Enacting citizenship for the healthy politeia

ABSTRACT

In the wake of ‘end of ideology’ predictions of the late twentieth century, nationalist ideologies and discourses have proven strikingly resilient, as have authoritarian regimes relying on nationalism for their legitimacy and power. Meanwhile, so-called liberal political philosophers and theorists who claim commitments to rights and justice make arguments that invigorate nationalist subjectivities at the expense of the rule of law. This essay explains how even those who are critical of nationalist, authoritarian regimes nonetheless use a vocabulary that reinvigorates Jacques Derrida’s ‘sovereign beast’. Insights from Miguel de Cervantes and Franz Kafka are used to amplify Engin Isin’s timely if not urgent arguments on behalf of theorizing citizenship as enactments that are creative, innovative, and autonomous, and not as a status derived from membership. Plato’s views on justice and the ‘healthy politeia’, as well as examples of creativity within existing governments are elucidated to further emphasize the benefits of theorizing new scripts for citizens over proposing new theories for governments.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• nation
• nationalism
• Engin Isin
• Jacques Derrida
• Plato
• Republic

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. For analyses responsive to concerns that such scripts are ‘unnatural’ or otherwise inconsistent with human predilections for violence, see Stevens (2009).

2. For a project envisioning creative citizenship within and outside existing sovereign institutions see ‘Declaration of Citizenship,’ https://declarationofcitizenship.org.

3. For the 2020 election, Stacy Abrams, a Black candidate for governor in 2018, mobilized voters in Georgia to vote for Joe Biden and two Democrats as Senators, a reversal of a decades-long Republican track record (New York Times 2021). Also in Georgia the mother of Ahmad Arbury after encountering officials refusing to prosecute for murder the three men who killed her son, first used the rules of the system to have the reluctant prosecutor removed, and, after securing guilty verdicts from a White jury, prevailed on a a federal judge to reject a plea deal for hate crime charges; the second trial resulted in a second conviction by a separate jury (New York Times 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacqueline Stevens

Jacqueline Stevens is a professor in the Political Science Department at Northwestern University and founding director of the Deportation Research Clinic, Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern. The Clinic uses litigation and other techniques of forensic intelligence to thwart government misconduct and enhance the health of the rule of law. Stevens writes on citizenship and political theories of membership.