Reflections on the Good Citizen

Abstract

In these reflections on what it means to be a ‘good citizen’, I explore the idea that citizenship cannot be understood as just a legal status or as equivalent to self-ownership, but needs to be understood as inextricably bound up with expectations and notions of dependence and independence that inform our understandings of ‘belonging’. I begin by thinking about Rousseau and his rather inspiring vision of what it means to participate in the state as a member of the sovereign and a part of the people who determine the general will. To be a citizen is to be subject only to laws you have made yourself, to have an equal status with every other citizen as sovereign individuals who are a part of the whole, and to have found a footing with others and a way of expressing shared human interests in a political arena. Citizens, as Rousseau puts it, have been transformed from stupid and unimaginative animals into men who can exercise justice over instinct and act in ways that reflect and amplify their civil and moral liberty, their equality and their mutuality. Citizenship is, he says, a title that is shared alike by all. Of course, Rousseau’s is the archetype of a theory that claims to be universal but turns out to be partial and value laden. In its exclusion of women from citizenship, Rousseau’s social contract lays bare citizenship’s reliance on a gendered public/private divide and on the division between the inside and outside that grounds the idea of ‘citizenship and its others’.