Academic literature on the topic 'Public reason citizenship'

Central values of Judaism and the historical experience of Jews are sources of strong Jewish support for democracy, especially in the United States, where Jews did not have to wait for citizenship and rights to be conferred on them – and possibly withdrawn. Judaism is strongly committed to the political order in the United States and to the pluralistic, dynamic civil society it helps make possible. Jews have the freedoms that others have, and those freedoms resonate with fundamental Jewish values in ways that matter even to nonpracticing Jews. Moreover, there are reasons to regard the Constitution's nonestablishment neutrality as comparing very favorably with a notion of public reason as a political approach to the question of state and church relations. Neutrality does not impose upon or require bracketing of individuals' constitutive commitments and their conceptions of what matters most integrally to them. Public reason is vulnerable to that troubling possibility.

Do the constraints of public reason unfairly exclude religious citizens? Two ways of framing the charge of exclusivity are examined: the burden of translation objection and the integrity objection. The first, it is argued, rests on a misapplication of the ‘distributive paradigm’ and fails to provide a convincing account of religious citizens’ relationship to their beliefs. The ‘integrity’ objection, it is argued, relies on a theologically questionable account of ‘wholeness’ and drastically overestimates the threat to personal integrity posed by the duty of civility. It is argued here that it is a mistake to interpret the ideal of public reason as inimical to recognising religious citizens as co-deliberators and that, on the contrary, only a public-reason-centred account of democratic citizenship can ensure that religious citizens will be appropriately recognised. A rival, convergence, account of public reason, which seeks to relax the constraint of public reason and eliminate the duty of civility is rejected on the grounds that it fails to underwrite the appropriate recognition of citizens.

This article shows a reflection on the urban environment, its influence on people's emotions and behavior, and on the configuration of public space from the perspective of herotopias, understood as juxtaposed places that, when analyzed, determine social relationships based on the configuration of space in an internal logic of power and resistance which have a content of reason. Heterotopia also configures city construction and requires an understanding of the environment from its green areas, paved roads, pedestrians and public services that contribute to the quality of life of citizens.

In Sri Lankan scholarship the second component, namely 'citizenship' is virtually absent from the public discourse. The obvious reason for the elusive presence of citizenship is, as previously mentioned, the inevitable invasion in every sphere of peoples lives of issues of nationalism, subnationalism and conflict in the past thirty years owing to the Tamil insurrection in the North and East of the island. In the 1980s and 1990s while the world was embroiled in debates over cosmopolitan and multicultural citizenship Sri Lankan studies were concerned with issues of power and democracy and remained locked in outdated analytical frameworks of nation, ethnicity, and community. For historical reasons citizenship has not had in the Sri Lankan scholarly field the seminal and near obsessive presence that nation and state have occupied. Another reason may be that liberal and radical scholars - defenders of minority rights - have been suspicious of majoritarian appeals to some ideal of 'good citizenship' where minorities will eventually be expected to play by majority rules. Although by the 1990s the terms had become a buzzword amongst thinkers in the North, citizenship remained in fact one of the least theorized notions in Sri Lankan studies where a generally instrumental understanding of the term that includes common defense of personal freedom, establishment of basic conditions of social justice and maintenance of civil peace prevails. In Sri Lanka, the tie between citizenship and nationhood, however, can never be wholly deconstructed or ignored. In this light, this paper will proposes future possible areas of study.

The idea of citizenship has played a prominent role in recent political debate. But how is common citizenship possible in societies that seem increasingly prone to cultural fragmentation along ethnic and other lines? The paper distinguishes three conceptions of citizenship – liberal, libertarian and republican – and asks how far each is able to respond to cultural pluralism. The liberal conception, exemplified by Rawls, interprets citizenship in terms of a set of principles that everyone has reason to accept; but Rawls fails to show why everyone should give political priority to the citizen perspective as he defines it. The libertarian conception views the citizen as a rational consumer who through contract and choice can gain access to a range of public goods. This caters to pluralism, but at the cost of eroding the idea of citizenship as a common status enjoyed by all members of society. The republican conception sees the citizen as someone who plays an active role in shaping his or her society through public discussion. Contrary to the claims of critics such as I. M. Young, this does not require the imposition of norms of impartiality and publicity which exclude certain cultural groups. This conception offers the best prospect of developing a political consensus to which all groups can subscribe.

The model of deliberative democracy poses a number of dificult questions about individual rationality, public reason and justification, public spiritedness, and an active and supportive public sphere. It also raises the question about what kind of civic involvement is required for the practices of democratic deliberation to be effective. The aim of this article is to examine the last question by looking at the role and value of citizenship understood in terms of participation. It argues that deliberative democracy implies a category of democratic citizens; its institutional framework calls for the activity and competence of citizenry, and consequently, the participatory forms of deliberative democracy come closest to the democratic ideal as such. Also, the model of participatory-deliberative democracy is more attractive as a truly democratic ideal than the model of formal deliberative democracy, but it certainly faces more dificulties when it comes to the practicalities, and especially the institutional design. This problem is raised in the last section of the article where the possible applicability of such a model to post-communist democracies is addressed. The major dificulty that the participatory-deliberative model poses for the post-communist democratization can be explained by a reference to the cultural approach towards democratization and to the revised modernization theory presented by Inglehart and Welzel. The problem of the applicability of such a model in the post-communist context seems to support the thesis presented here which suggests that active citizenship, civic skills and civic culture are indispensable for the development of deliberative politics.

The paper discusses Rawls’ and Habermas’ theories of deliberative democracy, focusing on the question of religious reasons in political discourse. Whereas Rawls as well as Habermas defend a fully inclusivist position on the use of religious reasons in the ‘background culture’ (Rawls) or ‘informal public sphere’ (Habermas), we defend a moderately inclusivist position. Moderate inclusivism welcomes religiously inspired contributions to public debate, but it also makes normative demands on public argumentation beyond the ‘public forum’ (Rawls) or ‘formal public sphere’ (Habermas). In particular, moderate inclusivism implies what we call a ‘conversational translation proviso’ according to which citizens have a duty to supplement religious with proper political arguments if – but only if – they are asked to do so by their co-discussants. This position, we argue, is more in line with the deeper intuitions behind Rawls’ political liberalism and Habermas’ deliberative model than is the fully inclusivist alternative. Keywords: conversational translation proviso, deliberative democracy, ethics of citizenship, Habermas, moderate inclusivism, public reason, Rawls

Agreeing and sympathizing as I do with what I take to be the core of Professor Abraham's argument—that prevailingly American constitutional thought and public reason model their conceptions of liberty and basic rights too much on proprietorship and too little on citizenship—I confine myself here to a suggestion about the framing of the argument.

<p>This inquiry analyzes the concept of ‘European public sphere’ within the European public discourse. In particular, it explores the European Communication Strategy for creating active European citizenship and European public sphere. The <em>European Commission’</em>s <em>Plan D for Democracy, Dialogue and Debate </em>failed, because it employed homogeneous and static concepts of public sphere and European values. In this way it reduced deliberation to a mere debate. The European Year of Citizens was not sufficiently successful for the same reason. It involved citizens debated about EU rights, but it did not produce deliberation. The purpose of this inquiry is to show the dialectical relation between ideas of European values, European identity and European public sphere. This paper emphasizes performative nature of European public sphere, European identity and European values. These concepts may be perceived as grand narratives which aim at producing universal truths.</p><p><span>Article first published online: 16 OCT 2017</span></p>

This study investigates the subject of Muslims’ citizenship in contemporary Western European societies from the viewpoint of John Rawls’s political liberalism, in particular in light of the ‘idea of public reason’ [see John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) and the 1997 essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” originally published in University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997), 765-807 and now included in Political Liberalism, expanded edition, 440-490]. By its very nature, political liberalism does not prescribe a single model for being Muslim in contemporary Europe. Thus, one may wonder if it is too vague as a point of departure for the analysis. On the other hand, however, here I argue that political liberalism specifies a peculiar evaluative framework that allows citizens to answer questions such as “What is politically at stake when citizens of Muslim faith are publicly presented as permanent aliens in contemporary European societies?”, “On what grounds is such exclusion based?”, and “What requirements can European citizens be reasonably expected to meet?” in a distinctively political way and, ideally, to solve the political and social problems from which those questions spring. In this research, I claim that public reason provides a common discursive platform that establishes the ground for a public political identity and for shared standards for social and political criticism. Together, these two elements solve the two dimensions of the problem of ‘stability for the right reasons’ (in Rawls’s terms) in contemporary European societies, because they secure both the political inclusion of Muslims on an equal footing as citizens and civic assurance that they will remain committed to fair terms of social cooperation. A joint solution of these two apparently conflicting demands of stability for the right reasons (i.e. inclusion and mutual assurance) requires an effort in political reconciliation. After having compared public reason citizenship with two prominent normative alternatives, I will conclude that the former is an adequate ideal conception of citizenship for European societies. Finally, I will apply the justificatory evaluative methodological framework (whose requirements I will specify starting from the idea of public reason itself) to a conception of citizenship elaborated by one of the most renowned Muslim public intellectuals in Europe: Tariq Ramadan. (I justify the choice of this author in sections 2.3 and 6.1). Such an evaluation sheds light on one of the main insights of this research, that is, the idea that public reason makes a decompression of the public space possible: it frees the public space from those forces that would prevent citizens from the possibility of exercising effectively their two moral powers (once more in Rawls’s words, the ‘capacity for a sense of justice and for a conception of the good’) as free equals. In this sense, public reason tries to reconcile ideal political consensus and the fact of reasonable pluralism on a public political ground. I believe that this is the deepest meaning of what Rawls calls ‘reconciliation through public reason’: its aspiration is to reabsorb reasonable pluralism politically without annihilating it.This research is structured in three parts: the first is methodological, the second is reconstructive, and the third is evaluative. Each part is composed of two chapters.In chapter one (“General Framework”), I begin from some empirical observations about the role of perceptions and identities in relation to the issue of Muslims’ citizenship in contemporary Europe. I claim that from this point of view Islam seems to “make problem” in a very specific sense. This does not mean that Islam is a problem, but that Islam is frequently publicly presented and perceived as a problem. This is the background problem from which my work starts. Thus, I explore some dimensions of such a problem (see 1.1). Subsequently, I provide a more specific formulation of the research problem and questions and of the aims of this study. Then, the main research question (Q) is stated in these terms: Which ideal conception of citizenship should provide the common normative perspective in contemporary Western European societies, which are characterised by both demands of inclusion of Muslims and the need for solving a ‘problem of mutual assurance’ [on which, see in particular Paul Weithman, Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)] concerning citizens’ commitment to shared terms of social cooperation, so that those societies can be stable for the right reasons? In order to answer this question, I also specify three sub-questions that I call respectively Q1, Q2, and Q3 (see 1.2).In chapter two (“Toward a Justificatory Evaluative Political Theory”), I firstly try to frame the problem of public justification within Rawls’s political liberalism (see 2.1). I then consider a specific approach to the question of Muslim citizenship in liberal democracies which can be adopted from a Rawlsian perspective: namely, reasoning from conjecture (see 2.2). Finally, I explain my own approach (which I call justificatory evaluative political theory) by means of comparison with the method of reasoning from conjecture (see 2.3). In presenting the evaluative framework specified from a political liberal standpoint, I point out three political liberal evaluative requirements: the reciprocity requirement (RR), the consistency requirement (CR), and the civility requirement (CiR).Chapter three (“What is Public Reason?”) deals with the history of the notion of public reason from Kant to Rawls and its enunciation within Rawls’s work (see 3.1 and 3.2 respectively). In doing so, I also identify three specifications for the three political liberal evaluative requirements considered in the second chapter. Furthermore, in chapter three I also unpack CR in three different dimensions (PR1, PR2, and PR3).Chapter four (“Public Reason and Religion. Reinterpreting the Duty of Civility”) completes the reconstructive stage by analysing Rawls’s ‘wide view’ of public reason and two major lines of objection to it (see 4.1). After having discussed such criticisms, I then introduce my own interpretation of the ‘proviso,’ which is structured around a two-level (or bifurcate) model of the ‘duty of civility’ (see 4.2).Chapter five (“Reconciliation through Public Reason: Justificatory Evaluative Political Theory between Modelling and Application”) bridges the second and the third part, that is, the reconstructive and the evaluative stage respectively. In the first section of the chapter, I summarise the political liberal evaluative requirements developed in the second part. In doing this, my purpose is to present my justificatory evaluative model of public reason citizenship (see 5.1). In the second section, I firstly argue that a conception of citizenship grounded in public reason is not only possible in existing European societies, but also preferable if compared with alternative conceptions (I consider liberal multiculturalism and Cécile Laborde’s critical republicanism [Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)]) with reference to the problem under scrutiny in this research. In conclusion, I show that public reason citizenship is able to solve the theoretical problem and the main research question mentioned above: Which ideal conception of citizenship should provide the common normative perspective in contemporary Western European societies, which are characterised by both demands of inclusion of Muslims and the need for solving a problem of mutual assurance concerning citizens’ commitment to shared terms of social cooperation, so that those societies can be stable for the right reasons? In the final part of chapter five, I try to demonstrate that public reason citizenship can both include Muslim citizens and solve the assurance problem because it provides both shared standards for political criticism and a common political identity on the basis of which citizens politically recognise one another as free equals. If my argument succeeds, then public reason citizenship not only could but also should be adopted as the ideal conception of citizenship in European societies (see 5.2).In the sixth chapter (“Tariq Ramadan’s European Muslims and Public Reason”) I apply the evaluative framework based on public reason to the conception of citizenship for Muslims in Europe developed by Tariq Ramadan. (According to a principle introduced in chapter two which I call the “plausibility principle” PP, I argue that Ramadan’s theory of citizenship can be plausibly presented as a “European Muslim” approach to the issue of citizenship, see 6.1). The purpose of such an evaluative work is twofold. Firstly, it aims at examining whether and how the idea of public reason accounts for a version of European citizenship for Muslims coming from Muslims themselves. Secondly, it aims at disclosing whether what such a Muslim conception of citizenship in Europe says about the two dimensions of ‘stability for the right reasons’ of the system of social cooperation (namely, inclusion and ‘mutual assurance’) is consistent with the provisions of public reason citizenship (see 6.2-6.5).
Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales
N.B. 1) Le lieu de défense de la thèse en cotutelle est ROME (Luiss Guido Carli)2) L'affiliation du co-promoteur de la thèse en cotutelle (Sebastiano Maffettone) est: LUISS Guido Carli
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This project seeks to give a normative account of citizenship education in the context of deliberative democracy. Within the framework of reasonable pluralism. civic life is not as ethically minimal as many liberals think. I will argue that liberal democracy needs to incorporate the idea of deliberative democracy in order to achieve its aspiration for the teaching and learning of active and reciprocal citizens within the framework of reasonable pluralism. Ethical traits. dispositions, and characters are essential liberal vi11ues to bring about a flourishing liberal democratic life. Using the conception of deliberative democracy, I theorize an ethically robust conception of the political person for liberal citizenship education that could accommodate the ideas of public reason, political morality and civic action. In so doing, I propose a framework of citizenship as reasonableness by reformulating Rawls's political liberalism and supplementing it with Dewey’s Pragmatism - especially his ideas of human intelligence. freedom as individuality and cooperative inquiry. As such, liberal democratic citizenship could be attentive to civic duties. active civic participation, and cultivation of liberal virtues. This framework also demonstrates an authentic understanding of liberal democratic polity as an ethical project of cooperative living and fulfills the inherent requirements of liberal theory, both in terms of articulating an ethically robust conception of the political person as well as accommodating moral difference in a diverse society. In addition, the educative feature of public deliberation suggests that reasonable citizens could thoroughly internalize public reason and political morality through practising deliberative civic action. Through the lens of deliberative democracy, this project aims to advocate a thick conception of citizenship education for contemporary liberalism in order to address the theorization of the civic self and the moral demands of liberal democratic citizenship.

What is politically at stake when citizens of Muslim faith are publicly presented as permanent aliens in contemporary European societies? On what grounds is such exclusion or ‘externalisation’ based? What requirements can European citizens be reasonably expected to meet? This research analyses the subject of Muslims’ citizenship in contemporary European societies from the perspective of normative political theory, and more precisely from the viewpoint of John Rawls’s political liberalism, in particular in light of the idea of public reason. Whilst recent contributions in political philosophy analysing the question of citizenship of Muslims in liberal democracies from a Rawlsian standpoint have mainly focussed on the notion of an overlapping consensus, the implications of the concept of public reason on that same issue are largely unexplored. This study tries to fill such a gap in the literature. In chapter one, I begin by framing what I call the “background problem” of the research, namely, the claim that “Islam in Europe makes problem” and its different dimensions. I then reframe the question under scrutiny by presenting in greater theoretical detail the problem investigated and the main research question: Which ideal conception of citizenship should provide the common normative perspective in contemporary Western European societies, which are characterised by both demands of inclusion of Muslims and the need for solving a problem of mutual assurance concerning citizens’ commitment to shared terms of social cooperation, so that those societies can be stable for the right reasons? My central thesis is that the idea of public reason provides a common discursive platform which establishes the ground for both a public political identity for citizens and shared standards for social and political criticism. I also argue that political liberalism specifies a peculiar evaluative framework that allows citizens to answer the above-mentioned questions in a distinctively political way. In the first part, I thus develop my “justificatory evaluative” methodological approach based on public reason (chapter two). In the second part (chapters three and four), I reconstruct the idea of public reason and specify the fundamental requirements of the justificatory evaluative approach. In the third part, I firstly attempt to demonstrate that, with reference to the problem at hand, public reason citizenship is normatively more appealing than two alternative ideal conceptions of citizenship, namely ‘critical republicanism’ and liberal multiculturalism (chapter five); secondly, I apply the evaluative framework to the conception of citizenship elaborated by one of the most renowned Muslim intellectuals in Europe: Tariq Ramadan. The purpose of such evaluation is twofold. Firstly, it aims at examining whether and how the idea of public reason accounts for a version of European citizenship for Muslims coming from Muslims themselves. Secondly, it aims at disclosing whether what such a Muslim conception of citizenship in Europe says about the two dimensions of ‘stability for the right reasons’ of the system of social cooperation (namely, inclusion and mutual assurance) is consistent with the provisions of public reason citizenship.

La thèse porte sur les effets de l’Internet sur la démocratie et la pratique de la citoyenneté, dans le contexte d’une civilisation marquée par une certaine apathie, où la télévision occupe une place centrale. Il s’agit d’interroger la pertinence des théories déterministes qui accordent aux nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication un pouvoir important de transformation de l’humain, soit dans le sens de son émancipation, soit dans celui de son aliénation. L’objectif de la recherche est de produire l’évaluation la plus réaliste possible de l’impact de l’Internet sur notre autonomie individuelle et collective. La thèse présente trois grands moments : dans le premier, les notions d’opinion publique, de démocratie et le rôle des médias traditionnels sont examinés à travers leurs fonctions latentes et manifestes, et révèlent une tension constante de l’humain entre son aspiration à la liberté et la nécessité du conformisme. Dans le deuxième moment, sont mis en évidence les différents effets possibles du web sur les citoyens, selon leurs pratiques ; nous voyons clairement se dessiner une coupure entre une minorité active, sur laquelle le web a des effets majeurs dans son rapport à l’information et à sa citoyenneté, et une majorité plus passive. Dans le troisième moment, nous décrivons l’activité d’un média citoyen, sorte d’utopie numérique pour les citoyens actifs. Cette thèse de philosophie emprunte aussi à d’autres disciplines comme l’histoire et la sociologie, et analyse précisément et concrètement certains phénomènes observés en ligne
The thesis focuses on the effects of the Internet on democracy and the practice of citizenship in the context of a civilization marked by apathy, where television plays a central role. It is to question the relevance of deterministic theories that accord to new technologies of information and communication a significant power to transform the human is in the direction of emancipation, or in that of his alienation. The objective of the research is to produce the most realistic assessment of the impact of the Internet on our individual and collective autonomy.The thesis has three main stages: in the first, the concepts of public opinion, democracy and the role of traditional media are examined through their overt and latent functions, and reveal a constant tension between the human aspiration to the freedom and the need to conform. In the second time, are highlighted various possible effects of the web on citizens. According to their practices, we can clearly see emerge a partition between an active minority, on which the web has a major impact in his relation to the information and citizenship, and a more passive majority. In the third stage, we describe the activity of a citizen media, digital kind of utopia for active citizens.This thesis of philosophy also borrows from other disciplines such as history and sociology, and analyzes some specific and concrete phenomena online

In this dissertation, I develop a political liberal ethics of citizenship that reconciles conflicting religious and civic obligations concerning political participation and deliberation--a liberal-democratic ethics of citizenship that is compatible with religious integrity. I begin by canvassing the current state of the debate between political liberals and their religious critics, engaging Rawls's Political Liberalism and the various religious objections Nicholas Wolterstorff, Christopher Eberle, Robert George, John Finnis, Paul Weithman, Jeffrey Stout, and Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier develop (Chapter One). I then critically evaluate political liberalism's requirements of citizens in light of the religious objections and the religious objections in light of political liberal norms of reciprocity, concluding that some religious citizens have legitimate complaints against citizenship requirements that forbid citizens from offering religious arguments alone in public political discussions (Chapter Two). Next, I propose an alternative set of guidelines for public political discussions in constitutional democracies, the phased account of democratic decision-making, that, I argue, addresses the religious citizens' legitimate complaints without undermining a constitutional democracy's legitimacy or commitment to public justification (Chapter Three). Then, I argue that a religious practice of political engagement I call prophetic witnessing is compatible with the phased account, can serve as a canonical model to guide religious citizens' political participation, and can help religious citizens navigate the substantive conflicts between their religious and civic obligations that remain possible even in a society that follows the phased account (Chapter Four). Finally, I conclude by imagining three different democracies, each adhering to a different set of guidelines for public political discussions, in order to argue for the benefit of adopting norms that balance citizens' obligations to govern themselves legitimately with citizens' ability to integrate their deepest moral and religious commitments and their public, political argument and advocacy.

Dissertation

Pour David Miller, l’inclusion des immigrants implique leur intégration culturelle. Une inclusion simplement politique sans ancrage culturel embrouille l’arrière-plan culturel de l’État-nation déjà mis à l’épreuve par la globalisation, les revendications identitaires et indépendantistes. Or, l’homogénéité culturelle lui assure une identité nationale solide, requise pour la citoyenneté, la délibération démocratique et la justice sociale. L’objectif de ce mémoire est de montrer que cette approche substantialiste est exigente outre mesure, que l’identité nationale ainsi comprise ne doit pas être un prérequis sine qua non pour une identité politique libérale viable, et qu’elle est en plus incompatible avec une société pluraliste. Ce mémoire propose donc une approche alternative fondée sur une interprétation spécifique de la théorie de la raison publique rawlsienne. Deux objectifs seront dès lors explorés : la plausible dissociation du régime libéral et de la culture au sens fort, et, par conséquent, la fondation en raison d’une société pluraliste.
For David Miller, the inclusion of immigrants requires their cultural integration. A mere political inclusion of immigrants without cultural anchoring muddles the cultural background of the nation-state, already tested by globalization, sub-state nationalisms and fragmented identities. Therefore, cultural homogeneity provides the nation-state a strong national identity required for citizenship, democratic deliberation and social justice. Our aim in this memorandum is to show that this substantialist approach is too strong a requirement, that this conception of national identity should not be a sine qua non prerequisite for a viable liberal political identity, and that it is incompatible with a pluralist society. We are proposing, instead, a political approach founded on a specific interpretation of Rawl’s public reason theory. Hence, two objectives will be explored: the plausible dissociation of national identity and citizenship, and consequently, the foundation of a pluralist society.

This book is a defense of political liberalism as a feminist liberalism. The first half of the book develops and defends a novel interpretation of political liberalism. It is argued that political liberals should accept a restrictive account of public reason and that political liberals’ account of public justification is superior to the leading alternative, the convergence account of public justification. In the second half of the book, it is argued that political liberalism’s core commitments restrict all reasonable conceptions of justice to those that secure genuine, substantive equality for women and other marginalized groups. Here it is demonstrated how public reason arguments can be used to support law and policy needed to address historical sites of women’s subordination to advance equality; prostitution, the gendered division of labor and marriage, in particular, are considered.

The question of what religious practices modern democracies should accommodate is urgent and widely discussed. This essay provides a framework for dealing with accommodation issues in pluralistic societies. It does this in part through examining Kevin Vallier’s Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation, which defends an accommodationist liberalism. His view is more permissive than this chapter’s both in accommodationist policy and on some broad normative questions; for example, this chapter gives a larger role to natural reason as a capacity shared by normal human beings and a basis for reasons not dependent on theology or religion. For secular citizens, identifying and appraising natural reasons for lawmaking is valuable both for clarifying their own thinking and communication; for religious citizens, seeking such reasons is also beneficial and need not be unduly burdensome. The essay concludes with applications of the proposed ethics of citizenship to both politics and public education.

This chapter examines Mary Wollstonecraft's political thought. Wollstonecraft advances the argument that the private and public are interrelated and that God has given reason to both sexes. Among her ideas: ‘natural’ qualities, including masculinity and femininity, are socially constructed; reason and virtue require cultivation; private and public virtue demands non-sexually differentiated principles and standards, and freedom, equal rights, and political representation for women and men; tyranny in private, especially in marriage, undermines political virtue and active citizenship; education must be reformed, marriage transformed into an equal relationship between loving friends, and wives must have economic independence. After providing a short biography of Wollstonecraft, the chapter analyses her views on nature, sentiment, reason, men's rights and women's freedom, private virtue, and public order. It shows how Wollstonecraft's insights challenge standard conceptions of democracy.

The community co-operatives that are spreading today in many parts of the world are the arrival point of an evolutionary process that has seen the progressive shift of co-operatives’ focus from specific social and professional groups to society as a whole. Since the term ‘community co-operative’ is relatively new and similar institutions are named differently at different times, the first task is to elucidate the concept. Its basic elements are community goods, territory, and citizenship, which are discussed with reference to factual cases. We then discuss differences between new community co-operatives and old ones. In the second part we review some data about them, with a special focus on customer-owned providers of public services. The chapter closes with a discussion of the economic reasons why citizen participation through consumer ownership this organizational mode is more likely to expand today in response to privatization failures than it did in the past.

In the long nineteenth century, democracy evolved from a contested, maligned conception of government with little concrete expression at the level of the state, to a term widely associated with good governance throughout the diverse political cultures of the Atlantic world and beyond. The geographical scope and public range of discussions about the meaning of democracy in this era were unprecedented in comparison to previous centuries. These lively debates involved fundamental questions about human nature, and encompassed subjects ranging from the scope of the people who would participate in self-government to the importance of social and economic issues. For these reasons, the nineteenth century has proven the formative century in the modern history of democracy. This volume surveys democracy broadly as a cultural phenomenon operating in different ways across a very wide range of societies in the nineteenthcentury world. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the “common good”; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and beyond the polis. These ten different approaches to democracy in the nineteenth century add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

This book examines the rise and fall of the American housewife as a political constituency group and explores the relationship between the domestic sphere and the formation of political identity. This book is a study of how women used institutions built on patriarchy and consumer capitalism to cultivate a political voice. Using a labor history lens, it places the home rather than the workplace at the center of the community, revealing new connections between labor, gender, and citizenship. Three periods of consumer upheaval anchor the narrative: the Depression-era meat boycott of 1935, the consumer coalitions of the New Deal and the rise of the Cold War, and the wave of consumer protests in the 1960s and 1970s. The book is framed around the lives of several key labor and consumer activists and their organizations in both urban and suburban areas—Detroit, Chicagoland, Long Island, and Los Angeles. The geographic diversity of these three periods allows for a national story about the influence of domestic politics between the New Deal and the election of Ronald Reagan and the emergence of the conservative right. Some of these women have appeared in other historical work in limited ways, while the remaining women are new to the literature of consumer activism. This book tells the story of these women as they enter the public sphere to protest the increasingly challenging task of feeding their families and balancing the household ledger.

Chapter 7 examines the politics surrounding California’s stem cell ballot initiative. The chapter explores how the promise of cures derived from human embryonic stem cell research elicited accounts of citizenship and the public good that treated biomedical innovation as an unequivocal public good. The chapter examines how actors used this idea of innovation to construct science and public reason as allied, secular institutions, and critics of the initiative as injecting unwarranted, private religious perspectives into processes of democratic judgment.