The ‘I’ and the ‘we’ of citizenship in the age of waning democracy: Wolin and Balibar on citizenship, the political and dedemocratization

Abstract

Despite drawing on different historical traditions and philosophical sources, Sheldon Wolin and Étienne Balibar have come to see citizenship and democracy in fundamentally similar ways. However, the work of one has not been considered alongside that of the other. In this paper, I examine some of their key texts and draw out three areas of common concern: the historical specificity of the political, citizenship as a dialectical process and dedemocratization. The significance of Wolin and Balibar’s writing on citizenship and democracy lies in a set of proposals for the eternal rebirth of the citizen as democratic agent between action and institution, hierarchy and equality, individual and community, difference and the universal. Their open-ended frameworks can be seen as an antidote to contemporary pessimism about the fate of democracy as either political order or normative ideal. I conclude by suggesting that contemporary Ecuadorean and Bolivian debates about how to combine relational ontologies and liberalism has opened a fertile domain for re-imagining the I and We of citizenship.

Keywords:

• Balibar
• Wolin
• citizenship
• democratization
• dedemocratization
• demos
• equality

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the efforts of two anonymous reviewers who made a number of helpful comments.