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December 20, 2004
This article on citizenship by Melanie White and Alan Hunt, which is hosted here,can be read as a criticism of Webdiary's internet activism and deliberative democracy pathway suggested in a previous posts.This pathway calls for more active citizenship and more public involvement.
This is a response to a public life in Australia that gives up on the project of freedom as self-government, abandons the aim of calling economic power to democratic account, that fails to form in citizens the qualities of character that equip them for political deliberation and self-rule.
This proposal is seen as romantic nostalgic for the participatory involvement of what is taken to be a small community's face-to face interaction. It's target is civic republicanism, which has re-emerged as an alternative to liberalism. Republicanism stresses the positive values of political participation and the limits of negative freedom of a rights based political culture.
A lot of the article is an explicition of Foucualt based on interpreting Foucault's idea of governance of the self (associated with the ethics of care for self) by linking it to citizenship, thereby going beyond Foucualt's more individualist understanding of care for self. I am sympathetic to this reworking of Foucualt.
The key idea is that relations of government produce particular kinds of citizens. An indication of this can be found here in this post by Mark Bahnisch at Troppo Armadillo. Mark mentions the work of Barry Hindess on governmentality, which suggests that the liberal university of yesteryear helped to produce:
"...reflective citizens through a humanistic education. This is not an innocent programme, and in the past it's been closely linked to broader ideas of governing the state. In neo-liberal governmentality, Hindess suggests, a different elite is interested in producing a different sort of citizen----self-disciplining, responsible and self-interested."
What White and Hunt do is highlight Foucault's understanding of governance as subjects governing themselves through the production of truth: as establishing a domain where the practices of true and false can be ordered and made pertinent. This is what Webdiary has done with respect to the Howard Government.
Many pages latter, after describing two forms of care for self, as public virtues associated with the 19th century understanding of character and the personality one (self-realization and expressive individualism) of the 20th century, White and Hunt connect changes in forms of citizenship to these two forms of care for self. The former is state-centred and public to one involving multiple point of contacts and participation across a variety of sites and institutions.
Let us accept this genealogy and move onto the critique of the contemporary romantic nostalgic around citizenship associated with civic republicanism. This romanticism is linked Rousseau and it understands citizenship to be a revolutionary project. Their argument that citizenship has no necessary content as it is associated with repression as well as egalitarianism.
That is insisted upon not argued. Is not citizenship in a liberal policy such as Australia connected to the broadening of democracy and the sovereignty of the people?
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