Question

Enjoyment of citizenship requires the activist politics of citizens.
​

Answer 1

Answer:

Citizenship

First published Fri Oct 13, 2006; substantive revision Mon Jul 17, 2017

A citizen is a member of a political community who enjoys the rights and assumes the duties of membership. This broad definition is discernible, with minor variations, in the works of contemporary authors as well as in the entry “citoyen” in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie [1753].[1] Notwithstanding this common starting-point and certain shared references,[2] the differences between 18th century discussions and contemporary debates are significant. The encyclopédiste’s main preoccupation, understandable for one living in a monarchy, was the relationship between the concepts ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’. Were they the same (as Hobbes asserted) or contradictory (as a reading of Aristotle suggested)?[3] This issue is less central today as we tend to take for granted that a liberal democratic regime is the appropriate starting-point for our reflections. This does not mean, however, that the concept has become uncontroversial. After a long period of relative calm, there has been a dramatic upsurge in philosophical interest in citizenship since the early 1990s.[4]

Two broad challenges have led theorists to re-examine the concept: first, the need to acknowledge the internal diversity of contemporary liberal democracies; second, the pressures wrought by globalization on the territorial, sovereign state. We will focus on each of these two challenges, examining how they prompted new discussions and disagreements.

The entry has four sections. The first examines the main dimensions of citizenship (legal, political, identity) and sees how they are instantiated in very different ways within the two dominant models: the republican and the liberal. The feminist critique of the private/public distinction, central to both models, serves as a bridge to the entry’s second section. It focuses upon two important debates about the implications of social and cultural pluralism to conceptions of citizenship: first, should they recognize, rather than transcend, difference and, if so, does this recognition affect citizenship’s purported role in strengthening social cohesion? Second, how are we to understand the relation between citizenship and nationality under conditions of pluralism? The third section discusses the challenges which globalisation poses to theories of citizenship. These theories have long taken for granted the idea that citizenship’s necessary context is the sovereign, territorial state. This premise is being increasingly contested by those who question the state’s right to determine who is accepted as a member and/or claim that citizenship can be meaningful beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. The entry’s fourth and final section looks at how recent discussions in the fields of disability rights and animal rights challenge a basic premise of the literature on citizenship since Aristotle: the idea that discursive rationality constitutes a threshold condition to citizenship.

Answer 2

A citizen is a member of a political community who enjoys the rights and assumes the duties of membership. This broad definition is discernible, with minor variations, in the works of contemporary authors as well as in the entry “citoyen” in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie [1753]. Notwithstanding this common starting-point and certain shared references, the differences between 18th century discussions and contemporary debates are significant. The encyclopédiste’s main preoccupation, understandable for one living in a monarchy, was the relationship between the concepts ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’. Were they the same (as Hobbes asserted) or contradictory (as a reading of Aristotle suggested)? This issue is less central today as we tend to take for granted that a liberal democratic regime is the appropriate starting-point for our reflections

♥️