Understanding Citizenship: Rights, Identity, and Public Life
Understanding Citizenship: Core Concepts and Debates
Essential Features of Citizenship
Citizenship encompasses:
- A set of rights and duties.
- A peculiar form of community.
- Some rules governing coexistence.
Membership in Society or Community
Citizenship denotes a particular form of collective identity, an accession that you can be more or less broad, more or less inclusive.
Two more notes define membership, especially relevant in today’s philosophical-political debate:
- Identity: Citizenship goes beyond the set of rights it bestows; it involves a consciousness of identity.
- Community is Prior to Political Pact: Citizenship is not conventional, as contractualism advocates; it does not depend on the goodwill of partners.
Conflicts in the Notion of Belonging
The notion of belonging involves intractable conflicts:
- A first conflict is the tension between the universalist-particularist conception of the idea of citizenship.
- Another is the ever-present tension that exists between uniformity and difference, addressing the problem of minorities who are not part of the majority group.
- The full integration of women as citizens in all dimensions.
The Citizen: Subject of Rights and Freedoms (T.H. Marshall)
Marshall, the American theorist who laid the foundations of the modern debate on citizenship, distinguishes three types of rights:
- Civil Rights: Ensure individual freedom (e.g., freedom of expression, thought, conscience).
- Political Rights: Ensure control over political power and participation in decision-making, active participation in the political sphere.
- Social Rights: The right to minimum safety and welfare to enable people to live with dignity and independence sufficient to exercise citizenship freely and responsibly.
From this perspective, liberty is the essential feature of citizenship. To be free requires economic self-sufficiency and freedom from any external constraints.
Participation in Public Life
While citizenship participation originally resulted from the triumph of liberalism, this view is now considered outdated for two reasons:
- The impossibility of direct participation for all citizens in communities as extensive as today’s.
- The requirement of a strong commitment to civic virtues has become a distant ideal.
From this design, it is argued that while citizens may not be able to govern directly, they are guaranteed the right to be governed by a state that enjoys their consensus, respects their rights, and allows them, according to their preferences and possibilities, to develop their life projects without interference.
Minimum Pluralism and Shared Social Justice
From this perspective, building a civic society is not easy. The liberal challenge will be how to simultaneously allow for the defense of individual views (ethics of maximum) and civic engagement (minimum ethics). This was already a subject of study in civic theory.
The Value of the Individual: Habermas and Rawls
Liberalism defends the primacy of the individual against any holistic or communitarian option.
The task of political institutions is to allow individual preferences to coexist. Democracy thus becomes a way to defend all individual interests. Liberalism, therefore, subordinates civic engagement to achieving individual goals.
Habermas has been accused of undermining democratic processes by strictly separating public and private spheres within liberalism. For him, public and private autonomy presuppose each other. We need a society that guarantees individual liberty, and without individual freedom, there can be no just society.
Moral Foundations of Political Life
Rawls has addressed this question by proposing a design for a just society.