Unity and Difference: a model of Political Community based on the work of Hannah Arendt and Charles Taylor

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Unity and Difference:

A model of political community

based on the work of Hannah

Arendt and Charles Taylor.

Sophie Lauwers

s4134362

sophie.lauwers@student.ru.nl

Specialization: Political Theory

Supervisor: Dr. Anya Topolski

Second reader: Dr. Bart van Leeuwen

Radboud University Nijmegen

14-8-2016

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Abstract

There is a tension between creating unity in a political community, while at the same time allowing differences within that community to flourish. This thesis aims to find a sustainable model of political community that can provide room for both individual and group-related differences. It does so by bringing together the work of Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt. These two authors both take difference, or plurality, as a starting point in creating a model of political community which does not depend on shared ethnicity, culture or a shared conception of the good. I will argue for a model of political community which combines the strengths in the work of Arendt and Taylor. This model, which I call a ‘common good approach to political community’, involves that unity is achieved because citizens share a public-political sphere, in which they deliberate on issues of shared concern. In this process, they identify certain common goods which they value and for which they share responsibility. Citizens construct a political identity based on these common goods, but this identity is dynamic and open to change.

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Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 Introducing the problem

Our modern society is characterized by increasingly insecure conditions. Forces of globalization have changed traditional national economies, leading to high rates of economic insecurity (e.g. Gunther & van der Hoeven, 2004; Scheve and Slaughter, 2004). War and terrorism, which we used to think were a problem only for ‘faraway countries’ suddenly reach our own doorstep, as the Western world is confronted with terrorist attacks and with large numbers of immigrants, who have escaped deplorable conditions elsewhere. This leads to a heightened sense of insecurity (e.g. Huysmans, 2006; Skirbekk, 2011). On top of that, we are confronted with predictions of ecological unbalance. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2001) similarly states that we live in a time of insecurity and rapid changes. In these circumstances, Bauman argues, we long for a ‘community’, something we associate with comfort and safety. This also holds for political communities, with which I will be concerned in this thesis. Bauman, however, goes on to argue that our craving for community is an illusion based on misplaced nostalgia. What is more, it can have dangerous consequences: the feeling of warmth and security comes at the price of exclusion of all things different and, ultimately, loss of freedom (Bauman, 2001). If we look to today’s political landscape, we see signs that Bauman might be right. Especially in populist radical right movements, both in Europe and in the United States, an appeal is made for the preservation of ‘our traditions’, ‘our identity’ and ‘our people’. Underlying their position is the idea that a political community which does not share such a homogeneous tradition and identity will fall apart, with disastrous effects for its citizens. Support for these movements is steadily growing. However, references to ‘us’ imply an inevitable ‘other’, who is not welcome and whose interest are not taken into account. A homogeneous political community, moreover, is at odds with the heterogeneity that characterizes today’s society. We live in societies that are pluralist, as individuals with different ideas of the truth live next to each other, and multicultural, as our societies consist of members of multiple cultural groups. A homogenous model of political community with a single culture and a single conception of the good has no other options than either to expel those whose cultural practices or values differ from the norm, or to force them to assimilate. I believe that both of these options are highly problematic.

In this thesis, I will ask the question how we can sustain a political community without relying on such homogeneity. Instead of starting from the position that a political community requires sameness, I want to take the diversity of views that exists in our modern society as a starting point. I will try to construct a model of political community that ensures a sense of belonging to the political community, while at the same time providing room for the different views and cultures that are

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adhered to within its boundaries. I will attempt to formulate such a model of political community by drawing upon the work of two authors who take difference, or plurality, as a starting point for their theories of political community. Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt are two of the major political thinkers of the second half of the 20th_{century and both have written extensively on how humans can} live together in a polity. Surprisingly, their work has hardly ever been brought into dialogue1_{. This} thesis aims to fill this lacuna in the academic literature, and bring the two authors into dialogue with the aim of acquiring deeper insight in how to sustain political communities with an eye to difference. In this thesis, I will explain Taylor and Arendt’s views on political community, after which I will compare their positions on four key themes, namely unity, difference, communication and

institutionalization. The discussion of these four themes will then form the basis for my own model of political community. In this model, which I call a common good approach to political community, I will draw upon the strengths in the work of both Arendt and Taylor. The ideal theory model of political community which I bring forward implies that cohesion in the political community is

achieved because citizens share a common public-political sphere in which they formulate a political identity around common goods for which they share responsibility. I will, moreover, contest the idea that a citizen can only identify with one political community and argue for multiple, nested political communities.

With this thesis, I wish to contribute to the academic debate on political communities, both by formulating my own position and by bringing Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt into dialogue. This project, however, is not only an endeavor with academic relevance. How to hold together a political community in the face of multiculturalism and pluralism is a question very high on today’s political agenda. Before I can go into this question, as I will do in the chapters that follow, I first need to clarify some key concepts and specify my research question. Section 1.2 will explain the concepts of political community and of difference, from which the full research question of this thesis will follow. Section 1.3 will then elaborate on the central authors used in this thesis. Finally, section 1.4 will give an outline of the chapters to follow.

1.2 Conceptual clarification

This thesis aims to find a model of political community that provides room for differences. The subsections that follow will expand on this aim. First, I will explain the concept of political community. Second, I will explain what I mean by ‘differences’. I interpret ‘differences’ as referring to both

individual and group-level differences, which are sometimes in tension with each other. After these conceptual clarifications, the central research question of this thesis will be formulated.

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1.2.1 Political community

The question of community is the question of who ‘we’ are. This concept of ‘us’ refers to a group of individuals who have something in common (Van der Zweerde, 2012). What they share can be anything, ranging from a religion to a certain physical appearance, a hobby, a language or a protest. In this thesis, I am primarily concerned with the concept of political community and the question of what needs to be shared to make us belong to it. With ‘political’, I refer to the polity, in which citizens directly or indirectly decide upon matters of shared concern, including the form of that political community itself and on what counts as a matter of shared concern. In this thesis, I will concern myself with the role of citizens in the political community. The position of non-citizens is certainly relevant, but falls beyond the scope of this thesis.

The concept of ‘community’ as it will be used in this thesis, draws upon the division between Gesellschaf and Gemeinschaf, made by the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in the 19th_{century, who} first pitted society against community. With Gesellschaf, usually referred to as ‘society’, he referred to a mechanical connection of rational individuals, which he associated with the fragmented modern world. With Gemeinschaf, or ‘community’, on the other hand, Tönnies referred to the community as a cohesive, organically connected whole with a life of its own, related to the traditional world. Tönnies’ romanticized ideal types of political collectives roughly represent two lines of political thought (Van der Zweerde, 2012). The first tradition thinks of social collectives as external to

individuals. Individuals, who are prior to this collective, come together to further their interests. This image is found in most contemporary liberal positions. This group tends to use the vocabulary of ‘society’ when referring to political collectives, roughly corresponding to Tönnies’ concept of Gesellschaf. The second line of thought considers individuals as intrinsically connected with other people and argues that being part of a political collective is at least partly constitutive of their individuality. This tradition refers to the political collective as a ‘community’, roughly corresponding with Tönnies’ idea of Gemeinschaf. This thesis places itself within the second tradition, starting from the assumption that such a community can and should exist.

This is not to say that the political community is not imaginary, rather than tangible and objective (Anderson, 2006). But the fact that the community is imagined does not make it less real. On the contrary: it is the citizens’ imagination of this community and their identification with it that makes a democratic political community stable and durable. As Mason (1999, 263) argues, a sense of belonging together is needed for at least four, interrelated, reasons: to avoid alienation from the political institutions, to make institutions stable, to establish the sense of trust which makes

compromise possible, and to achieve support for policy measures. Having a sense of belonging to the political community, then, is related to the legitimacy of the political institutions and general laws.

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When citizens experience their political community as a community and identify with it, this does not mean they give authority to every particular law or particular government which rules that

community at a given moment. Rather, they adhere to the general framework of institutions and the spirit, rather than the letter, of the law. Experiencing a sense of belonging to a political community, for example, also means that citizens are motivated to participate in changing particular laws and arrangements they deem unjust.

1.2.2 A balancing act: differences

The existence of a political community, rather than merely a political society, is essential for the legitimacy and hence the health of any democratic society. For citizens to identify as part of a political community, adhere to its rules and participate in its government, it necessary that they share

something more than merely the condition that one’s life is affected by the decisions made. However, concepts of political community based on shared values run the risk of being oppressive or exclusive. I believe that the challenge of our time is to sustain political communities in a way that acknowledges the existence of different cultures and different conceptions of the good.

Social groups are an important part of modern human life. Situated between the individual and the political community, social groups exist in many different forms, ranging from church

communities to fashion movements. In this thesis, the concepts of ‘social groups’ or ‘cultural groups’, which I will use interchangeably, refer specifically to religious, linguistic and ethnic communities. These non-political or subpolitical communities will differ in their conceptions of the good or in their cultural practices, and sometimes in both. Forcing them to assimilate to the dominant culture within the political community will not suffice: the modern society asks for measures that acknowledge and incorporate these differences.

Defining a political community in such a way as to give sufficient room to social and cultural groups, however, will not be enough. It is crucial to take into account the existence of in-group differences, as individuals increasingly have multiple identities and affiliations. Some multiculturalist visions have a tendency to essentialize social and cultural groups by presuming that identities are settled and that members of a group accept that their identity is defined by their membership of a single group. Both assumptions are highly problematic because they insufficiently acknowledge the uniqueness of individuals, who cannot be reduced to their social or cultural community. As Calhoun (1999, 224) argues, the world cannot be “divided neatly into categories within which individuals are largely similar by virtue of the identifying traits they share”. A political community ought to take into account the position of individuals as much as that of social and cultural groups. At the same time, this should not lead to a homogenizing norm which rids itself of cultural groups altogether, forcing individuals to be ‘protected’ by the imposition of a dominant vision of what the good life should be. It

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becomes clear that political community, subpolitical community and individual uniqueness can be at odds with each other. The challenge of balancing these three goods lies at the heart of this thesis. The research question flows from it, as this thesis will aim to answer the question:

How should we sustain political community in a way that provides room for social and individual differences?

This research question contains two separate, but related questions. First, I will aim to answer the question of what should unite citizens in the political community. In answering this question, I will always keep in mind the second question of what this means for social and individual differences and how we can give those differences enough room.

My concern in this thesis is how we can sustain a political community in a way which generates an optimal balance between the three factors of importance: political community,

subpolitical community and individual uniqueness. This thesis, as said, is concerned with maintaining or rather, sustaining, a political community. It is important to note that the aim is not the

conservation of a political community, as that would imply that the political community cannot be changed. Instead, it is important to realize that a political community is not fixed, but rather internally differentiated, fluid, highly relational and subject to change. The question of sustaining a political community, moreover, can be separated from the question of how a political community was originally constituted. The question of the constitution of a community implies more of a historical investigation, which I will not go into in this thesis, although the questions of constitution and sustaining are related. As Terpstra (2012) shows, stories of the foundation of a political community, whether mythical or historic, can give guidelines for the organization of that community and foster allegiance to it. Conversely, a certain model of sustaining political community can imply a need for re-constituting political communities. The focus on this thesis, however, will be on how to sustain an already existing political community. I will aim to answer this question by drawing upon the work of Hannah Arendt and Charles Taylor. The next section will expand on why I believe bringing their positions into dialogue is worthwhile for the purpose of my thesis.

1.3 Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt

This thesis aims to find a model of political community which provides room for individual and social differences. It will do so by bringing together the work of Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt, two authors who are very conscious of the tension between unity and difference and attempt to solve it. I argue that the ideas of Hannah Arendt and Charles Taylor on the topic of political community are complementary, as the thinkers answer the research question of this thesis from very different perspectives. Arendt is primarily concerned with the protection of human plurality, which she found

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to be threatened by totalitarianism. Taylor, on the other hand, is responding to procedural liberalism, which according to him insufficiently recognizes the importance of both political and subpolitical communities. As a result, their theories of political community take very different forms. Charles Taylor refers to the political community as a determinate community, within which citizens share a nationalistic commitment to the nation-state and toward each other, which is made possible by their shared history. In public dialogue, citizens formulate a shared political identity by identifying the common goods that are important to the political community as a whole and to the subpolitical groups within its borders. For Arendt, however, a political community is more open-ended. In her view, the bond between citizens arises from the fact that they share a common public space and the responsibility for a common world. Arendt, moreover, rejects the nation-state as the prime locus of political community, because she considers it necessarily exclusive. The positions of Taylor and Arendt will be expanded upon and evaluated in the next chapters.

1.4 Outline

Now that I have explained and clarified my research question, the next chapter will give an overview of the current theoretical debate surrounding the concept of political community. This allows me to situate the thought of Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt within the broader debate and to further justify the choice for these two authors. At the end of this second chapter, moreover, I will briefly outline some methodological differences between Arendt and Taylor. This is necessary to facilitate the interpretation of the chapters that follow chapter two. Chapter three and four elaborate on the positions of Taylor and Arendt and explain their views on political community against the background of their broader work. Chapter three gives an outline of Charles Taylor’s position, starting from his view of the ontological interdependence of individuals, through his politics of recognition to his idea of ‘deep diversity’ and its realization. Chapter four, then, outlines Arendt’s views. It will start by explaining her view of the political as based on action, freedom and plurality, after which I will elaborate on her vision of political community and how this can be institutionalized. In the fifth chapter, the positions of Taylor and Arendt will be compared. This comparison will be conducted based on the four key issues which are central to their work on political community: creation of unity, embracing of difference, communication, and institutionalization. My own position on political communities, which will be explained in chapter six, will build on these four points of comparison. Drawing upon the strengths in both the work of Hannah Arendt and Charles Taylor, I will argue for a common good approach to political community. This approach implies that cohesion is achieved because citizens share a common public-political sphere in which they formulate a political identity around common goods for which they share responsibility. The conclusion, finally, will give a brief

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Chapter 2: Literature review

2.1 Introduction: modern communities

The problem of how we can and should maintain our political communities is one of the central questions in the field of political theory. Through the ages, political thinkers have answered the question of how we can generate cohesion in political communities in different ways, directly and indirectly. Avineri and de-Shalit (1992, 1) take us through a brief history of the concept:

“The term ‘community’ […] goes back to Greek philosophy, to Aristotle’s works, through Cicero and the Roman community of law and common interests, St Augustine’s community of emotional ties, Thomas Aquinas’ idea of the community as a body politic, Edmund Burke’s well-known concept of the community as a partnership ‘not only between the living but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’, and the works of Rousseau in France and Hegel in Germany”.

The thought of these authors continues to influence political thinkers to this day. This chapter will, however, give an overview of the more recent debate surrounding the question of political

community, ranging from contemporary liberal to communitarian and pluralist approaches. It will situate the two central authors of this thesis, Hannah Arendt and Charles Taylor, within the larger debate and, finally, justify my choice to bring their work into dialogue.

One of the most influential recent thinkers on political communities is Benedict Anderson. As many of the authors in the current debate on community explicitly or implicitly interact with his work, it is worth starting this literature review with his position. Anderson’s influential book Imagined Communities, originally published in 1983, describes how societies forge a political identity by emphasizing that they are a community. This sense of political community is imagined, as its members do not know each other personally, but imagine to be part of the same community. Anderson used the idea of ‘imagined communities’ to analyze nationalism. We have an

understanding of the nation as a “solid community moving steadily down (or up) history” (Anderson, 2006, 26), whereas in reality, the idea of the nation is produced by cultural practices which encourage citizens to understand themselves as part of that nation. This became possible, according to

Anderson, primarily because of ‘print capitalism’. With the rise of capitalism, books and media started to be printed in vernacular languages, instead of script languages such Latin, to make them accessible to larger number of people. As a result, readers who originally spoke only different dialects became able to understand each other through a ‘national language’ and were subject to the same common discourse. Moreover, the standardization of national calendars and clocks was embodied in

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made possible by widespread literacy, the end of the dominant idea that rule was established by divine right, and by the development of a modern, homogeneous concept of time, which replaced the medieval conception of time where events were situated simultaneously in the present, past and future. A common national discourse, made possible by print capitalism, led to an imagined idea of the shared life of the nation, for which its members are even willing to die. A nation, then is “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson, 2006, 6).

There are two ways in which contemporary thinkers relate to Anderson’s findings. For some thinkers, Anderson himself included, the fact that communities are imagined does not mean they are less relevant. Such thinkers argue that having a sense of belonging to a political community is

necessary for human life. For other thinkers, however, a political community is unnecessary, and even dangerous. Political collectives should come in the form of a ‘society’, which is external to its citizens, and should only exist to serve their interests. Although this thesis situates itself within the first tradition, arguing that a political community is essential to human life, the second strand of thought, adopted primarily by liberal thinkers, is dominant in our current society (Van der Zweerde, 2012). This is why the following section of this literature review will briefly outline the main liberal positions on the topic of political communities. After this explanation of liberal theories, this chapter will turn to theorists who argue in favor of political community. Section 2.3 will introduce the main

communitarian thinkers, among whom we can situate Charles Taylor, after which section 2.4 will explain the positions of their pluralist critics, who have largely been inspired by Hannah Arendt. Sections 2.5 and 2.6 will expand on my choice for bringing Taylor and Arendt into dialogue.

2.2 Liberalism

Liberal political theories tend to speak of society, rather than community, as the form which political collectives take. This reflects the implicit assumption in many liberal theories that the community is necessarily an oppressive institution which enforces a single vision of the good upon its inhabitants (Kukathas, 1996). A society as liberals envision it is primarily a collection of rights, which allows individuals to pursue their personal ends in life. Rather than revolving around particular common ends, a liberal society is primarily characterized by a system of law. Although most liberal thinkers start by rejecting the idea of a political community, the debate with communitarian thinkers has made political communities more central to liberal thought. It has put the issue of identification on the liberal agenda. Ronald Dworkin (1986; 1989), for example, argues that liberal citizens should identify with their political community, but argues that the collective life of such a community is limited to only official political acts, such as legislation and adjudication. Andrew Mason (1999; 2000), similarly, argues that a sense of political identity can arise out of identification with only the major

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institutions and central practices of the polity. John Rawls (1993; 1999) goes one step further and argues that not political institutions, but political values are what secures cohesion in a political society. He advocates a political liberalism, where cohesion in the political community is achieved because reasonable citizens share the same set of political values. Although Rawls argues that this does not imply a political community, because citizens do not share a common conception of the good, other liberals have argued that it does. So-called ‘comprehensive liberals’, such as William Galston (1991) and Stephen Macedo (1990) argue that the liberal state does and should articulate and pursue a comprehensive conception of the good, based on shared liberal ethical traits, such as the value of autonomy.

The liberal theorists mentioned so far all assume the state to be the primary locus of political community. Liberal cosmopolitans have criticized these authors for not questioning the importance of the institution of the state. Cosmopolitans advocate a world society, governed by universal principles of justice, which are independent from traditions, history or conceptions of the good. Although some cosmopolitan thinkers such as David Held (1995) and Kwame Appiah (1997) acknowledge the

empirical weight of local communities and states, cosmopolitan liberals generally deny them moral significance and argue that universal principles of justice should take precedence. This contrasts with the communitarian position. Rather than assuming that rights are self-standing and universal, communitarians generally argue that rights are part of particular forms of life and dependent on the particular context of a political community (Bellamy and Castiglione, 1998). The different views of communitarian thinkers will be explained in the next section.

2.3 Communitarianism

If liberalism can broadly be defined as emphasizing respect for individual freedom, communitarianism can generally be understood as attaching importance to the value of belonging to a community. However, although originally united in their critique against the liberal conceptions of community mentioned above, communitarianism is hardly a unified strand of theory. What communitarians share is an emphasis on the importance of community for human beings. A community cannot be purely procedural, but requires some form of a shared ethos. However, communitarian theorists disagree on the definition of a ‘community’, and what type of shared ethos would be necessary. This section focuses on communitarian thought on political communities. I will group communitarian thinkers into three categories. The first category includes communitarians which focus on

deliberation and envision political community as a communicative community. The second group includes thinkers that are generally known as civic republicans, who stress the importance of participation in small-scale communities. The last group of authors discussed are known as civic nationalists, who seek to articulate a political identity on the level of the nation.

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2.3.1 Communicative community

Jürgen Habermas is a communitarian thinker who remains strongly committed to liberalism. He argues that values are dependent on particular political communities, but is wary of models of political community that are based on homogeneity. Instead, Habermas (1996; 1998) advocates a model of discursive democracy. Political communities should be based on a rational consensus of binding norms that are the result of public discussion. Habermas attempts to identify a form of political community that is the result of active public engagement. The basis of political communities, for Habermas, is not pre-established, but arises as a purely rational agreement from debate in the public sphere. Habermas, furthermore, attempts to ground political identity in what he calls ‘constitutional patriotism’. He argues that societies will always contain multiple conceptions of the good, but citizens are bound together by their shared loyalty to the common political culture reflected in the constitution and its legal implications. The constitution provides a set of procedures which, although “permeated by ethics”, are neutral vis-à-vis subpolitical identities (Habermas, 1994, 134). Habermas imagines such constitutional patriotism to be possible on the level of the state, such as Germany, but also on larger levels, such as the European Union.

Habermas’ model has inspired many thinkers, who have criticized and built upon his theory. Seyla Benhabib (1992, 1996), for example, advocates a more rooted concept of communication, arguing that Habermas’ rational discourse should be contextualized with regards to communities of differences. She emphasizes, moreover, that cultural communities should take part in democratic deliberation so that cultural disputes can be regulated by the state without putting an end to dialogue and contestation (Benhabib, 2002). Iris Young similarly criticizes Habermas’ model as paying

insufficient attention to communities of difference. Young (1996) argues that norms of rational democratic discourse are biased in favor of male, white and Western groups. She brings forward an alternative conception of democracy, where deliberation is not based on reasonable arguments, but also on greeting, rhetoric and storytelling, which better suit the communication styles of historically marginalized groups. For Young, moreover, loyalty to the political community is mediated through one’s ethnic or other nonpolitical identity, and arises when individuals believe that participation in a political community is in their (subpolitical) interest (Gilbert, 2000).

2.3.2 Civic republicans

Michael Sandel (1984) criticizes liberal thinkers for entertaining a metaphysically flawed image of the individual as ‘unencumbered self’. Although Sandel’s primary target is John Rawls, his critique is also directed at Habermas. According to Sandel, these thinkers wrongly assume that individuals enter the public sphere as already fully developed selves and independent actors. Sandel argues, however, that individuals are themselves constituted by their community. What is more, active citizenship in a

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political community is intrinsically valuable for human flourishing. According to Sandel (1996), self-government through participation as a citizen in the common life of a political community gives our lives and personhoods meaning. Sandel argues that such active citizenship is dangerously absent in modern-day society. Revitalizing civic life, however, cannot be done in a large-scale political

community, but only in particular communities. That is why Sandel proposes to disperse sovereignty by creating a multiplicity of political communities and political institutions, both above and below the nation-state. “Different forms of political association”, Sandel (1996, 344) explains, “would govern different spheres of life and engage different aspects of our identities”. Participating in smaller public spheres like social movements, schools or churches will, according to Sandel, allow citizens to develop civic virtues and identify with political communities. Sandel (1996, 350) admits that there is a risk that such “multiply situated selves” are unable to develop identity and agency at all. He therefore

considers negotiating between different obligations and loyalties the distinctive civic virtue in our time.

Alisdair MacIntyre similarly identifies a lack of community in our current society. MacIntyre (1981) emphasizes the fact that human beings can only flourish as moral agents in a community which shares an authoritative conception of the good life. Such a moral structure, according to MacIntyre, is lacking in our current society. His solution, like Sandel’s, is not to create such a community on the level of the nation-state. Instead, MacIntyre (1981, 245) argues that we should promote local forms of community, “within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us”. Patriotism and loyalty are only possible in local and particular communities, which are characterized by their particular history and traditions and which share a conception of the good. The modern nation-state, MacIntyre (1994) argues, is not such a community, but should be merely a neutral facilitating framework.

Benjamin Barber, like Sandel and MacIntyre, emphasizes the need for citizen participation in smaller communities. He aims to redefine politics as a ‘realm of action’, freed from the formalism and proceduralism that many liberal theorists advocate. Barber (1984), however, rejects the idea of representative government. He follows the republican thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and proposes a conception of ‘strong democracy’, based on direct democratic participation.

2.3.3. Civic Nationalism

As Benedict Anderson has argued, a nation is a socially constructed political community, imagined by its members as being inherently limited and characterized by a at least a certain degree of

sovereignty. Today, the nation-state is the dominant form of political community (Calhoun, 1999). The third, and last, group of communitarian thinkers which I will introduce in this chapter continues this practice by advocating a civic nationalism. Michael Walzer, for example, argues that the nation is the

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primary locus of political community. Citizens in a nation have a “special commitment to one another and some special sense of their common life" (Walzer, 1983, 62). This ‘common life’ refers to certain shared sensibilities, intuitions, and often a shared history which members of such a political

community implicitly share. These understandings should be articulated in politics. These shared understandings are not fixed, however, and a political community should remain open to change through democratic means. Generally speaking, the nation appears in the form of a nation-state, where “habits, feelings, religious convictions, political culture, and so on […] are likely to be bound up with, and partly explanatory of, the form and character of their state” (Walzer, 1980, 216). This is not to say that Walzer does not recognize that not all states are homogeneous. What it means to be a nation-state is that the majority of the inhabitants identifies with the nation’s ‘common life’. When groups do not identify as such and refuse to assimilate, Walzer advocates the possibility for ethnocultural minorities to become ‘national minorities’. The exact role of such minorities and the political framework which incorporates them “must itself be worked out politically, and its precise character will depend on understandings shared among the citizens about the value of cultural diversity, local autonomy, and so on" (Walzer, 1983, 29).

David Miller, like Walzer, relies heavily on the nation-state as the most relevant political community. A sense of belonging within this political community is necessary to promote

endorsement of political decisions. To achieve a sense of belonging within the political community, Miller (1989; 1995) argues that it is necessary to articulate a national identity with which citizens can identify. Political participation encourages identification with this political identity, which is why Miller promotes that each citizen should be engaged at some level in political debate. Miller, moreover, criticizes the multiculturalist theories of thinkers like Iris Young, which encourage citizens to participate politically as members of their nonpolitical group. Miller argues that this inhibits inclusive politics, as it will lead to a conflict about the distribution of resources, which will inevitably be won by dominant groups. Citizens should engage in politics “not as advocates for this or that sectional group, but as citizens whose main concerns are fairness between the different sections of the community and the pursuit of common ends’’ (Miller, 1995, 93-4). Rather than having one’s political loyalty mediated by a subpolitical identity, Miller advocates seeing the nation as a cultural community which generates loyalty in its own right. This loyalty, however, does not originate in ethnicity, common descent or religion. This means that immigrants, as far as they are willing to embrace the ‘common public culture’ can also become a member of a nation. Such a national identity should be as independent as possible from group-specific cultural values (Miller, 1995). However, Miller rejects the possibility of ‘inventing’ such a national identity from scratch, as national continuity requires that citizens are indebted to their ‘historic identity’ (Gilbert, 2000, 119).

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Walzer and Miller is Charles Taylor. Taylor advocates a politics of recognition, which implies that granting equal rights to minority groups misses the point, as these groups do not just want to be respected for their equality, but also recognized for their difference. His politics of difference not only grants minority groups cultural rights, but includes measures to ensure the survival of their

community for future generations (Taylor, 1994c). Taylor argues that subpolitical communities should be incorporated in the overarching political community. Taylor envisions an inclusive political identity, with which citizens with different subpolitical identities can identify in their own way. Such a political identity is based not on ethnicity or religion, but on common goods (Taylor, 1993). Some of these common goods refer to culturally specific practices of minority groups and others to overarching goods that facilitate loyalty to the political community at large. These goods are to be identified in a public debate in which citizens from different groups are encouraged to engage with each other. Taylor believes that it is possible to construct a political identity with common goods because different groups have lived alongside each other for a long time, which fostered mutual understanding (Taylor, 1994a).

Like Miller and Walzer, Taylor wants to create a national political identity that is not based on ethnicity, but nevertheless embodies cultural ways of life. Whereas Miller argued that the nation-state is simply the highest level of political community that can still create sufficient solidarity, Taylor justifies the central position of the nation-state in his theory with reference to the idea of ‘social imaginary’: modern individuals imagine themselves as being part of a nation-state. Identification with other forms of political communities is therefore more difficult.

2.4 Room for pluralism

Several theorists have criticized communitarians for being conservative and for demanding too much homogeneity in their ideas of political community. Critics have also argued that communitarians overestimate the dependence of individuals on their communal contexts. Many theorists who have formulated such critiques are categorized as agonists or pluralists. Their aim is to construct a concept of democratic engagement which accommodates identity and difference by embracing moral conflict as a valuable part of political life. Chantal Mouffe is one of the main representatives of this viewpoint. According to her, both liberalism and communitarianism fail to take into account the antagonistic aspect of the political and therefore the political community. She argues that we should recognize this aspect and set out to find forms of power struggles that are compatible with democratic values. Mouffe advocates a model of ‘agonistic pluralism’, where the ‘other’ is no longer seen as an enemy, but as an adversary, “with whose ideas we are going to struggle but whose right to defend those ideas we will not put into question” (Mouffe, 1999, 756). Within a political community, citizens share the same ethico-political principles, which makes an ‘enemy’ into an adversary. The recognition of an

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hegemonic set of ethico-political values, the ‘political grammar’ of the community, is what binds citizens together (Mouffe, 1991). However, these principles are the product of specific power

relations and they can be challenged. A political community should facilitate deliberation on different interpretations of their implementation and meaning, and thereby incorporate an antagonistic, or rather, agonistic element. As Mouffe (2009, 551) argues, “in a pluralist democracy such

disagreements are not only legitimate but also necessary”. There thus exist only a ‘conflictual consensus’ within a political community on what that political community is and how it is related to its ‘constitutive outside’, the “them” that constitutes the “us” (Mouffe, 1991, 78). For Mouffe, such a political community exists on the level of the nation-state, as she argues for a revival of national democracy. Criticizing cosmopolitanism, Mouffe argues that there can never be a democracy of all humankind, because inclusion and exclusion is inherent to the political community. She does, however, envision the possibility of a new, multipolar global order, in which different regional blocks with their own hegemonic principles compete (Mouffe, 2008; 2009).

William Connolly similarly argues that the political community should be defined without relying on shared moral or rational values and that political conflict and disagreement are essential for political life. Connolly (1995) advocates an agonistic model of democracy, which does not have consensual aspirations, but which requires the cultivation of a shared “agonistic respect between interlocking and contending constituencies” (Conolly 2002, x). Connolly believes that such an ethos of ‘agonistic respect’ and ‘critical responsiveness’ is both achievable and sufficient to realize

oppositional yet respectful engagement across differences. This way, an agonistic model of politics fosters mutual respect and inclusion. Unlike Mouffe, Conolly does not envision a political community on the level of the nation-state. To achieve democratic governance, we do not have to create a national “we” that opposes other political communities. Instead, Connolly argues (1995, xx), “numerous possibilities of intersection and collaboration between multiple, interdependent constituencies infused by a general ethos of critical responsiveness […] suffice very nicely”. Not all thinkers are so optimistic about the beneficial effects of agonism. Monique Deveaux (1999) argues that, rather than fostering inclusion of differences, agonism is more likely to lead to the

entrenchment of existing oppositions and insufficiently includes citizen’s group-based cultural identities.

Many agonist or pluralist theorists have been heavily influenced by Hannah Arendt. Although some authors have categorized her as a communitarian, Arendt’s vision of community is very

different from the communitarian thinkers listed above. Rather than emphasizing the importance of cohesion, Arendt prioritizes the protection of human plurality. Consensus is not to be the end goal in the political sphere, as plurality and individual distinctness are what allow this sphere to exist. Similarly, rather than focusing on the indebtedness of individuals to their societal context, as thinkers

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such as Sandel or Taylor have done, Arendt prioritizes the importance of natality, the human capacity to start something new. Despite her differences with the communitarians, Arendt also disagrees with liberal thinkers. She believes that human individuality reaches its highest expression in commitment to and participation in public life. Arendt (1958) argues that the political in its current form is too often dominated by the social, namely by mass culture, consumption and what Arendt calls “national housekeeping”. She advocates a separation of the social and the political, so that the political can become a sphere of freedom, where inequalities are bracketed and where we interact as (artificial) equals on issues of common concern (Arendt, 1958; 1977a). Participation in this political realm, according to Arendt, is intrinsically valuable, as our identities are defined, or rather revealed,

intersubjectively. More than many theorists who have been influenced by her, moreover, Arendt pays attention to creating a sense of belonging in the political community. However, rather than sharing a set of values, she believes the political community can be maintained because citizens share a public space of appearance, shared promises and a responsibility for a shared ‘world’.

2.5 Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt

Political theorists have struggled with the challenge of creating sufficient unity to maintain the political community while at the same time allowing differences to flourish. The aim of this thesis is to gain more insight in how we can solve the unity-difference dilemma. I will set out to do this by bringing the thought of Charles Taylor into dialogue with that of Hannah Arendt. These two authors have both found original ways to deal with the tension between unity and difference in their models of an inclusive political community. Taylor and Arendt share the fundamental assumption that there is intrinsic value in political engagement and reject an atomist vision of the self. However, they differ in their view of what needs to be shared in order for a political community to function. Charles Taylor is closer to what Benhabib (1992) has called ‘integrationists’, who try to identify integrative

fundamental values and principles, while Arendt can be categorized as more of a ‘participationist’, who envisages community as emerging from common action and debate in the public realm and thriving on difference.

Because of their different angles, their views make for an interesting debate. Taylor might be able to provide Arendt’s theory with a perspective of how social groups can be incorporated in the political sphere. Arendt, on the other hand, could offer a corrective for possible exclusionary or static elements in Taylor’s theory, by focusing on the human capacity of beginning and individual

uniqueness. A more elaborate critical comparison between the thought of Taylor and Arendt will be brought forward in chapter five and six of this thesis. First, the next two chapters will subsequently outline the position of Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt on the topic of political community. Before I go into their respective theories, I will expand on their philosophical background and ‘methods’. This

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is necessary because both authors write in a different philosophical tradition, which means that their conceptual language will be different. Explaining these differences before explaining Taylor and Arendt’s theories will help the reader to understand their positions, and enable a comparison between them, as I will do in chapter five.

2.6 Taylor and Arendt: methodological concerns

The fact that Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt write in different traditions requires an explanation of their vocabularies before they can be brought into dialogue. Charles Taylor places himself in a

republican tradition. Although she rejects the label herself, we can place Hannah Arendt in this tradition as well. Both authors define freedom in positive terms as realized in political action.

Similarly, both start from the assumption that individuals’ identities are constituted intersubjectively. However, the two thinkers write from different philosophical perspectives, as Charles Taylor stands in a Hegelian tradition, while Hannah Arendt writes from a phenomenological perspective. These differences can lead to misunderstandings related to how Taylor and Arendt conduct their reasoning and define their concepts.

Charles Taylor’s conception of the political community is strongly rooted in the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Taylor embraces Hegel’s Sittlichkeit to a large extent and similarly argues that people become individuals by virtue of the historical and social context in which they find themselves. Like Hegel, moreover, Taylor argues that political duties do not form an external

imposition on individuals, but are an extension of the interests of the individual, as a result of one’s identification with one’s community and its idea of the good (Thompson, 1998). Taylor, however, does not follow Hegel all the way, as he insists on the liberal value of individual uniqueness. Taylor stresses the importance of self-realization of individuals who are influenced, but not determined by their social and historical context. As Cornel West (1988, 872) describes him, Taylor is “deeply grounded in the Hegelian tradition without being a Hegelian and profoundly committed to liberal values of individuality and tolerance without being a liberal”. Taylor fears the possible authoritarian implications of a communitarian theory which puts the priority of the good over the right. His solution, then, is to argue that citizens are bound together by their allegiance to common goods such as particular institutions, histories and traditions, rather than moral principles. Although Taylor is wary of Hegel’s interpretation of public space as space of harmony and unity, he criticizes the philosophical anthropology of liberalism because it ignores the need for recognition for the

development of human autonomy in the first place. This belief is rooted in the Hegelian dialectic of reciprocal recognition as condition for identity and human bonding (West, 1988).

Whereas Taylor’s work taps into the liberal and Hegelian tradition of political philosophy and tries to combine the advantages of each, Arendt rejects both traditions. Although, like Taylor, she

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emphasizes the importance of the public sphere for the realization of freedom and identity, she defines these concepts from a very different perspective. Arendt believes that traditional philosophy, including Hegelian and liberal thought, has a problematic relation with politics. Ever since Plato, Arendt argues, philosophers have wanted to subject the plurality of doxa, of opinions and judgments, to the truths of philosophical insights or scientific explanations (Vasterling, 2007). Additionally, philosophy has always prioritized the contemplative life over the life of action, and has attributed the political merely an instrumental role. Arendt (1964) wanted to form a conception of the political “unclouded” by this type of philosophy. She tried to understand politics on its own terms, capturing the fact that human action is filled with paradoxes and inconsistencies, which clash with the logic of conventional philosophy. Arendt’s writing on the political is situated within the tradition of existential and hermeneutical phenomenology (Aydin, 2007). Phenomenology, the study of how we experience, is characterized by a commitment to phenomena as they present themselves. For Arendt, this means approaching the human condition by focusing on political appearances and experiences. Central to her work are the concepts of freedom and plurality, which can only be realized through political action in the world. This ‘world’ is itself to be understood as a phenomenological term, as a human realm between people, which cannot be understood in terms of singularity. Moreover, rather than starting from ‘human nature’, Arendt starts from ‘the human condition’, because the plurality of unique men, not Man, cannot be grasped by reference to a human nature (Arendt, 1958). This is why Arendt stresses ‘who’ people are, in their uniqueness, rather than ‘what’ they are, determined by biological or social factors.

Given the purpose of this thesis, it is important to explain two key concepts and how they are interpreted in different ways by Taylor and Arendt. The central concept of this thesis is that of the political community. For the two authors, this concept has a different meaning. Arendt’s idea of the political community is connected to her specific reading of the political as a sphere for human action and freedom. The political community is not bound by a shared identity but instead determined by a shared commitment to take care of the shared ‘world’ between individuals. The political community refers for Arendt, first, to the world at large, in a phenomenological sense. At other times, Arendt refers to a political community as a concrete polity. As mentioned above, Arendt rejects the nation-state as a suitable form for such a polity, because of its exclusionary nature. For Taylor, on the other hand, a political community refers only to a concrete polity, which offers the framework which can accommodate subpolitical groups through reference to a shared identity. For pragmatic reasons, Taylor advocates the nation-state as the form of organization which can foster political identification. Taylor holds on to nation-states because they are part of our ‘social imaginary’.

The second central concept in this thesis is that of ‘difference’, as the central research question refers to the importance of finding a form of political community which can give sufficient

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room to differences within that community. Taylor and Arendt do not refer to these differences in the same way. If we consider the ontological level first, Arendt writes about ‘plurality’ as the fact which characterizes us as human beings, who are each equally individually unique. Taylor, on the other hand, refers to the ontological fact of ‘diversity’. Here he has in mind primarily the diversity of different social groups, although he does recognize the existence and also importance of individual uniqueness. For Taylor, the desired concrete embodiment, the ontic, of this ontological fact of diversity is ‘multiculturalism’, the organization of human life where the state recognizes the importance of social groups and facilitates both their interests and survival (Taylor, 1994c). For Arendt, on the other hand, plurality constitutes both the ontological and the ontic (Topolski, 2014, 3). The policy desired by Arendt should be aimed at securing this plurality in public spaces, by avoiding dominance by philosophical or scientific truths and thereby providing a space for human action.

2.7. Conclusion

This chapter has given an overview of the main theoretical perspectives on political community, ranging from liberals to communitarians and pluralists. I have situated the main authors of this thesis, Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt, within the debate and explained why their work is relevant. Moreover, I have clarified some methodological differences between their positions, which helps understanding their respective theories and facilitates a discussion between their perspectives later on. With this literature review, I have set the stage for the following chapters. The next chapter will develop Taylor’s position on political communities, after which chapter four will explain Arendt’s position. Their views will be compared in chapter five and criticized in chapter six, where I bring forward my own model of political community.

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3. Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor’s work is aimed at answering the question how “people [can] live together in difference granted that this will be a democratic regime, under conditions of fairness and equality” (Taylor, 1998b, 213). He theorizes a model of political community which creates room for difference, while at the same time achieving unity. This chapter outlines Taylor’s model of political community, which he calls a model of ‘deep diversity’. Underlying this deep diversity is the assumption that individuals have multiple types of identity: a political one, and private, or subpolitical, ones. Taylor assumes that the identities of individuals and constituent groups, which define what is important in a person’s life, will generally be “richer and more complex, as well as being often quite different from each other” (Taylor, 2003a, 21). Apart from these identities, Taylor, assumes that individuals also have a political identity, which he relates to the modern nation-state. Taylor emphasizes that all different groups need to be heard and involved in the creation of such a common political identity.

This chapter is made up of four parts. Section 3.1 explains Taylor’s vision of the self, which explains his concern for the protection of different subpolitical communities. Section 3.2 continues to explain why Taylor believes that we also need a political community, given the nature of a democratic society. Section 3.3 then explains how Taylor aims to combine the need for subpolitical communities with the need for a cohesive political community, with his model of ‘deep diversity’. Section 3.4, lastly, will explain how Taylor wishes to institutionalize this model.

3.1 Taylor’s idea of selfhood

Before we can look at Taylor’s view on political communities, it is necessary to clarify his underlying assumptions. A crucial foundation of Taylor’s work is his view on selfhood. This explains why he values subpolitical and political communities, and why he emphasizes the importance of difference. This section will therefore explain Taylor’s view on selfhood, before I explore how this view influences his model of political community in the rest of this chapter.

Taylor distinguishes ontological and historicist dimensions of the self. Ontological dimensions have been true ever since human beings came into existence. For Taylor, ontological characteristics of the self are primarily the fact that humans are animals with language and in the dialogical nature of selfhood. Subsection 3.1.1. explains his idea of the ontological self. Apart from this characterization, Taylor seeks to identify the specifically modern selfhood, the Western conception of the self which has emerged over time. This historicist conception of selfhood is especially characterized by the demand for recognition. Subsection 3.1.2, will explain Taylor’s idea of modern selfhood.

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3.1.1. The dialogical self: an obligation to belong

Charles Taylor’s work criticizes what he calls an ‘atomistic’ image of human beings. This image, Taylor argues, can be found in doctrines of social contract theory since the 17th_{century and in various} modern-day liberal theories. The individual, according to the atomist view, is not constituted by its society, but self-sufficient (Taylor, 1985). Society is awarded a merely instrumental role, in fulfilling the requirements for individual’s needs and ends. According to Taylor, this ontological priority of the individual is fundamentally flawed. Taylor argues that the individual is always socially situated. What is more, the realization of our distinctively human capacities depends on living in a social and political context. Human autonomy, being an agent in the realization of one’s own idea of the good cannot exist without a framework of what is good and what is bad, which is generated by an individual’s social and cultural context. As Taylor argues, “what man derives from society is not some aid in realizing his good, but the very possibility of being an agent seeking that good” (Taylor, 1985, 292).

For Taylor, the crucial feature of human beings is their dialogical character. In order to become full human beings, we need to define our identity in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, our environment and concrete others (Taylor, 1994c). It is in this context that Taylor argues for the primacy of community, rather than the primacy of the individual. The language and culture which individuals need to develop the self-interpretations on which their identity and agency rely, can only be maintained and renewed within a community (Taylor, 1985). From this, Taylor derives the conclusion that people have an ‘obligation to belong’. Whereas those theorists who Taylor associates with atomism see our obligation to sustain a society and obey its authorities as instrumental to our interests and dependent on our (implicit) consent, Taylor argues for a more unconditional

commitment. For Taylor, “any proof that these [human] capacities can only develop in society or in a society of a certain kind is a proof that we ought to belong to or sustain society or this kind of society” (Taylor, 1985, 197). If the social framework within which one lives is a precondition for the development of human capacities such as individual freedom, this means, for Taylor, that individuals have an obligation to sustain the society necessary for their flourishing. However, Taylor does not believe that individuals are completely determined by the society in which they live. It is only insofar as someone values and identifies with the goods of his or her society that the obligation to belong, implying an obligation to maintain the society, arises. This holds, first, for the liberal society at large, where one’s individual capabilities to aspire freedom, exercise autonomy and critical reflection are only made possible by the wider culture that values critical and independent thinking (Taylor, 1985). However, it also holds for the subpolitical groups of which citizens are part. Taylor argues that the government has a task of sustaining the communities which allow individuals to develop.

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3.1.2 The modern self: demand for recognition

In the previous section, I explained Taylor’s view on the ontological nature of the self. This section will expand on Taylor’s view of the specific nature of the self in modern, Western societies. In his

magnum opus Sources of the Self (1989), Taylor sketches the contours of ‘our’ modern ontology. He argues that a certain set of ‘life goods’ is deemed important for modern individuals. Life goods are values that make up our moral horizon, called life goods because they are properties "which makes a life worthy or valuable" (Taylor, 1994b, 126). Taylor argues that our modern moral horizon consists of “an ethic of benevolence; an ethos of universal respect and justice; the quest for individual self-realization and expressive fulfillment; the ideals of freedom and self-rule; and the avoidance of death and suffering” (Redhead, 2002b, 806). Taylor’s work on political theory, and especially political community, has focused primarily on the quest for individual fulfillment and authenticity. According to Taylor, we share a desire for being ‘authentic’ that has given rise to the demand or need for recognition. This section will focus on this need for recognition, and how it led Taylor to formulate a ‘politics of recognition’. This is necessary to understand his vision of political community, which will be developed in the rest of this chapter.

As explained in the previous section, Taylor advocates a dialogical conception of the self. One’s self-relation is not independent from others. In fact, Taylor argues, we need recognition of who we are by others in our environment. According to Taylor, failure to be recognized damages the individual’s self-relation and his or her sense of identity, as it can lead to a feeling of inferiority which is then internalized. Withholding recognition can be a form of oppression. Taylor argues that this has always been the case, but the demand for recognition became more relevant in the modern age, with the collapse of social hierarchies. In societies where the social positions into which one was born were fixed, recognition could be taken for granted. It is only with the more fluid societies of modern democracy that the demand for recognition can arise, as recognition is no longer self-evident (Taylor, 1994c).

Taylor identifies two basic modern forms of recognition that are relevant today, and he is primarily concerned with the second. The first refers to the universal dignity of human beings. This type of recognition is directed at treating people as free and equal individuals and finds its political translation in equality of rights (Taylor, 1994c). The second form is recognition of someone’s distinctiveness, related to the rise of the so-called ‘age of authenticity’. According to Taylor, the demands made in name of this second form of recognition are the driving forces behind

contemporary multiculturalism in which groups, be they focused on religion, ethnicity, gender or sex, make claims for the public acknowledgement of their particular features (Blum, 1998). The politics of difference, or so-called identity politics, have made their entrance in the public sphere, as members

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of various groups attach value to the collective aspect of their individual identity and seek public acknowledgement. Taylor applauds this demand, but realizes that there are significant risks involved when social groups adopt the stance of the victim in the struggle for recognition (Taylor, 1998a). As we will see in the next section, it is problematic for Taylor’s conception of political community when a certain group believes that no common ground can be found with other groups. Although Taylor asks from subpolitical groups that they are prepared to look for common ground, he also demands from governments that they recognize the specific character of such groups. He advocates a ‘politics of recognition’, which is based on the idea that a politics of neutrality is biased towards the hegemonic culture and hence inherently discriminatory (Taylor, 1994c). Instead, Taylor advocates political recognition of minority groups, with policy that goes far beyond the policy measures which are required from a proceduralist liberal view. In the case of the Quebec, for example, Taylor (1994c) argues for the protection of the French language, but also for policy which ensures the survival of the French Canadian culture for future generations. The need to incorporate difference is also a key element of Taylor’s model of political community. The next section will outline his position on this topic.

3.2. The democratic political community

Taylor’s dialogical vision of the self implies that he attaches great value to communities of which individuals are part. This goes for both the broader political community and for subpolitical

communities. His emphasis on the importance of different subpolitical communities is reflected in his vision of the political community. This leads to a dilemma for Taylor, because he argues that a

democratic political community requires a high degree of cohesion around a shared political identity. This section explains why Taylor believes this degree of cohesion is necessary, and how it leads to problematic exclusionary tendencies. The next section will then explain how Taylor aims to solve this tension by formulating a ‘deeply diverse’ political identity, which incorporates both common goods that matter to subpolitical groups and overarching political goods.

3.2.1. The dilemma: the nature of democracy

Taylor’s political work is directed at answering the question how people can live together in difference under a democratic regime (Taylor, 1998b). Taylor argues that unlike previous forms of government, such as in despotic or authoritarian societies, modern democracy requires strong identification of citizens with the political community. The central characteristic of a democracy is popular sovereignty, self-rule of the people. This has implications for the bond among citizens, and for the relationship between citizens and the state.

Unity and Difference: a model of Political Community based on the work of Hannah Arendt and Charles Taylor