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November 23, 2006
In Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship Susan D. Collins is concerned with the way that liberal political theory has failed to reckon with the fact that the human good has an unavoidable political dimension. Liberal theorists often flee from the fact that every political community requires specific virtues, molds characters, and shapes its citizens' vision of the good.
In this review Thomas W. Smith says that in the first part of the book Collins shows the problematic character of various liberal conceptions of citizenship. Collins points out, that liberalism has called into question its own principles of justice and morality:
For example, critics sympathetic to liberalism have picked apart the Rawlsian emphasis on procedural liberalism and justice as fairness. They have eviscerated the liberal pretension to neutrality. They have criticized the hard distinction between a public realm informed by liberal principles and a private realm unaffected by the social and political forces liberalism generates. Collins thinks that these sorts of arguments have brought clarity about the need to confront the question of the human good in our regime. Yet this clarity challenges liberalism at its core. Increasingly liberal theorists recognize that liberalism requires civic education in certain virtues. However, with certain prominent exceptions, they are unwilling to argue that liberalism ought to try to transform their citizens' comprehensive views or cultivate a way of life.
Liberals, by and large, are uncomfortable with the view that regimes form citizens. Neo-liberals are different. The whole point of neo-liberalism is that the market mechanism should be allowed to direct the fate of human beings. The economy should dictate its rules to society, not the other way around. On this account neoliberalism is a series of market oriented reforms aimed at global economic integration, free trade, privatization, and deregulation, has been presented by some scholars as an being an opposition to social democracy.
Neo-liberalism is also a mode of governance one that organizes people--and distributes rights and benefits to them---according to their marketable skills rather than according to their membership within nation-states. Those whose knowledge and skills are not assigned significant market value---such as migrant women working as domestic maids in many Asian cities---are denied citizenship.
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It seems to me that harking back to Aristotle is completely fruitless.
Every possible context for understanding the human condition and trying to create a truly humanising culture is now completely different.
We now live in a world of Quantum Reality wherein everything is interconnected and hence equally vulnerable. Chaos theory and the butterfly effect.
And we also "live" in a "world" of media created images/abstractions. We are bombarded by these images from the moment we are born---even before we are born because the growing baby is sensitive to all the noise in which its mother is immersed.