Skip to main content
Log in

State-authorizing citizenship: the narrow field of civic engagement in the liberal age

  • Published:
Theory and Society Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Liberal citizens are held ethically accountable not only for their own acts and behaviors, but also those of their state. Reciprocally, a proper liberal subject is one that metonymizes with the state, merging their fates and moral worth, and taking personal responsibility for the state’s actions. I claim that as a result, the liberal subject is not only self-authorizing according to liberal theories of moral autonomy, but also state-authorizing. I demonstrate the above claims through a consideration of changing activist practices among the Israeli political left. I show that the hegemonic model of civic engagement is oriented towards the state and state policy as the privileged and naturalized site of ethical intervention. I then describe the ways this model hampers political endeavors by restricting the sites of intervention as well as structural access to political participation. I also consider contemporary efforts at political engagement that bypass the state.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. The material presented here is based on fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2009 and renewed ongoing fieldwork among Israeli activists from 2012-present.

  2. There are also those who call these activists traitors and deny all ethical content to their intervention.

  3. While personal autonomy is oriented towards freeing the individual from social constraints, moral autonomy is a process of self-determination and self-control.

  4. There is a small audience for these efforts, and others who are involved in these types of efforts, for example, Jewish Israeli women who bring Palestinian women and children to visit the beach for the first time. However, even within the small and shrinking Israeli left, these efforts are often marginalized.

References

  • Abrahamsen, R. (2000). Disciplining democracy: Development discourse and good governance in Africa. London: Zed Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. New York and London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Asad, T. (2009). Free speech, blasphemy, and secular criticism. In Is critique secular? Blasphemy, injury, and free speech (pp. 20–63). New York: Fordham University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Asch, R. G. (2000). Religious toleration, the peace of Westphalia and the German Territorial Estates. Parliaments, Estates & Representation, 20(1), 75–89.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bakhtin, MM (1981 [1935]) The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.

  • Balibar, É. (2015). Citizenship. Cambridge: John Wiley and Sons.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bourdieu, P. (1999). Rethinking the state: Genesis and structure of the bureaucratic field. In G. Steinmetz (Ed.), State/culture: State-formation after the cultural turn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, W. (2008). Regulating aversion: Tolerance in the age of identity and empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brubaker, R. (1996). Nationalism reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the new Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Brubaker, R. (2017). Why populism? Theory and Society, 46(5), 357–338.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chatterjee, P. (2004). The politics of the governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chatterjee, P. (2011). Lineages of political society: Studies in postcolonial democracy. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cody, F. (2009). Inscribing subjects to citizenship: Petitions, literacy activism, and the performativity of signature in rural Tamil India. Cultural Anthropology, 24(3), 347–380.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Connors, M. (2007). Democracy and National Identity in Thailand. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • El-Ad, Hagai (2016) B'Tselem head: Why I spoke against the occupation at the UN. Haaretz Op-Ed: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.747699.

  • Ferguson, J. (2013). Declarations of dependence: Labour, personhood and welfare in southern Africa. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(2), 223–242.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ferguson, J., & Gupta, A. (2002). Spatializing states: Toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality. American Ethnologist, 29(4), 981–1002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goodman, Y. C., & Mizrachi, N. (2008). “The holocaust does not belong to European Jews alone”: The differential use of memory techniques in Israeli high schools. American Ethnologist, 35(1), 95–114.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gordon, A., & Stack, T. (2007). Citizenship beyond the state: Thinking with early modern citizenship in the contemporary world. Citizenship Studies, 11(2), 117–133.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Greenhouse, C. (2005). Hegemony and hidden transcripts: The discursive arts of neoliberal legitimation. American Anthropologist, 107(3), 356–368.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Greenhouse, C. (2011). The paradox of relevance: Ethnography and citizenship in the United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Holston, J. (2009). Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Handelman, D., & Katz, E. (1995). State ceremonies in Israel–remembrance day and independence day. In C. Leibman & M. Shokeid (Eds.), Shlomo Deshen. The Sociology of Religion in Israel: Israeli Judaism.

    Google Scholar 

  • Handelman, D. (2004). Nationalism and the Israeli state: Bureaucratic logic in public events. London: Berg Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keane, W. (2010). Minds, surfaces, and reasons in the anthropology of ethics. In M. Lambek (Ed.), Ordinary ethics. New York: Fordham University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kymlicka, W. (1994). Multicultural citizenship: A liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lavie, S. (2014). Wrapped in the flag of Israel: Mizrahi single mothers and bureaucratic torture. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lazar, S. (2010). Schooling and critical citizenship: Pedagogies of political Agency in El Alto, Bolivia. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 41(2), 181–205.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lazar, S., & Nuitjen, M. (2013). Citizenship, the self and political agency. Critique of Anthropology, 33(1), 3–8.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Levinas, E. (1979). Totality and infinity. New York: Springer.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Lomsky-Feder, E. (2004). The memorial ceremony in Israeli schools: Between the state and civil society. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(3), 291–305.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • MacIntyre, A. (1984). After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mahmood, S. (2012). Religious freedom, the minority question, and geopolitics in the Middle East. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 54(02), 418–446.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McQuarrie, M. (2013). No contest: Participatory technologies and the transformation of Urban Authority. Public Culture, 25(1 69), 143–175.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mehager, T. (2016). Conscientious objection is yet another Ashkenazi privilege. In +972.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mein, E. (2009). Literacy, knowledge production, and grassroots civil society: Constructing critical responses to neoliberal dominance. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 40(4), 350–368.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mizrachi, N. (2011). Beyond the garden and the jungle: On the social limits of the human rights discourse in Israel. Ma’asei Mishpat., 4, 51–74 (in Hebrew).

    Google Scholar 

  • Murphy, R. (2004). Turning peasants into modern Chinese citizens:“population quality” discourse, demographic transition and primary education. The China Quarterly, 177, 1–20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Needleman, J. (2003). The American soul: Rediscovering the wisdom of the founders. London: Penguin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paley, J. (2004). Accountable democracy: Citizens' impact on public decision making in Postdictatorship Chile. American Ethnologist, 31(4), 497–513.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Phillips, A. (2010). War, religion and empire: The transformation of international orders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Povinelli, E. (2006). The empire of love: Toward a theory of intimacy, genealogy, and carnality. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rawls, John (2009 [1971]) A theory of justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

  • Rawls, J. (2005). Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rorty, R. (1999). Achieving our country: Leftist thought in twentieth-century America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rose, N. (2006). Governing “advanced” liberal democracies. In A. Sharma & A. Gupta (Eds.), The anthropology of the state: A reader. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schinkel, A. (2007). Conscience and conscientious objections. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Scott, J. (2009). The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spivak, G. (2004). The trajectory of the subaltern in my work (lecture). Columbia University.

  • Taylor, C. (1992). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ticktin, M. (2006). Where ethics and politics meet. American Ethnologist., 33(1), 33–49.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Taylor, C. (1991). The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tsing, A. (1993). In the realm of the diamond queen: Marginality in an out-of-the-way place. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weber, E. (1976). Peasants into Frenchmen: The modernization of rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weiss, E. (2011). The interrupted sacrifice: Hegemony and moral crisis among Israeli conscientious objectors. American Ethnologist, 38(3), 576–588.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weiss, E. (2016). Incentivized obedience: How a gentler Israeli military prevents organized obedience. American Anthropologist, 118(1), 91–103.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weiss, E. (2017). Competing ethical claims in a diverse society: Israeli military refusers. American Ethnologist, 44(1), 52–64.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wimmer, A., & Schiller, N. G. (2003). Methodological nationalism, the social sciences, and the study of migration: An essay in historical epistemology. The International Migration Review., 37(3), 576–610.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zerubavel, Y. (1997). Recovered roots: Collective memory and the making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Yifat Gutman, Inna Leykin, and Tom Pesach who were kind enough to read drafts of this article while it was in preparation. I would also like to thank the Theory and Society reviewers of this article, who read very carefully and offered sharp, helpful, and constructive advice.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Erica Weiss.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Weiss, E. State-authorizing citizenship: the narrow field of civic engagement in the liberal age. Theor Soc 47, 467–486 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9322-x

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9322-x

Keywords

Navigation