cultural and political publications currently being devoured by the newly liberated citizens of Eastern Europe?

We seem to end up in an uncomfortable impasse. According to our argument, it is only by locating some more substantial possibility of political membership that we can hope to avoid a fate described by Nietzsche as "going to pot on egoistic pettiness and squalor, ossification and self-seeking,"^[88] or in Burke's words, the fate of being "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality," becoming "little better than the flies of a summer."^[89] On the other hand, a more real relationship to the political world already requires a transcendence of the ungrounded or deracinated character of modern culture. Thus the inescapable vicious circle: a deeper engagement with politics only when freed from our barbaric social culture; a less barbaric culture only when political membership is deepened and enhanced. The exit from this vicious circle is barely imaginable. I doubt that the impasse admits of a theoretical resolution; yet one can conceive it being surmounted by new experiences, new constellations of social solidarity, new modes of life arising with a spontaneity that confounds all the expectations of social scientists. To predict the sources of such spontaneous regenerations of solidarity is certainly not the responsibility of theory. The theorist can, however, say what Rousseau said: that "the inference from what has existed to what is possible is a sound one."^[90] So on that basis, we may be assured either that past instances of invigorated citizenship in liberal societies—such as the civil rights movement of the 1960s, itself rooted in the powerful ethos of the black churches—may be resuscitated, or that we may find parallels in our own experience in the West of the possibilities of an enriched practice of citizenship that have been disclosed in the last decade in the dockyards of Gdansk, on Tiananmen Square and Wenceslas

[88] Friedrich Nietzsche, Vom Nützen und Nachteil der Historie, section 9.

[89] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 194, 193.

[90] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, book 3, chap. 12.

Square, and in the streets of Manila and Leipzig. In either case, the specific shape of these possibilities is unforeseeable and therefore beyond the purview of the limited powers of theory.

During 1989 the peoples of Eastern Europe offered a school of citizenship for the West. Prior to the end of the 1980s it would have been hard to imagine just how prescient Hannah Arendt could turn out to be when she wrote a quarter of a century ago: "Whatever the outcome of our present predicaments may be, if we don't perish altogether, it seems more than likely that revolution, in distinction to war, will stay with us into the foreseeable future. Even if we should succeed in changing the physiognomy of this century to the point where it would no longer be a century of wars, it most certainly will remain a century of revolutions."91' (The bicentennial of the French Revolution was celebrated throughout Eastern Europe, with Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Bulgarian, East German, and Romanian reenactments of the events of 1789.92) Of course, in reading the above passage by a leading critic of liberalism anticipating a renewal of the revolutionary tradition in modern politics, in a book meant to challenge what she saw as an impoverished experience of citizenship in American liberalism, we confront a deep irony: that all of the revolutions or attempted revolutions of the late 1980s, in China, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, were liberal revolutions, revolutions on behalf of bourgeois freedoms. On the other hand, I think it would be perfectly consistent with Arendt's point of view to suggest that the instruction offered by the stunning success of these revolutionary movements has less to do with the moral and political adequacy of prevailing bourgeois liberalism than with the yet to be realized possibilities of enriched citizenship in the liberal societies of the West. In other words, the citizens of China, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia may have more to teach us about political freedom than we have to teach them.

[91] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), p. 8.

[92] Following the inauguration of a non-Communist government in Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel told his followers: "Historians will have to analyze this period . . . this peaceful revolution . . . and tell us what happened." One might presume to say that in On Revolution, Arendt "explained" these revolutions several decades before they actually happened.

In the Soviet Union, as glasnost gained political momentum, officials announced that it was necessary to suspend live broadcasts of sessions of the Supreme Soviet because so many people watched them that there was a drop in productivity—not something that would pose a threat in any Western democracy! Liberal citizenship, even if its worth is somewhat less than all the oil in Arabia and all the fish in any sea, certainly counts for something. But whether its worth is sufficient to rescue us from the atomizing, deracinating, and "massifying" tendencies of modernity is a question that one trembles to ask.

The Liberal Regime

A social contract [must allow for the fact] that society as a whole has no ends or ordering of ends in the sense that associations and individuals do.
—John Rawls, article in American Philosophical Quarterly, 1977

Leo Strauss has, at least among his followers, popularized "regime" as a translation for the Greek term politeia.^[93] This retranslation is still rather misleading, since current English usage tends to associate regime with a particular government or governing elite (e.g., the Brezhnev regime),^[94] but it has at least highlighted the unacceptable narrowness of the usual translation, "constitution." Whatever one may think of other aspects of Strauss's reading of classical texts, I think this introduction of the term regime to convey an ancient meaning can help us to draw invaluable lessons from classical philosophy for the understanding of all human societies, including our own liberal society.

[93] See, for example, Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), PP. 136-138, 193; What is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 33-34; The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), PP. 45-46. Cf. Nathan Tarcov and Thomas L. Pangle, "Epilogue: Leo Strauss and the History of Political Philosophy," in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, ₃ d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 925-927, 931-933. Also Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), pp. 2-3.

[94] Thus G. A. Kelly takes regime to have a narrower, not a broader, signification than state. "Who Needs a Theory of Citizenship?" p. 34.

Part of what is entailed by the Platonic-Aristotelian conception of regime (and what Strauss took it to mean) is that all action, in particular all political action, asserts certain claims to truth whose authority either can or cannot be vindicated. All rule by statesmen is meant to be authoritative for everyone within the society. We all live within the horizon of norms and moral expectations imposed by leaders of our society whose example is, again, authoritative. The presumption is that these norms are true, that the way of life we take to be exemplary within our society is a true exemplar—whether, as in ancient Greek society, the exemplary life of the warrior or orator or, as in our society, the exemplary life of the lawyer or software inventor or ambitious entrepreneur. Political arguments in any society, including our own, commonly boil down to who these exemplary types should be. Again, this invariably contains an implicit claim to truth, a claim that this or that exemplar is authoritative for the whole society—that we should all model ourselves upon, or judge ourselves by the standard of, the successful warrior or orator or corporate lawyer or entrepreneur. Every society exists and orders itself as a society by its commitment to one or several of these exemplary types being true. We all live according to the dictate of a set of putative truths, the grounding of which, for Plato at least, requires turning political practice into philosophical practice and turning kings into philosophe-rkings.

It hardly needs remarking that this whole idea of authoritative standards of social life is virtually untranslatable into our own modern categories of moral and political life. We would say that these people have these values, and those people have those values, and that it would be a mistake (a violation of liberal principles) for either these values or those values to be considered authoritative for the whole society. Within the grip of these liberal categories, it is pretty much impossible to get the talk of moral knowledge off the ground at all. The very notion of knowing virtue, of grasping cognitively a moral reality, is quite bewildering to modern ears. To be sure, we can make sense of the idea of knowledge as the basis for a claim to rule—in the sense of technical knowledge, technical expertise. (This is something like what Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century had in mind when he proclaimed "Knowledge is power.") So we can certainly make sense of the rule of knowers, in the sense of technical experts. But moral knowledge? Our very term values im-

plies that these things cannot be known; they depend on individual choices and preferences. They are, by definition, not objects of cognition but objects of volition; not rational, to be apprehended by the knowing intellect, but volitional, products of one's will. Yet there is something to be said for Plato and Aristotle's way of talking about moral and political experience. Let us consider the notion, assumed by all members of a modern society, that no values are authoritative (or no values ought to be) in a liberal society that is faithful to itself. Aren't liberal principles themselves intended to be universally authoritative, and if so, not reducible to mere "values"? Aren't they thought to be true in some basic sense? This was brought out very forcefully in the uproar surrounding the Salman Rushdie affair. To say that Khomeini's death threat against the author of The Satanic Verses offends our "liberal values" sounds pathetically weak. Moreover, if someone responds that "Islamic values" are no less legitimate for Muslims than "Western values" are for us, how are we to answer, if not by forsaking the language of values? In fact, even the liberal has to claim ultimately to know a moral reality that is either valid because it is knowable, or nothing—of no political consequence. Politics is itself the realm of competing claims about what is authoritatively true—true not for me or you as individuals, but true for all of us.

And the same goes for the allocation of priorities in a society, or the ranking of practices, or the appointment of roles, as mentioned earlier. For instance, one might consider that Hannah Arendt's arresting presentation in The Human Condition of modern society as, quintessentially, a society of laborers or a society of jobholders is an account of the modern regime, of the norm-enforcing ethos of modernity. By a jobholder's society Arendt meant a society in which it is dictated that "whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of 'making a living' "; a society governed by the "trend to level down all serious activities to the status of making a living."^[95] As she puts it: "Even presidents, kings, and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society."^[96] Again, it is certainly wrong to conceive liberal society, as it

[95] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 126-127.

[96] Ibid., p. 5. What Arendt offers here is simply a book-length elaboration of Rousseau's suggestion, in book 3, chapter 15, of The Social Contract,that the moderns have avoided the ancient institution of slavery by the expedient of universal slavery. Cf. Marx: "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959), p. 10.

is often conceived, as merely offering a neutral grid within which individuals can pursue their self-defined activities. Every society is shaped as the society that it is by an implicit ranking of activities, or by the definition of a certain range of activities as paradigmatically worthy of pursuit—or by the canonization of certain activities as supremely human, relative to other activities that are correspondingly stigmatized. This is as true of liberal society as it is of every other society. According to Arendt, what defines a modern society, whether liberal or socialist, is that it tends increasingly to conceive itself as a society of laborers, where the primary energies of human activity are drawn to the collective goal of maximizing the productivity of the society as a whole, maximizing the possibilities of production and consumption. Far from it being obvious that this should be the overriding task of a society, Arendt argues that it is unique to the modern age that this defining goal has the centrality it now has. "The modern age," she writes, "was as intent on excluding political man, that is, man who acts and speaks, from its public realm as antiquity was on excluding homo faber."^[97] A given society may accord paradigmatic status to the activity of being a warrior, or being a citizen, or being a worshipper of the civic deity; the life of the society may be governed according to the moral reign of poets or priests. Ours, Arendt claims, gives such status specifically to the vocation of being a jobholder, of contributing to the net productivity of the social whole.

The liberal regime is a regime of producers and consumers, not of citizens. (More strictly, it is increasingly a regime of servicers and consumers of services; for production, it seems, looms less and less large in economically advanced liberal societies.) If one takes this thought seriously, it will certainly tend to puncture the liberal presumption that a liberal political order can and should remain impartial toward the conflicting ends and aspirations of different

[97] Arendt, Human Condition, p. 159.

individuals and groups within society. The Platonic-Aristotelian view is that any neutrality of this sort is impossible. If Plato and Aristotle are right that any political community must embody some ranking of ends, then the liberal notion of a society without an ethos and a state without a regime must be severely confusing as far as the understanding of liberal society is concerned. My judgment is that Plato and Aristotle are right about this, and that therefore liberal theorists indeed breed confusion. In fact we would be better off with the ancient theoretical framework of parts and wholes, assumed by the liberal theorist to be long ago dead and buried.

What defines liberalism is its desire not to be a regime, an organized social and political ordering of ends. It fails to fulfill this desire because it cannot do so. Once it is admitted that the liberal regime is a regime, we can set about addressing the more interesting theoretical question of whether it ought to be a regime of laborers, of consumers, or of citizens, and why.^[98]

[98] One might also read the account of liberalism given by Alasdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 335-347, as an effort to characterize the liberal regime. On p. 336, MacIntyre offers his own statement of the thesis of this section and of this book: "Liberal individualism does indeed have its own broad conception of the good, which it is engaged in imposing politically, legally, socially, and culturally whenever it has the power to do so, [and] in so doing its toleration of rival conceptions of the good in the public arena is severely limited."