Citizenship Concepts: Rights, Identity, and Political Philosophy
Citizenship: Definition and Features
Citizenship is the relationship established between an individual and a political community, in which the individual is recognized as a full member.
Essential Features
Citizenship entails a set of essential features:
- Duties and responsibilities.
- Rights granted to the member.
- A specific form of integration into the community.
- Rules governing coexistence.
Membership, Identity, and Challenges
Membership of a society or community: Citizenship denotes a particular form of collective identity and adhesion, which can be broader or narrower, more or less inclusive. This leads to two considerations:
- Identity: Citizenship goes beyond the mere set of granted rights, implying a community consciousness or identity.
- Predates the political pact: Citizenship is not purely conventional, as advocated by contractualism, which makes it dependent on the will of the associates.
The notion of belonging involves difficult disputes:
- Tension between universalist and particularist conceptions of citizenship.
- The problem of homogeneity versus difference, particularly regarding minorities not fully integrated into the majority group.
- The full integration of women as citizens in all dimensions.
Citizen Rights and Freedoms: Marshall’s Framework
The American theorist T.H. Marshall laid the foundation for the modern debate on citizenship. He distinguishes three types of rights:
- Civil rights: Guarantee individual freedom.
- Political rights: Guarantee control over political power.
- Social rights: The right to a minimum level of security and well-being.
From this perspective, freedom is the essential characteristic note of citizenship.
Challenges to Civic Participation
Current challenges include:
- The impossibility of direct citizen participation in large modern communities.
- The requirement of extensive civic virtues, which appears as a distant ideal, demanding a strong commitment.
Feminist Critiques and Contributions
Classical Philosophy Revision
Feminism involves a revision of classical political philosophy, leading to three conclusions:
- Classical philosophy excludes women.
- Its arguments often apply only to men.
- The concept of ‘man’ is associated with reason and culture, while ‘woman’ is associated with emotion and nature.
Proposed Feminist Political Philosophy
Feminist theory suggests a political philosophy that addresses the private sphere.
Marxist and Socialist Feminist Theories
These theories share a notion of human nature created by the dialectical interplay between biology, human society, and the physical environment.
Political Philosophies on Citizenship and Justice
Social Pluralism and Shared Minimums
Building a civic conception is not easy. The liberal challenge consists in making possible, simultaneously, the defense of individual opinions (ethics of maximums) and civic commitment (ethics of minimums).
Liberalism: The Value of the Individual
Liberalism defends the primacy of the individual choice against the community. The task of all political institutions is to allow individual preferences to coexist. Democracies become the method for reconciling individual interests. Habermas accused liberalism of weakening democratic processes by separating the public and private spheres. Guarantees of individual freedom are needed.
Communitarianism: Challenging State Neutrality
Liberalism holds a citizenship model in which the state should remain neutral regarding any conception of the good life. Communitarians oppose this. They think that the realization of justice, the ultimate end of social life, is not possible without a prior recognition of what should be considered good. The valuation of neutrality itself is not neutral.
Communitarianism and Civic Humanism
Communitarianism takes up the tradition of civic humanism, considering that a free society requires discipline and sacrifice from its citizens. They must freely accept compromise. This patriotism is the link that associates citizens with a shared common political project.
Republicanism: Interaction and Freedom
Whereas liberalism conceives human beings as sovereign and selfish wills, and communitarianism understands them as tribal beings, republicanism emphasizes the interactive nature of social life.
Freedom, in this view, is not the absence of restrictions but the safeguard against the capricious interference of others.
Law as the Foundation of Freedom
The best defense against domination is a legal and institutional system that protects citizenship through the rule of law. Outside the law, there is no freedom; law is constitutive of liberty.