The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen
Stephen K. White
Language: English
Pages: 150
ISBN: 0674032632
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen, Stephen K. White contends that Western democracies face novel challenges demanding our reexamination of the role of citizens. Such reflection involves our neither denying, in the name of tradition, the force of what is new, nor imagining that we can adequately confront change by simply rejecting the traditions of modern Western political thought. White offers an incisive interpretation of our late-modern ethical-political condition and explains how a distinctive “ethos,” or spirit, of citizenship might constitute part of an exemplary response. This ethos requires reworking basic figures of the modern political imagination, including our conception of the self, citizenship, and democratic politics. Essentially, White argues that the intense focus in the past three decades on finding general principles of justice for diversity-rich societies needs to be complemented by an exploration of what sort of ethos would be needed to adequately sustain any such principles. He proposes that Western citizens adopt an ethos that is defined by such virtues as (moral) attentiveness, self-restraint, and existential gratitude. Accessible, pithy, and erudite, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen will appeal to a wide audience.
Rousseau and the Social Contract (Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks)
Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings (Get Political)
Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (New Directions in Critical Theory)
Articulation model, it is not difficult to see how virtues of carefulness and humility toward the other are prefigured more clearly here than is the case in either the foundations model or the framework model, where the other is more susceptible to being quickly scripted as either an obstacle or an entity of possible instrumental use. Attentiveness and restraint gain their content in relation to that figure of a journey that I have suggested is implied in the notion of articulating sources.
Against which it stands out.37 What is crucial about this ontological figuration is that it vividly portrays the finitude of all projections of identity. If identity is constitutively dependent on difference, then my agency cannot complete a portrait of itself and its projects as sovereignly free in the sense of being beyond dependence on that which it is not. As I showed in Chapter 2, this general character of being stands in no small degree of tension with the persistent desire modern humans have.
That the great majority that might constitute the classic subject of democratic will-formation cannot be composed exclusively of a category that is both poorest and numerically the largest. This is so, for the simple reason that there is no such category. Democracy’s Predicament 81 My emphasis on the middle segment might appear to be the start of a celebratory argument for such a society’s having become a successful democracy in the sense that more people are relatively well-off. But there is.
Aristotelian individual on one end, and the individual imagined by economists and their allies in political science on the other. Flourishing for the former is dependent on taking action in public life; flourishing for the latter can be achieved when an individual is not required to take any action at all, because action counts as a “cost” to be avoided. Human being, as I have Democracy’s Predicament 93 sketched it, sits far closer to the Aristotelian figure than to the economically rational.
Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 12–14, 44– 45, 81–82. See also his “Response to Critics,” Review of Politics 76 (2005): 495–513. 6. Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 2d ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 10. Cf. Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics,” in Human Rights, pp. 3–4. 7. Waldron, God, Locke and Equality, pp. 71–72, 75–81. 8. Taylor, Sources of the Self , 495-521.