Community, Solidarity, and Belonging: Levels of Community and Their Normative Significance. By Andrew Mason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 246p. $59.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-188
Author(s):  
Russell Muirhead
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Global Community ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Community Solidarity ◽  
Normative Significance ◽  
Political Communities

Communitarianism has long suffered from vagueness: what is community? What about it, if anything, is necessary or good? What are the boundaries of morally relevant communities? Often those who attend to the claims of community tender these questions with too little rigor. Not so Andrew Mason. His new book has three main purposes: to map the meaning of community, to assess the claims of political community in relation to communities below the level of the state, and to evaluate the claims of political communities with respect to the global community. In addition to a number of rigorous and thoughtful clarifications and a comprehensive overview of recent debates between liberalism and its critics, the book offers arguments of its own which are often more bold than its judicious manner suggests. It deserves careful attention by all who have attempted to sort through the tensions between liberalism and community.

Citizenship

Anthropology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sian Lazar
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National Citizenship ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
Under Construction ◽  
The Relationship

At its most fundamental, citizenship means political belonging, and to study citizenship is to study how we live with others in a political community. Anthropological work on the theme of citizenship tends to break open the classic version of citizenship as a universal legal status belonging to citizens of a given nation-state. Instead, it recognizes the differentiated nature of political membership, and the ways that citizenship acts as an ordering and disciplining device as well as a mechanism for making claims upon different kinds of political communities. These may include the state but they are not limited to it. In dialogue with political theorists, anthropologists of citizenship have argued that the constitution of any given community requires a considerable amount of work, and that meaningful membership is more than the possession of rights and responsibilities. Citizenship may be formal or substantive, full or partial, and it is always under construction, as citizens and noncitizens claim inclusion and effective participation in political life. That may be articulated through languages of rights but may also be conducted—and contested—through other kinds of everyday or insurgent political practices. One of the main focuses of ethnographic study of the practices of citizenship has therefore been on how people relate to the state, bringing out the relationship between people and state bureaucracies and between people and law. Another aspect is the scale at which relevant political communities operate, as anthropologists have added to the discussion of national citizenship with studies of cosmopolitan, transnational, or global citizenships and of local, city-based formations. Citizenship is a complex bundle of practices of encounter between the state and citizens at different scales or levels. Because citizenship practices are also the means by which societies organize inclusion and exclusion, the figure of the noncitizen is crucial to the construction of citizenship. Noncitizens might be conceptualized as strangers, migrants, or refugees, and these individuals always raise questions about the definitions of political communities and their borders. Central to all these processes of inclusion, exclusion, encounter, and claims-making is the way that people (citizens and noncitizens) build their own political agency and subjecthood under what constraints and in what realms of life, including the most intimate.

The Revival of Organic Theory

1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 454-459
Author(s):  
Francis G. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Voluntary Association ◽  
Political Pluralism ◽  
The North ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
Social Organism ◽  
Organic Theory

Theories of the nature of the political community vary with conditions. Just as political pluralism was a phase of the late mellowness of liberalism, so the organic theory of the state is suited for more heroic moments. When integral nationalism was discovered in the United States after the defeat of the South, it was not inappropriate that organic theories should have been supported in order to explain the place of the American nation in history. Nor can it be surprising that today some of the leaders of the United States are looking at the nation as a kind of social organism.If one reads with attention the words of President Lincoln during the early days of the Civil War, it can be seen that the Union was more than just a voluntary association of political communities. The states had their being within the Union, and the Union itself had given birth to the states. Even the history of Texas and its relation to the Union did not impress Lincoln as simply consensual, for if there was consent it was all on the side of Texas. Whatever liberty and authority the states possessed they derived from the Union, and not from any original powers of their own. When the Union became a symbol of organicity in the mind of the North, the earlier individualistic theory of the state was remote enough. The social contract, the consent of all to government, was suitable in the American Revolution, since protest was being made against the specific, arbitrary actions of the British government, animated it would seem by a total conception of Empire. To Lincoln, states, like individuals, were a part of the Union, and the Union might be broken neither by citizens nor by states.

Political Community, Legitimacy and Discrimination

1974 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Laponce
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
Infancy And Childhood ◽  
The Family ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The Continuum

Relating the notion of political community to those of discrimination and legitimacy — and, consequently, setting up a typology which will contrast communities by the criteria they use to distinguish members from non-members and by the location they give to legitimacy, placed either in a ruler or in a process — will be made easier if we consider first of all certain striking similarities which exist between the most private of social groups, the family, and the most public, the state, similarities which probably facilitate the transfer of the ideological constructs formed in infancy and childhood into the political expectancies and assumptions of adulthood. Let us distinguish communities defined through the brothers from communities defined through the father: communities centered around a leader from those centered on themselves. These contrasts will suggest to us a natural/ artificial continuum along which political communities can be ranked, those most resembling the family in their ideas about legitimate authority and legitimate membership being closer to the ‘natural’ end of the continuum. I will explain later the reasons for this distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, but I must at the outset make it absolutely clear that the use of these terms does not in any way imply an evaluative preference on my part.

‘Party in the street’: The partisan politics of space

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Lipin Ram
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
State Power ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.

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