Organic vs. inorganic citizenship

ABSTRACT

Social contract theories from John Locke to John Rawls are rooted in a flawed ontological foundation as autonomous, self-interested individuals with interests/rights abstracted from any relationship to each other, land/animals they live on/amongst or even time/history live within a state of nature or original position. Political authority and/or fundamental principles of justice are produced as inorganic artifices, constituted via the aggregate consent of natural/pre-political beings. While citizenship may appear universal, in reality, ‘freemen’ were defined along gendered, racialized, class-based, and/or ableist lines. Thus, a hierarchically defined subset of people consents to authority or the principles of justice. In contrast, an organic theory of citizenship is rooted in the opposite ontological premise with human beings understood to be living, growing interdependent beings born into relationships and ecosystems that pre-exist and upon which they depend to live at all, are explicitly anti-hierarchical. Relations between people, society, and the ecosystem must be theorized as a priority rather than bracketed outside of consideration and/or constituted as the byproduct of consent. The central question for an organic theory of citizenship is thus: how to create a healthy ecosystem and non-hierarchical set of relations so humans from birth to old age, creatures, and the earth itself are all able to flourish interdependently?

KEYWORDS:

• Inorganic
• organic
• social contract
• flourishing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For the purposes of this short article, I am focusing on a key thread as it evolves within liberal thought, but as Duncan Bell has shown (2014), liberalism has multiple threads which all evolve over time and can contradict each other.

2. While Hobbes and Locke limited ‘freemen’ along gendered, racialized, ableist, class, age lines rooted fundamentally in a preceding ‘racial contract’, ‘sexual contract’, ableist contract.