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.