The Tragedy of Citizenship: A Preliminary Sketch for the Dramatic Education of Civic Citizens

The Tragedy of Citizenship:

A Preliminary Sketch for the Dramatic Education

of Civic Citizens

Author: Jasper Donkers Supervisor/Examiner:

prof. dr. Yolande Jansen

Assessor:

dr. Robin Celikates

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements

for the degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy of the Social and Political Sciences to the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam

May 18, 2018 Number of credits: 18EC

abstract

This essay follows James Tully’s redescription of civic citizenship games in Philosophy in a New Key I & II and tries to confront and supplement entrenched legalistic notions of civil citizenship that are dominant in liberal discourse. Tracing Tully’s theoretical model to its antecedents in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hannah Arendt it is argued that the dialogical structure of the ‘rule-bound’ model of civic language-games befits a sceptical orientation to the ‘initiatory’ and ‘performative’ dimensions of Arendt’s theory of action and in other, ‘ancient’ variants of agonistic theory. Because of the enduring nature of ‘tragedy’ that is found in democracy, and the unpredictability and precariousness of the modern predicament, it is argued, that a tragic modesty with regard to the performativity of political action seems justified. To educate civic citizens in civic citizenship the pedagogical potential of the tragic form is explored through a reading of tragedy by way of historical analysis, and an interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone, in which the agons of Attic tragedy are perceived as ‘agons gone wrong’. This pedagogical reading of tragedy locates the moment of learning for civic audiences in tragedy’s demonstration of civic irreconcilability; the danger and recklessness of the hubristic acts of prodigious power by tragic heroes; and the failure of the tragic hero to move beyond ultimately one-sided ethical principles.

keywords

James Tully • civic and civil citizenship • agonistic citizenship • civic education • tragedy and civic education • civic virtue • agonism and tragedy • political language-games • Greek tragedy and modern politics • Antigone • tragic heroism

acknowledgements

I would like to thank Prof. Yolande Jansen for supervising this thesis – her guidance, enthusiasm for the topic and lectures for the course ‘Political Philosophy and Humanities in a Global Age’ helped spark a renewed interest for political thought in me I had once thought lost.

The last few years have been hard. Not only on me, but also on the people who stand closest to me. After a period of intense work-related and political stressors, I experienced a psychotic break in April of 2016. To this day, I live with memories of ecstasy and terror from the three-month period I was under its spell. The last two years were a period of pain, patience, small steps forward and dare I say it: mental and physical recovery. The completion of this thesis signifies not only the completion of a period of academic inquiry; it is a therapeutic processing of my own personal tragedy and a much-needed personal milestone in my recovery.

It is now time for me to continue my recovery. I will try to do this on my own terms – as a citizen that continues to be a part of a larger world, be it now with greater clarity and compassion for pain and difference. I will try again to work with all the puzzles and games my little life throws at me and try to dance with and against its tune.

For their undying love, support and affection, I thank my mother, Karin, and my sister Melanie and her partner Kevin. I would also like to thank my closest friends, Anouk, Bardia, Emiel, Ersot and Vincent for their understanding, their kindness and the ways in which the lightness of their company reminded me of how life continues – even during darker, more chaotic days.

table of contents

abstract + keywords

2

acknowledgements

3

table of contents

4

opening quotes

5

0. prelude – democracy as Chekhovian tragedy

6

1. introduction

8

2. civic and civil citizenship

17

2.1. civic citizenship

19

2.2

civil citizenship

23

2.3

Tully’s redescription

26

3. civic citizenship as an infinite game

31

4. civic citizenship and the politics of invention

37

5. civic citizenship as a play with adversity

48

5.1

tragedy and the

polis

50

5.2

the

agon

gone wrong in Sophocles’

Antigone

56

6. conclusion

64

Maturity consists in having rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.

― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

If we wish to do justice to the conflicts that surround us and lead to one tragedy after another, we can do no better than to keep the example of Antigone constantly in mind.

0. prelude – democracy as Chekhovian tragedy

… there is the Shakespearean resolution and there is the Chekhovian one. On the one hand, at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, the stage is strewn with dead bodies and maybe there’s some justice hovering high above. A Chekhov tragedy, on the other hand, ends with everybody disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, disappointed, absolutely shattered, but still alive. And I want a Chekhovian and not a Shakespearean one for the Israeli/Palestinian tragedy.

― Amos Oz, In the Land of Israel

When questioned in an interview about his outspoken preference for a two-state solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict, Amos Oz used the endings of Shakespearean and Chekhovian tragedy as analogies to the potential ‘closures’ of the ongoing tragedy of the conflict. In the Shakespearean ending the dramatis personae die and we see an image of Lady Justice

lingering above the stage as a semi-divine, Platonic afterthought; in the Chekhovian tragedy the play concludes with a resolution that is difficult to embrace for all parties involved, but at least allows for the characters to live and continue their struggles after the narrative ends.

Oz’s analogy of the need for Chekhovian resolutions can be read as a dramatic reaffirmation of Otto von Bismarck’s famous remark that ‘politics is the art of the possible’ (von Poschinger 1895), the attainable; the art of the next best. It invites us to visualize an alternative to the conventional, classical ending of tragedy. The destructive ‘closure’ is postponed, deferred, at least until the next tragedy follows. Oz’s analogy is prescient, because it makes us consider the consequences of our commitment to the ideal of justice, and the effects of our often-one-sided versions or applications of it. It is an analogy that leaves us with several important philosophical questions, such as: Does the embrace of the far-sighted ideal of justice not ultimately lead to ‘a stage strewn with dead bodies’? And, are the temporary armistices that leaves all parties disillusioned, embittered and heartbroken, but at least alive and willing to fight another day, not preferable, over hard-fought resolutions over ideals?

For Oz, the tragic imagination of Chekhov demonstrates that there is no reasonable hope for a permanent resolution in which seemingly irreconcilable positions become reconciled. In his rhetorical sleight of hand, Oz disagrees with the prominent philosophers of tragedy, Hegel and Nietzsche, who find in the deaths of the tragic dramatis personae either the expression of a ‘latent rationality’ or a heroic and impassioned willing that shows the possibility of man’s ‘self-overcoming’. For Hegel, the violent closure of tragedy is a necessary element of a structurally tragic dialectical reconciliation, of a consciousness in progressive conflict (Roche 2006); for Nietzsche, the death of the tragic hero is not something we should mourn as an audience: its

appearance in the world is the only thing that makes us realize that a ‘pessimism of strength’ is possible and that ‘life is indestructibly mighty and pleasurable’ (Nietzsche 1967, 39).

This essay is a theoretical experiment – in which I demonstrate that we can use Oz’s allusion to Chekhov’s tragic imagination to overcome the theoretical violence present in idealistic philosophies of tragedy and in the civil discourse of citizenship. I take Oz’s analogy as serious as possible — as serious as anyone that plays can. I ask you, the reader, to do the same.

Try to imagine democracy as a politics in disarray; as a political system in that is in a continuous state of irresolution in which the instances that we share a common sense of ‘justice’ or a ‘consensus’ are but short-lived moments in which a temporary armistice is reached between conflicting forces and opinions. A system of productive irresolution; not one that leads to final and absolute resolutions. Imagine it as test of patience, of suffering – an

agony to live through, that requires a tremendous amount of empathy and resilience of us all, but still: a tragedy that is better endured and lived than resolved.

1. introduction

In our complex, globalized world the political category of ‘citizenship’ can no longer be regarded as a mere, formal judicial-administrative relationship between the institutions of a given polity and its members. When we want to conceptualize a larger scope of interactions between individuals and systems of governance with the term ‘citizen’ it is instead more useful to think of citizenship as a phenomenon that consists of a multiplicity of formal- and informal socio-political interactions between different persons and localities, with varying degrees of political significance and meaning. A multiplicity of governance practices and activities exist and continues to spread, taking on a myriad of forms, suggesting that political analyses that focus only on the state-citizenship relationship are wont to miss the complex socio-political relationships that characterize the modern situation. There are wide variety of relations that exist between the members of a given polity among each other, but also with- and against actors across borders, and there are widely divergent ways in which these ensembles organize themselves and are governed by political actors.

As of yet, there is no single conceptualized form of citizenship, fixed throughout time, with clearly delineated rules, that can describe the diverse sets of relationships between different levels of governmental institutions and the formal citizenry; between transnational corporations and consumers; between employees and employers; between digital natives organized around political issues; the local organization of indigenous groups; and between communities of believers, ethnicities and political affiliations.

The question of how we can prevent making the mistakes of the past and embolden practices of informal imperialism in the future, either directly or indirectly, but still conceptualize these complex relationships between citizens in a meaningful and morally productive way, has been a significant challenge for modern theorists of citizenship. The availability of more accurate empirical descriptions of the complex collages of contemporary modes of governance and the development of new theoretical models that deal with system and linguistic complexity have led a new breed of theorists to critically assess the one-sided legalistic, national approach to citizenship that is emblematic of the liberal tradition of constitutionalism and deliberative democratic theory. These critical political theorists recognize the value of a more differential approach to citizenship and find that the tendency of the contemporary liberal order to project and elevate ultimately local cultural values — that have developed in tandem with local contexts and conditions — to best practices and

legislation that profess to hold universal appeal and validity may ultimately lead to a tragic repetition of past mistakes (Young 1989; Kymlicka 1995; Callan 1997; Williams 1998; Tully 2004). The important question these theorists ask themselves is: ‘How can we, as political theorists, give voice to the unheard voices of citizens and to yet unthought-of modes of citizenship?’

As always, different theorists posit different answers to the same questions. The scientific community too seems marked by productive irresolution. The point that most of these theorists seem to concur with, is the value a contemporary political theory should ascribe to the cultivation of citizens’ intellectual and institutional sensitivity to local surroundings, discourses and voices. Because we have been so ‘accustomed to assessing our morality and politics predominantly in the juridical terms of ‘right’, ‘rights’, ‘law’ and ‘universal’ and ‘self-evident’ truths Western citizens have become ‘unused to other political and moral language-games’ (Tully 1989, 186) that may possess their own internal validity and meaning and should thus be given a ‘right’ to expressive self-determination and recognition. A ‘glocalization’ of citizenship is needed, these critically-minded political theorists argue. We need to open the judicial-administrative discourse of civil citizenship to the political and moral language-games that have been, and still are, disregarded and may have their own “right” to cultural and political self-expression and -determination, they say.

James Tully is one of the pioneers of this research agenda and is responsible for conducting some of the most important theoretical groundwork for its academic development in recent decades. In his studies of indigenous peoples, constitutionalism and diversity, and in his genealogical inquiries in methods of informal imperialism, he has consistently tried to experiment with ways in which political philosophy can ‘attend to the strange multiplicity of political voices and activities without distorting or disqualifying them’ (Tully 2002, 537). In his postulation and defence of ‘global civic/diverse citizenship’ forms in Public Philosophy in a New Key I & II, published in 2002, Tully tries to move beyond the dominance of the legalistic tendencies of the liberal tradition through the development of a more flexible and contextualized variant of citizenship-theory that relies on the use of Wittgensteinian ‘language-games’ to model civic relationships among citizens and with- and against governors.

Tully recognizes the modern, legalistic approach to citizenship that describes citizenship in strictly judicial-administrative terms as the globally hegemonic discourse of citizenship. This mode of citizenship – which Tully defines as ‘civil citizenship’ – ‘takes as its empirical and normative exemplar the form of citizenship characteristic of the modern nation state’ (Tully 1999, 11) and the political system of liberal democracy, and thus defines this dominant

form of citizenship in relation to ‘two clusters of institutional features of modern nation states’, namely the ‘constitutional rule of law’ (nomos) and ‘representative government’ (demos) (Tully 1999, 11). Tully observes that the hegemonic global citizenship-discourse is propagated en masse by sovereign nation-states and is spread through deliberate measures of formal- and informal imperialism, consisting.

The dominance of this tradition of civil citizenship should be seen as a historical and political contingency; as a ‘limited whole, as one historically specific ensemble of forms of government and practices of freedom among many, rather than as the comprehensive and quasi-transcendental framework’ (Tully 2002, 541) it presents itself as, according Tully. Its current form is not only historically contingent, but also objectionable and morally indefensible, for Tully, insofar as it disregards the multiplicity of voices that characterises the contemporary political realities and reproduces historical modes of ‘civilizing’ imperialisms through the global institutional enforcement of the Western ‘rights of commerce’ (ius commercium) — enshrined in democratic constitutions and in international law — and its corollary: the ‘duty to hospitality’ of host countries (Owen & Tully 2014, 21).

Although we usually fail to perceive the myriad of civic activities and practices for the diverse mosaic of multiplicity it is, and have grown more accustomed in recognizing, discussing and theorizing civil citizenship, this does not mean that the marginalized forms of proto-civil citizenship cease to exist or have faded from relevance. Civic activities simply do not ‘fit’ the formalized parameters of the neoliberal discourses that have become dominant in Western democracies. It is as if, to use the William James’ terminology, civic citizenship is the combined ‘litter’ (Connolly 2005, 74-79) or the ‘remainders of the system’ (Honig 1993, 3) that escapes and transverses the judicial-administrative practices and political technologies of liberal democracies that present themselves as the centre. To these dominant discourses, civic freedom practices and activities are the ‘unfortunate accidents that no system can control’. They are thought of as ‘the symptoms of an ill-conceived, dysfunctional politics’ (Honig 1993, 5). Despite their relative invisibility from public debate in liberal democracies, and our failure to effectively theorize its ‘litter-like' and ‘accidental’ quality, civic citizenship can be considered ‘the largest non-centralized and diverse movement of movements in the world’ (Tully 1999, 83). The movement can be seen as the global contrapuntal field of citizenship and it is a field that is not only more diverse, but also ‘qualitatively different from the subordinate mirror image of themselves that the modern mode of citizenship presents to its captivated citizens’ (Owen & Tully 2014, 35).

Civic relationships can be characterized as ‘negotiated practices all the way down’ (Owen & Tully 2014, 36): as relationships between civic citizen that organize around a common cause or

purpose, and as relationships between civic citizens with and against governors in local contexts in which the governor invariably fails to ‘construct the other all the way down’ (Owen & Tully, 46).

In his work on the anti-imperial struggles of aboriginal peoples for self-rule following

Strange Multiplicity Tully came to recognize that the struggles of marginalized voices involved not (only) the struggles for recognition but also their collective struggles over recognition. Citizens who seek to exercise their civic freedom find that it difficult to reach a dialogical consensus or a just, final settlement with their governing partners (Owen & Tully 2014, xi). Rather, in the process of the continued dialogue these civic actors found themselves forced to engage in civic action with- and against fellow citizens, and with- and against the governors that were instrumental to their cause, over the ways in which they were recognized.

The freedom – or lack thereof – experienced by civic citizens in the relationships they find or project themselves in can be visualized as a ‘field’ or as a ‘Spielraum’ – in the sense of a ‘room or space of manoeuvrability’ and in the experiential sense, as a space in which civic citizens can only play a ‘range of possible moves’ in their relationship (Owen & Tully 2014, 44-45) with governors and fellow citizens. Civic citizens only have a ‘constrained space in which […] the have survived centuries of imperialization’ and have exercised ‘the arts of resistance’ (Owen & Tully 2014, 47). They were able to survive because ‘humans are always unavoidably

homo ludens, creative game players and prototypical civic citizens in the dialogical relationships of their cultures and civilizations’ (Owen & Tully 2014, 45) Tully says.

Tully conjures the image of the agon ─ the classical Greek image of a space of productive strife and contest (a positive Eris) between individuals over power and opinion — to help us understand how civic citizen were able to carve out the space to breath. For Tully, as it was for Burckhardt, Nietzsche — who first identified the agonality of Greek Culture as one of the primary reason for its vibrancy – and later, for Arendt, Foucault and the Republican virtue theorists, the public confrontations and contests between opinions, interests and powers are constitutive and productive elements of a healthy democracy. It is through playful, agonistic

activity that citizens — or ‘those who are subject to and affected by’ systems of governance — can question, negotiate and ultimately transform said practices (Owen & Tully 2014, 95). It is trough agonistic activity that the rules of their dialogues with governors can be changed.

Civic citizens find that they must change the rules of the game while playing and thus must ‘civicize’ the games they find themselves in or shift the borders of the game to other games that allow for more freedom, if they want to exercise their freedom in meaningful ways and succeed in undertaking their life projects. Man’s playful nature thus has made it possible for the governed partner to remain an ‘active agent – an apprentice player’ (Owen & Tully 2014, 45)

that the governor ‘fails to construct […] all the way down’ (Owen & Tully 2014, 46). Of course, the civic citizens must always ‘learn how to navigate and negotiate his or her way around the field and how to play the game through acting and interacting with the governing partner’ (Owen & Tully 2014, 47), but because citizenship practices are open-ended; negotiated all the way down; and can be engaged in creatively, resistance and the questioning and augmentation of the rules of the game always remains a distinct possibility.

I

If we are to accept Tully’s findings that proto-civil ‘citizenship’ forms that make up civic citizenship continue to exist as contrapuntal discourses and remainders of the current hegemonic citizenship discourse; that they are taking place in the margins of the post-Westphalian, Western dominated international order; and that they can be thought of as proto-civil, playful, agonistic activities that value non-violent dialogue over open conflict – this will naturally lead to the more exploratory and, to my mind, more interesting, pedagogical follow-up question, which is:

How can one acquire the sensitivity through which one becomes able to engage with one’s local surroundings in an emphatic and understanding way, while at the same time becoming and remaining an agent of change of- and for these very same surroundings?

Even if Tully can successfully move from a legalistic reading of citizenship to the more contextualized and flexible variant of ‘civic citizenship’ to attend to a multiplicity of voices he still has to address this paradox in more detail. The original Platonic/Aristotelian paradox formulated as the intertwinement of the law of the polis and its effects on the ethos of the citizens living in the community of the polis ― perhaps reiterated most forcefully for the secular age by Rousseau in the Social Contract (Honig 2007) ― is at the heart of the problem of political emancipation and the question of citizenship.

The paradox ― ‘which comes first – good people or good law?’ is ‘not a clash between two logics or norms’ but presents itself instead ‘as a vicious circle of chicken-and-egg’ (Honig 2007, 1) and has thus proven inescapable for political philosophy. Regrettably, it is often addressed only in the margins of the writings of theorists of deliberative democracy and agonistic democracy.

appear to offer some solution to the paradox by describing the constitutional moment and the relationship of citizens with the governor and with other citizens as dialogical (Honig & Stears 2014) ― that is: as an agonistic relationship between constituent and constituting powers ― and the ‘civic’ citizen as an ‘apprentice-player’ (Owen & Tully 2014, 44), this contextualization necessarily displaces the original paradox to both a more comprehensive domain of inquiry, namely the general role of convention, and the role and limits of education in overcoming it; and a more specific domain, namely: the structure, rules and emotional effects of the dialogical games of citizenship, and the capacities needed by citizenship to participate in them.

To understand these problems, we will have to move from political philosophy, political psychology to the philosophy of education. With Tully’s theory in hand, we can formulate a research question that can be operationalized, and our research-subject can move away from the rather broadly-formulated notion of a ‘sensitivity to one’s local surroundings’, because we now know, following Tully, that we can conceptualize the ways in which citizens interact with one another and governors as dialogical. The notion of a ‘game’ simplifies the problem, but stills retains the complexity we are looking for to work with the original paradox.

If we agree that the possibility of rule-following and deviation are given in the dialogical process, and that the method of learning happens, so to say, in the game, between ‘apprentice-players’ and more mature players, the pedagogical question takes a different form. The question we must try to answer now becomes, how civic citizens can be motivated to engage in civic citizenship; be moderated or restrained in a non-forceful way in their agonistic activity; and how they can become resilient in their play, so that they keep on playing, despite the agony of the tragedies of civic life.

These first two elements, motivation and restraint, can be summarized as ‘agonistic respect’ - as I believe the notion of respect both contains a recognition of the need for agonality, and a self-restraining element, insofar as the player who ‘respects’ recognizes that there are rules to the game; that these rules serve a function; and that they are contingent and thus amenable. The second we can call ‘civic resilience’, and this notion is interrelated to a citizen’s recognition and understanding of the agon, insofar as the citizen becomes resilient through understanding the need of productive strife for the health of a democracy and the ways in which the agonality of culture may give him pleasure and enrich the value of his actions.

The displacement of the original paradox, the recognition of the tragic nature of civic citizenship, and the identification of ‘agonistic respect’ and ‘civic resilience’ as complementary, may lead us to formulate the following research question:

a societies' dialogical and negotiated practices and activities - of which the law may be the primary example, but still but one example among others - how can we prepare the agonistic respect and the civic resilience needed by civic citizens to engage in dialogues with diverse and different political actors in the interest of the public good?

In this essay I explore this broadly formulated question through a preliminary sketch of a dramatic civic education that is mindful of the idea of democracy as an enduring and

continuous tragedy. My method is analogical, insofar as I do not try to answer the research question directly but try to demonstrate how we can use Greek tragedy to help apprentice-players understand the agon.

II

In the first substantive chapter of this essay, Chapter 2: Civic and Civil Citizenship, I reiterate Tully’s genealogical descriptions of the distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘civil’ citizenship to establish an overview of the contemporary situation of citizenship-discourses. My aim in this extended opening chapter is not to contest Tully’s findings, but rather to introduce the genealogy of the civic-civil distinction in order that we may use it with more fluidity at a later stage in reference to tragedy. The approach to my writing in this chapter is informed and indebted by Tully’s own approach of political philosophy ‘as a critical activity’ insofar as it surveys the historical delineation of citizenship categories between ‘civil’ and ‘civic’ and thus tries to ‘bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’. In following this approach, I try to ‘ensure that the work of philosophy starts from the “rough ground” of struggles with and over words’ (Tully 2002, 544). In this case, the genealogy of Athenian ‘civic’ citizenship and Roman ‘civil’ citizenship is the historical ‘rough grounds’ we necessary find ourselves at if we are to retrieve the first struggles with and over words over now lost modes of citizenship.

After this opening survey I engage in a systemic conceptualization of civic citizenship negotiations in Chapter 3: Civic Citizenship as an Infinite Game. In this chapter I redescribe the basic theoretical premises of ‘civic citizenship’ as an ‘infinite game’ and trace the theoretical debt of Tully’s concept of civic citizenship to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’ and Nietzschean ‘agonality’. I engage in this redescription for several reasons: because it helps us visualize the diversity of civic activities; because it helps us model the dialogical spaces in which contestation seems possible; and because it sets up an exploration of the

potential pedagogical link between civic polyphonies, games-playing, citizenship and the

enduringly tragic nature of democracy.

Although very much essential to my argument, the Wittgensteinian approach does not seem sufficiently able to describe the spatial and temporal settings in which political invention takes place or becomes possible. As Johan Huizinga rightly remarked: ‘It is ancient wisdom, but it is also a little cheap, to call all human activity "play"’ (Huizinga 1949, I). To assert that man is a homo ludens who finds himself surrounded within ‘language-games’ is simply not enough. Likewise, to call all forms of play-like activity that civic citizens engage in meaningful and political is equally cheap. If we agree that the ‘apprentice player [..] must learn how to navigate and negotiate his or her way around the field [of games]’ (Owen & Tully 2014, 44) he finds or projects himself in, and that the subsequent transformation of these fields occurs through acts of creative re-evaluation and deviation on the part of the players involved, we must ask ourselves a series of questions, namely: How can we account for the possibility of

more complete deviation from the norms and rules that regulate the space of play or the creation of new rules? Is it possible for profound or foundational change to come from within the confines of a rule-based environment? Quite simply put: is the political apprentice or the civic ensemble not largely conditioned and held down by the mundane pressures of life and the norms, values, institutions and practices exerted by neoliberal modes of governance?

It is these difficult questions that will lead me to reflect on the interplay between convention, system determinism or indeterminism, and the very possibility of political action in the third chapter of this essay, Chapter 4: Civic Citizenship and the Politics Invention. To pose these questions is to reiterate the problem of agency and initiative in political life in the face of structural rigidity; a problem that has become central to post-Nietzschean philosophy, pessimism over postmodern Marxist political projects and our cultural processing of the ‘banal’ tyranny of totalitarianism. It is thus not altogether surprising that one of the most eloquent philosophical response to the problem comes from the ‘reluctant modernism’ (Benhabib 2003) or, if you will, the ‘ancient agonism’ of Hannah Arendt (Kalyvas 2009; Wenman 2003) who, with her theory of action, attempts to integrate Nietzschean notions of self-creation within the framework of a Republican model of ‘civic’ virtue.

I explore the ‘politics of invention’ in Arendt’s theory of action in some detail and then contrast the ‘performative’ and ‘initiatory’ dimensions of Arendt’s argument with notions of ‘emergence’ and system ‘self-organization’ in complex systems, that appear in William E. Connolly’s work on pluralism. The works of these two authors offer examples of individual self-creation and systemic creation, in the form of ‘absolute invention and initiative’ and ‘systemic self-creation’. These two authors are presented, respectively, as the two primary

examples and exponents of ‘ancient’ and ‘(post)modern’ models of agonist political invention (Kalyvas 2009; Wenman 2013). By contrasting the two I demonstrate that a ‘post-modern’ sensitivity to the unexpectedness and randomness of complex systems should add to our

tragic democratic sensibility, insofar as it shows that a positive valuation of the grand, performative, aesthetic gesture is becoming exceedingly difficult in in a complex, modern world that is characterized by a multiplicity of civic language-games and in which insight over cause and consequence is often lacking.

In the final chapter of this essay, Chapter 5: Civic Citizenship as a Play with Adversity, we turn to history once again, but now with more of a literary flourish, as I demonstrate how Greek tragedy can provide us with valuable examples for a popular dramatic education that attends to notions of ‘agonistic respect’ and ‘civic resilience’ and is mindful of the indeterminism of the modern predicament. If we are to educate contemporary civic citizens to ‘play with adversity’ and come to understand further how hubris may lead to ‘a stage strewn with bodies’ I argue that a modern understanding of Greek tragedy may prove important. I demonstrate this by discussing the civic role Attic tragedy played in the public life of fourth- and fifth-century BCE Athens and by drawing a parallel between the dialogical structure of civic citizenship and the tragic form.

This historical analysis is supported by a literary interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone in which it is argued that the apparently simple, but extreme dilemmas portrayed in Sophocles’ masterpiece can be read as citizenship language-games that prove to be irreconcilable. Instead of showing us an example of ‘productive irresolution’, I argue, the agons of the Antigone

demonstrate the consequences of agons gone wrong; the destructiveness of hubris; and the impossibility of principled reconciliation. Because they are able to prove such things to its prospective audiences they may be helpful in my sketch of a preliminary civic pedagogy.

My thoughts on the pedagogical potential of the Antigone specifically, and Greek tragedy in general, are developed in reference to the work of Bonnie Honig who looks at the ‘interruptions’ in Sophocles’ Antigone (Honig 2013); the work of Derek Barker who reads the

Antigone as an example of ‘ineffective communication’ (Barker 2009); and the work of J. Peter Euben who argues that the advent of political theory should be thought of as a continuance of tragic theatre (Euben 1986). Without the work of these theorists I would not have seen the ‘faults’ of the Antigone as opportunities to be cherished.

2. civic and civil citizenship

In modern liberal democracies we fight most of our disputes and contests over ideas not through the sword, but through participation, discussion and deliberation in the public arena. As an ideal, the legal concept of citizenship can be regarded as the creation and subsequent safeguarding of a political community through judicial-administrative technologies. It seeks to create a community in which ‘speech has taken the place of blood, and acts of decision’ have taken ‘the place of acts of vengeance’ (Pocock 1995, 32). Underneath the imagined or formalized unity of the state, and the institutional agon created, protected and promoted by it, however, there always continue to exist spaces of difference, strive, violence and solidarity and repricrocal aid between citizens. Even though they are often unseen by authorities these spaces continue to be a part of the constituent power of the modern nation-state.

In liberal democracies, as well as in illiberal democracies or non-democracies, citizens engage in civic relationships with each other in efforts to exercise their influence on the shape, norms and values of their common world. These relationships continually redefine the question of informal and formal political belonging, not (only) through the collective engagement of citizens with or against the rule of law, but also through a diverse array of political activities in which differences in opinion about ‘political belonging’ manifest themselves and in which the law stands somewhat at a distance. Civic relationships demonstrate how one can become a citizen instead of being signified as one and what it may meanto be a citizen among citizens.

Due to the plural nature of modern societies, civic relationships have become diverse, multifaceted phenomena that can materialize in altogether different forms. They can manifest themselves as loosely knit cognitive or intellectual organizations and associations, as in academic schools of thought or forms of digital political activism; or in a more material and visible manner, for example, in the plights of indigenous populations who seek to protect their cultural heritage, through the creation and maintenance of informal community centres, village councils or as ad hoc local protests that mobilize against the decisions of governments and local municipalities.

In the best of political realities, the two citizenship models supplement and reinforce each other. Where civil citizenship grants us the passive rights that protect against arbitrary influence, force or violence by authorities and formalizes the institutional processes through which representative government is attained and legitimized, civic citizenship serves as a further protection of these basic rights and as a space of political experimentation and social

belonging beyond the domain of institutional control and oversight. Whereas civil citizenship highlights the integral, constitutive and regulative role played by institutions and conventions for the survival and maintenance of a functioning liberal democracy and a vibrant public life, civic citizenship brings to light the role of virtuous political activity and the way in which its manifestations can cement and create new democratic practices that reflect the constituent power of the peoples living side-by-side these institutions.

The space of civic citizenship is a political space where augmentation and transformation remain distinct possibilities, however much hegemonic powers or discourses may claim that history is at its end or that there are no alternatives to existing political conventions and procedures. It is a space where relationships are not formalized and directly subordinated to the ordering and controlling ends of the state. Together, these two forms of citizenship are not distinct options one has to choose between; rather, they represent ‘two impulses of political life, the impulse to keep the contest going and the impulse to be finally free of the burdens of contest.’ (Honig 1993, 14) or to at least displace the conflict to a formalized agon.

We should nuance our thinking about these forms of citizenship if we are to think of them as ‘glocal’. Not every citizen is able to enjoy the fruits of both types of citizenship in the same way and to the same extent. In societies that suffer under oppressive or illiberal regimes and the recognition of its tragic nature — that lack constitutional protections and that are disrespectful of the rights of their citizens — the de facto space of political freedom citizens experience is severely limited. In these societies, citizens may only have access to very specific and nuanced forms of proto-civil citizenship to shape their collective destinies. Violent contest has become a fact of life which citizens try to overcome daily. Because of this, the logic of civic participation shares more resemblance to the logic of war, in which citizens are seen either as potential enemies or as potential forces that can be mobilized for organized violence. This bleak observation does not mean that the notion of ‘play’ or the notion of ‘game’ becomes untenable. The opposite; because of its strategic dimension the concept may even grow in importance in such circumstances.

Because of their strategic utility, the discovery of existing civic citizenship relationships can be of great importance for philosophers, political scientists and policy-makers working with grassroots movement in the Global South. Perhaps more important than conventional judicial and administrative methods of democratic advancement. Since changes in these states may have to come from the so called ‘grey’ areas of society that exist in the periphery of highly repressive discourses and governments who use the law as a device of oppression, the discovery of informal civic relationships that have developed more minute, nuanced forms of daily resistance can be of the utmost importance for policy makers.

Let me be clear here: although the civic framework is useful, its utility should not lead to an underappreciation of the need for genuine, trustworthy democratic institutions to take root in non-democratic countries; what it shows, rather, is that without the constituent power of a vibrant and active civic society democratic institutions are at best doomed to remain ‘paper tigers’, and can, at worst, be extremely detrimental to the pre-existing proto-civil or civic fabric of societies.

I

The genealogical redescription of what I will call ‘the legislation of citizenship’ in the two following subchapters will demonstrate how civic and civil citizenship have developed as distinct but interrelated philosophical- and political categories. I argue that the underappreciation of civic citizenship in favour of the more legalistic form of civil citizenship in modern times reflects the changing estimations and denominations of the ‘scope of political life’ articulated by dominant citizen classes in Classical Greece and Ancient Rome. As such, I argue, the philosophical genealogies of ‘citizenship’ cannot be considered as disinterested accounts of rational reflection and elucidation; it is more appropriate to consider them as political narratives that have been created in and through processes of ‘alterity’ and that were promoted through rhetorical strategies and tactics aimed at the exclusion of minority and subaltern groups.

My contributions here can be read as a supplementation and elucidation of Tully’s genealogy of the civic-civil distinction, insofar as its reaffirms the significance of the distinction in our understanding of the historical contingency of the dominance of the legalistic citizenship discourse. My own genealogical digging undertaken on these pages tries to make visible the historical elements that would remain hidden if we were to discuss Tully’s work in a purely theoretical manner. To support my inquiry, I rely on the authoritative genealogies of citizenship conducted by Engin Isin in his excellent study, Being Political, and the work of i.e. Paul Cartledge, J.G.A. Pocock & Nicolas Loraux.

2.1. civic citizenship

The roots of civic citizenship can be traced back to the Republican traditions of Classical Greece and Ancient Rome. Especially the city of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC is seen by classicists and intellectual historians as the formative period for the concept (Walzer

1989; Pocock 1995). Due to the geographical location of its origin on the Greek peninsula, the ideal of civic citizenship is often referred to as ‘classical’ ideal of citizenship. It is also seen as classical because the values the ideal represents are values that we, to this day, view as fundamental to ‘Western’ civilisation proper. Although the attribution of a unique geographical belonging to democratic political activity has become somewhat controversial, insofar as it underestimates the communal aspects in the kingship politics of the ‘Orient’ and fails to account for these practices (Isin 2002), it is still important to recognise the importance of the ideal to modern Western self-understanding; to this day, there continues to be a deep psychological affinity between the Western political self-identity and the notion of self-rule and practices of collaborative decision-making.

The term ‘citizen’ – from the Latin civis and/or the Greek polites – is commonly defined, historically speaking, as the formal membership of an individual to the Athenian polis or Roman res publica and the deliberate participation in the administration of community, either through the holding of political office or the eligibility for the holding of political office. Thus, it refers not to membership of any political entity, but to a specific type of membership to a specific type of political entity.

The most influential philosophical definition is the definition articulated by Aristotle. In his

Politics, Aristotle defines the citizen as someone who is ‘qualified by gender (male), age (adult), and social status (free, legitimate, of citizen descent)’ to have an ‘active share in public decision-taking (including the giving of judicial verdicts) and office-holding’ (Cartledge 1997, 16). Aristotle’s definition here is no mere thought-experiment; it was seen by Aristotle himself and his Greek contemporaries as an empirical description of citizenship in the polis, and a practical, normative justification of its institutions.

For the aristocratic citizens of the polis in 4th century BCE Athens, Aristotle argued, it was natural to govern oneself, because these citizens, saw the operational good as fundamental to human life. As ‘intelligent and purposive beings’, the citizen of the polis naturally ‘desired to direct that which could be directed toward some purpose’ (Pocock 1995, 32). The Greek citizen’s primary avenue through which he could actualize this desire was through the political life. It was through the holding of political office and through the co-legislation of the laws of the

polis that the Greek citizens could ‘express what was best in them’ (32).

In Aristotle’s description of Greek political life, we find evidence of a preoccupation of the well-off citizen classes with the intrinsic relationship between activities of self-rule, the acquirement of personal virtue and the attainment of glory and honour. The Aristotelian form of civic citizenshipaffirms the fundamental need of humans to engage in purposeful political

behaviour to direct the individual life of the person and the collective life of the polis. By engaging in public deeds, man could cultivate his civic ethos and through the daily contests of civic life he could show his favour before the Homeric gods to his fellow-citizens.

For Aristotle, the reasons for citizens to engage in public life were also highly practical: a society could only maintain and develop the integrity of its institutions and the moral life of the members of a community, when these members were actively involved in the purposeful fulfilment of their own political telos, so he believed.

In this frame of reference, ‘citizenship is not just a means to being free; it is the way of being free in itself’ (Pocock 1995; 34). That is to say: participation in the political processes of the Athens’ chief magistrates was not only instrumental in the attainment of different positive political ends (eg. stable statehood, representative government and internal peace) but was considered the fundamental communal experience through which a prospective or new citizen came to know, experience and define himself as ‘free’ human being. It was within the context of one’s exercise of freedom in the public arenas of the polis that one was able to attain value as a human being at all.

There is a notable gap here between our traditional understanding of Aristotle’s ideas, the political realities of the Greek city-state broadly defined, and our modern intuitions of equality. When we look at citizenship through the lens of alterity a picture emerges that is counterintuitive to our modern, moral sensibilities. The classical ideal of civic citizenship is necessarily fraught, due to its foundational dependence on a conceptualisation of equality that denies self-rule within the space of the polis to all living and non-living ‘things’ that sit, move and breathe in the household (oikos) of the freed patriarch and that do not fall under the territorial bounds of the polis (nomos). These ‘things’ are excluded from the political space of the polis and — as we have learnt from Aristotle — to be excluded from the polis is not only to be denied the right to rule oneself but is to be denied the very possibility of becoming a human being at all.

There is an irony here; it is because the private, social space of the household was taken care for by women and slaves that the men could exercise their civic virtue in the polis in the first place. We see in this exclusionary narrative, already, in its embryonic form, a struggle for

and over citizenship that we will find later in modern democratic states. It seems to point to the profound connection between the ascription of citizenship and the problems of equality and alterity the political-judicial technology of the citizenship-status can exacerbate. Aristotle famously describes ‘man as a political animal’ (kata phusin zoon politikon), but because he defines political activity as a prerequisite of and for man’s belonging – as an emancipation from the world of things (oikos) to the autonomous world of politics (polis) – he creates a state

of affairs in which from one’s (forced or voluntary) abstention from political affairs logically follows that one is reduced to a mere ‘thing’ in the eyes of those that have been granted the status of ‘citizen’.

Although the demotion of a human being from the public to the private clearly carries the logic of exclusion, to frame it is as a lived experience for the Greeks would be to deny the historical complexities of the lived realities of citizenship in favour of the philosophical neatness we so crave for. We can argue that Greek citizens created categories for the ‘strangers’ (xenos) below their social standing such, as women, slave, foreigners etc. and constructed their identity negatively through these categories to legitimate and reinforce their hegemonic socio-political position, but we cannot leave the negatively constituted space of those persons that are displaced to the oikos empty or blank. To do so would be to deny the complexities of daily life in the polis and would be to disregard the more nuanced ties of ethnic and cultural feelings of kinship among Greek social groups that existed in the space between the oikos and polis(Isin 2002, 54-56; Cartledge 1993, 47). If we would do this, we would follow the seemingly coherent narrative of the hegemonic group that was the only group in the position to articulate such a narrative and thus the only group able to preserve it for posterity, and repeat the historical injustice as truth.

Isin argues that if we want to understand classical citizenship we should look to the ‘conditions under which immanent categories of alterity’ (Isin 2002, 54) such as women, slaves and other categories strangers are created. In his genealogy, he shows that the realities of citizenship show that there was not ‘a clear difference between ‘the sacred and the profane or the political and the economic’ (77) in Greek society. Because of this, ‘being political’ in Classical Greece cannot be perceived as a type of conduct that existed in a wholly different, formalized and actualized space of action, separated from the household and other domains of society. The description of Greek civic life in terms of a clearly effectuated and lived public and private space, or even sphere, would be to commit to an anachronistic fallacy. Even in Greek politics, we should perceive of ‘political’ action as embedded within ‘practices that form a chain in the sense that they were continually interwoven and were not separated by sacred and profane, political and religious divisions’ (77). If we are willing to talk of a proto-civil space of ‘being political’ we also must be willing to talk of a proto-civic space that could be perceived agonistically by the people that occupied it.

Recent investigations on Greek political history show that only with the appearance of democracy in the classical polis and the institutionalization of certain citizen practices within the confines of the assembly, that a formal separation between public and private was proposed and created by those conferred with the status of ‘citizen’. This demonstrates that

through the acquirement of political power and legislative authority a dominant group could position the other as belonging to an altogether separate domain of conduct. It is through acts of storytelling that follow solidaristic and agonistic strategies that these exclusionary narratives are created. Like Isin argues, ‘When such things as unity and harmony are praised, as in the funeral oration tradition, and especially that of Pericles, they were solidaristic strategies that expressed the will of the dominant citizens, rather than an achieved reality’ (Isin 2002, 81; Loraux 1986). Reading Isin remarks on the interwovenness of civic citizenship practices and the private-public divide as a ‘will of the dominant citizens’ (Isin 2002, 81), reminds us that we should read our classical political interlocutors with the same fair suspicion we reserve for our contemporaries.

The general example of women as belonging to the domain of the oikos is informative here; insofar it shows that even the dominant citizenry classes were ambivalent about the rigidness of the divide. Although ‘constituted as non-citizens, they [women] nonetheless required a prominent religious space’ or a ‘latent citizenship’ (Isin 2002, 74) Isin writes. Women were given responsibility for the city’s sanctuaries and other holy sites in the polis. This formidable responsibility, together with the necessary roles fulfilled by women in managing the household (sometimes managing many slaves) and in childbearing -and rearing showed the ‘integration of women’ in the polis not as a ‘passive (e.g. religious, spiritual) form of belonging, but as a necessary and immanent element for the constitution of the city’ (74). Women their labour, work and action thus were a foundational prerequisite to the exercise and attainment of civic virtue by the men within the assembly. Their actions were virtuous in their own way, although were not traditionally ‘civic’ in the eyes of the aristocratic Greeks.

2.2. civil citizenship

One of the central contrasts between Greek and Roman citizenship that helps contextualize the ‘legalisation of citizenship’ in Ancient Rome — or: the outspoken dominance of civil

citizenship over civic citizenship forms — is the difference in relative territory, composition and mode of governance of the Greek poleis in comparison to the Roman civitas.

Despite Cicero’s, Livy’s and Plutarch’s rhetorical appraisal of Greek civic heroism and virtue (Nicolet 1993, 17), Roman ‘civil’ citizenship is overwhelmingly associated by historians with a ‘graded citizenship’ that was both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the form of governance that helped constitute the Greek public agon:

The Romans [...] invented a citizenship that was very different from the Greek conception by virtue of its territorial principle and categories of otherness; it

was not exactly a dual citizenship, but it was certainly a graded citizenship. A Roman’s citizen’s precise obligations, privileges, and right were a combination of his territorial identities: as Roman, as a citizen of the kind of a province, and as a citizen of the kind of a city. (Isin 2002, 97)

Isin emphasizes here the classification and gradation allowed for by the legislative authority of the Roman aristocracy with and contra a different and complex range of ‘alterities’ in the budding Roman empire, e.g. between patricians and plebeians, between masters and slaves, between patrons and clients and between men and women. Isin shows that the difference between different citizenship classes did not only exist between internal population groups, but also became a matter of territoriality. Examples of this ‘jostling’ for control now also occurred beyond the borders of the Roman city-state, between the Roman centre and the territories Rome conquered and turned to dependent or semi-autonomous municipae and

coloniae under Roman law.

The image conjured by Isin to explain the difference in the Roman conception of citizenship from that of Athens is closely linked to the idea of the Roman census as a tool of military governance for a Republican civitas with increasingly imperial ambitions. The Roman census was a vast undertaking by the Republican (and later Imperial) bureaucracy, that originated as a systematic method of martial obligation. It involved the counting and dividing into classes of all groups living on Roman territory. After all the peoples governed under Roman law were counted and classified into ethnic and civil groups, rights and obligations flowed from these classifications. The status of a citizen thus ‘depended largely on his being assigned a precise place in a vast system of order, classes, tribes and centuries’ (Isin 2002, 106; Nicolet 1993, 253).

What is of interest here for our present purposes is how the Romans visualized the internal and external workings of the going-ons on its territories and controlled and regulated it through a ‘vast system of order’. It is in examples such as this that we can witness the development of legalisation of citizenship that developed as a way to ascribe specific types of citizenship rights and thus different levels of political autonomy to different subaltern classes by the dominant aristocracy. Citizenship was used by the Romans foremost as a tool of inequality by a smaller group of aristocrats, instead of equality or the promotion of agonality between larger groups of citizens. As Nicolas Walzer argues, ‘when the scale of political organization [of Rome] changes, unity and trust collapse and a different understanding of citizenship was required’ (Walzer 1989, 214). It is through the acts of legalistic classification and administration — a legal ‘policing’ if you will — that control was once again established by the governing aristocratic citizen-class over agonistic activities that could no longer be

controlled by means of the sheer force of the state.

The similarity of the activities of the census to what Nicholas Mirzoeff has called the ‘visuality’ of politics and organized violence in The Right to Look is striking and seems to be in line with the original instrumental purpose of the census to make martial conscription more efficient. Mirzoeff writes that ’information supplied by subalterns’ supplied ‘the general in modern warfare [...] with the visual data he needed ‘for visualizing the battlefield’ (Mirzoeff 2011, 475). Given the preoccupation of the governing patricians, and the later assembly between patrician and plebeian citizens, with the conquest over new territory and their dominion over subaltern classes, it is not an unlikely hypothesis that the relations between and with subaltern classes were visualized as a potential battleground. It is probable that the governing class sought to visualize and then ‘denominate the visible’ (Mirzoeff 2011, 476; Foucault 1994; 132) through the systematic naming, categorizing and defining of subalterns. For the more cynical minded student of military and political history it is a demonstration of the fact that the opposite of Clausewitz’s remark — that ‘war is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means’ (Clausewitz 2007, 7) — may hold more truth to it than his original formulation. In the dominant discourse of the governing classes the members of a community were denominated as homo legalis first before those citizens could ‘rightfully’ become or exercise their nature as zoon politikon. That is, when we assume that the truly ‘political’ agon

precedes the denomination of citizens as citizens and the boundedness of the individual to a purposefully designed agon.

In the Roman example the aristocratic governing classes composed different fields of political autonomy and freedom for different subaltern political actors. As we saw, the ‘classical’ man is zoon politikon and thus a citizen, insofar as he is an active force working together with and acting on other men to shape his destiny, but to Romans the distinction between oikos and a semi-autonomous polis that existed for its own sake could not hold. Rome became a politywhere different domains of equality were constituted after the fact. Although the conduct of man in the political arena was still an affair between men in the exercise of

virtù and the institutional definition of ‘full’ citizenship by the Romans — defined as the holding of- or at least eligibility for political office — did not change, the dominant citizenship discourse and its influence of it on the self-definition and identity of people as citizens did effectively change. To Walzer this becomes especially clear when he undertakes a genealogical reading ranging from the Greek polis, the beginning of the Roman Republic to the end of the Roman Empire, and contrasts these accounts with early-modern liberal conceptions of citizenship:

When St. Paul claimed to be a Roman citizen, he was imaging himself not as an active and involved member of the political community, certainly not as potential magistrate, but rather as the passive recipient of specific rights and entitlements (Acts 23:27). A citizen was more significantly someone protected by the law than someone who made and executed the law (Walzer 1989, 215)

As Walzer’s remarks and my reflections above demonstrate, the Western self-conceptions of citizenship by citizens developed primarily from an idealized, active pursuit of purposeful political action primary to the constitution of a person’s self-identity and moral life, towards a more passive legalistic conception: an identity that was signified by an almost invisible, constituting power for subaltern citizens, that was still an important identity to have, but was now an ‘occasional identity, a legal status rather than a fact of everyday life’ (Walzer 1989, 215).

2.3. Tully’s redescription

Formal ‘equality’ has dispersed along ethnic and class lines within the confines of the nation state and as a result of this, the legal status of full ‘citizenship’ has become more inclusive. This inclusion has reduced the formal political dimension of citizenship to an insider-outsider and native-stranger logic. Civil citizenship has, however, retained the legalistic orientation of late Roman citizenship in common parlance and in practice. But, as the ancient form of civil citizenship should be seen relative to the political developments in the Roman Republic and its development towards Imperium, so early-modern and modern expressions of civil citizenship can only be seen relative to the configuration of the nation-state, its position within and relation to the Westphalian nation-state system, and the development of models of international governance under the auspices of the global hegemony of the United States.

If we want to understand the present situation, we must move from the macro to the micro-level, between past and present, and back – from changing international power relations and the imperial ambitions of the major Western actors exercised within the international system to the denomination of individual inhabitants of nation-states through judicial-administrative technologies. It is a testament to Tully his intellectual courage that he tries to do just this in his seminal two-volume study Public Philosophy in a New Key Vol. I & II.

Whereas the Greek and Roman conceptions of citizenship were formulated primarily in relation to the ‘alterity’ of strangers and outsiders such as women and slaves (in the Greek example) and in line with one’s ancestral origin and territorial identity (in the Roman example) the ‘alterity’ of the Westphalian variant of ‘civil citizenship’ can be traced primarily to modes of ‘alterity’ created in and by Western imperialism and -modernity, and its accompanying

categories of race, development and wealth.

Tully finds that modern ‘civil’ citizenship ‘takes as its empirical and normative exemplar the form of citizenship characteristic of the modern nation state’ (Tully 1999, 11) and defines the dominant form of citizenship in relation to ‘two clusters of institutional features of modern nation states’, namely the ‘constitutional rule of law’ (nomos) and ‘representative government’ (demos) (Tully 1999, 11).

Not unlike the Roman graded citizenship then, the constitutional rule of law is seen as the first condition of citizenship that precedes and ‘literally constitutes [..] the conditions of civilization, the city (civitas), citizenship, civil society, civil liberty and civility (hence ‘civil’ citizenship)’ (Tully 1999, 11) and guarantees the very possibility of the demos to participate in the political domain. To be civilized is to be signified as a civil citizen through a specific set of judicial-administrative technologies that are legitimized by the dominant, citizenship discourse.

Tully offers a clear formal delineation of the concept of civil citizenship by demonstrating that as a political concept it is ‘usually explicated and defined in terms of the historical development of four rights (liberties) and duties of formally equal individual subjects of an association of constitutional rule of law and representative government’ (Tully 1999, 11-12). These rights and duties are defined in the constitution and thus apply to any formal member of a polity, either by birth or through formal application, and are subsequently spread through the propagation of the political entity of the sovereign, democratic nation-state on a global scale.

According to Tully, these four ‘civil’ rights (liberties) and duties are, respectively: a) The indispensable set of ‘civil liberties’ laid down by the modern liberal

tradition, e.g. equality before the law, liberty of person, speech, thought, faith and the right to own property and enter into contracts;

b) The liberties and entitlements related to representative government, e.g. the right to vote and the right to form and join a political party; c) The social and economic rights of distributive equality and care

established through the social democratic tradition, e.g. the right to work, -to housing and education;

d) The modern minority rights that have developed in response to the persecution of minority groups in WWII and debates surrounding

multiculturalism, e.g. the right to express oneself in one’s native language, freedom of education, and representation of minority groups in government institutions and -advisory boards.