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.
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Notes
The material presented here is based on fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2009 and renewed ongoing fieldwork among Israeli activists from 2012-present.
There are also those who call these activists traitors and deny all ethical content to their intervention.
While personal autonomy is oriented towards freeing the individual from social constraints, moral autonomy is a process of self-determination and self-control.
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.
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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.
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9322-x