A neorepublican cultural citizenship: beyond Marxism and liberalism

Abstract

The idea of cultural citizenship is often associated with a present-day context of multiculturalism, and seen as a novel issue for political philosophy. Within political philosophy it has been mainly conceptualised within a liberal tradition focusing on (cultural) rights. The concept also features in cultural studies, to articulate the importance of artistic and media practices to citizenship. This article aims to orient the debate to wider theoretical concerns, and to a long-standing political-philosophical interest in the relation of politics and culture. It proposes a ‘broad view’ of cultural citizenship, which moreover locates cultural citizenship in concerns about the public sphere. It revisits historical philosophical positions on the relation of politics and culture, viz those of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. The distinct conceptual models ensuing from their work both expound ‘broad views’, which take the relation between politics and culture to impact on all citizens. The article subsequently discusses a recent Dutch policy report on cultural citizenship, which shows that these models still have topical relevance. Next, a fourfold grid is elaborated of weak and strong, positive and negative views on how citizenship is to be related to issues of culture. The article concludes by arguing for a neorepublican approach of cultural citizenship that adopts a ‘weak positive’ view and may repair the conceptual drawbacks of both the liberal and Marxist views.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• politics and culture
• neorepublicanism
• Karl Marx
• John Stuart Mill

Notes

 1. This is not meant as an exhaustive picture of cultural studies. There obviously are, within that broad and indeterminate field, various works which do ally more easily with political philosophy. The cultural anthropology of Arjun Appadurai (1996) or Ulf Hannerz (1996) are two fitting examples; we may add names like Néstor García Canclini (2005) or Renato Rosaldo (1989). Still, beyond these efforts in cultural theory, the idea of the ‘cultural citizen’ is often employed in the more narrow sense that I refer to here. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss how the cultural theorists mentioned would relate to the argument on citizenship that I develop here.

 2. This view is, mostly implicitly, present in a range of further work, e.g. the already mentioned work of Appadurai or Hannerz. It has also been taken up in some instances of critical theory, like the work of Nancy Fraser (2003, 2005) and, lately, Jürgen Habermas (2006, 2008), and more generally in social philosophy on recognition.

 3. The issue is more or less whether we should restrict the notion of a ‘cultural’ citizenship to the contemporary condition of an information society, or extend it in a historical direction and understand it as belonging to longstanding criticisms of narrow political or/and universalist conceptions of citizenship. These critical conceptions can be found in various (public and philosophical) historical discourses on citizenship's dependence on its cultural castings, in ethnic, gendered or class senses. Such discourses are addressed in e.g. Muthu (2003) and Vega (2003a). I return to such a reading below, where I discuss a ‘weak positive view’ of the relation between citizenship and culture.

 4. See also the useful discussion in Brown (1995).

 5. Mill also discusses this theme in his Considerations on representative government (1861). (I owe this observation to one of this article's referees.) The text there shows a certain ambivalence. Mill argues that a mixture of nationalities, especially if they speak different languages, makes it difficult to reach the ‘united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government’ (Mill 1861, p. 165). In agreement again with his earlier remarks in On liberty, he also expounds that ‘whatever really tends to the admixture of nationalities’ amounts to ‘a benefit to the human race’ (Mill 1861, p. 167). Still, here Mill shows himself to be a pessimist as to the capacity of democratic government to sustain a coexistence of nationalities if of roughly the same strength. He proceeds by discussing federal solutions, in which both a balance of power and protection against majority rule are to be guaranteed.

 6. I here address only the 2007 report. I may add that, interestingly, an earlier report of the Council, on ‘media wisdom’, did problematise the issue of media power and the need to educate people in that regard (see Raad voor Cultuur 2005).

 7. I return to this concept of freedom in the conclusion.

 8. It is (implicitly) described in a formulation like ‘the process by which historical actors assigned meanings to the prescriptions and delineations of citizenship and hence became subjects in their encounters with citizenship laws, rhetorics, and practices’ (Canning & Rose 2001, p. 432). In this case its authors proceed with confining that process to the marginalised or excluded. I would rather extend the formulation to those ‘in the centre’, as all citizens (including the proverbial ‘white males’) are subject to the negotiation of regimes of meaning. See also note 3.

 9. The weak views concur with the notion of a ‘weak ontology’ that advances the idea of ‘sticky subjects’ over and against the ‘Teflon subject’ of dominant modernity, in the happy phrases of Stephen White (1997, 2000). The fragmented and culturally burdened civic identity that underlies the concept of cultural citizenship is bound up with a weak ontology. Such ontology emphasises, inter alia, ‘the ways in which all identity is intrinsically tied to that from which it seeks to differentiate itself; or on how projects and discourses inevitably overflow our powers to direct them toward precisely specified ends’ (White 1997, p. 507). In a similar mood, Michael Sandel (1984) criticised liberalism for its assumption of ‘unencumbered selves’, shoring up a mere ‘procedural republic’ of rights-bearing citizens, frustrating the actual need of engagement by real ‘encumbered selves’.

10. With notable exceptions, such as Herman van Gunsteren (1998).

11. This does not imply that neorepublicanism can only be a theory of politics. For a defense of this argument see Richard Dagger (2006).

12. Also compare Homi Bhabha (1994), who, in the words of Nick Stevenson, distinguishes questions of cultural difference from those of cultural diversity, arguing that ‘diversity requires a pre-given cultural realm’, whereas ‘[q]uestions of cultural difference seek to deconstruct claims to cultural purity and demonstrate that the meanings and symbols of cultural identity require interpretation and enunciation’ (Stevenson 2003, p. 51). The neorepublican theory of cultural citizenship distances itself from the ‘mosaic’ or ‘archipelago’ view (Kukathas 2003) of a plurality of internally coherent cultures vying with each other for recognition: it precisely resists the liberal impulse of projecting coherent identities.

13. The notion of a symbolic order I roughly borrow from psychoanalytic theory as developed by Jacques Lacan (1977 [1966]) and Julia Kristeva (1984 [1974]). I cannot detail here their approaches and differences. My use of the concept may become apparent from the context of my discussion. See also Lee (1998).

14. Philip Pettit (1997) has ventured that republicanism has its proper concept of negative freedom, in its principled struggle against domination or, the ancients' concept, slavery. Quentin Skinner (1998) develops a similar argument, reconstructing a ‘neo-Roman’ theory of liberty in contrast with the liberal theory of liberty. This theory opposes liberty not to the radical absence of interference but to the radical absence of (potential) coercion.