Citizenship and Alienation

According to some political theorists, being alienated can deprive people of the full value of their citizenship and is associated with having a second-class, marginal or outsider status. Within the context of these arguments, alienation is a belief-dependent psychological state that refers to a sense of separation which comes about when someone is unable, or unwilling, to affirm or endorse current political arrangements, or to identify with their polity. This conception, or something very much like it, can be found, for example, in Anna Stilz’s (2019) defence of collective self-determination for internal minorities, which recommends self-government rights as a remedy for the kind of ‘persistent alienation’ experienced by national minorities who have different political priorities to the majority community. It can also be found in Catherine Lu’s recent advocacy of a postcolonial politics of reconciliation, which juxtaposes alienation with the enjoyment of a ‘mutually affirmable and affirmed social/political order’ (2017, 190). Finally, it is crops up in longstanding debates about the effects of religious establishment on minority faith communities and atheists (e.g. Brudney 2005). In this paper I call into question the priority these different arguments give to the task of reducing or even eliminating alienation. The argument I develop proceeds in two stages. First, I cast doubt on connections drawn by these authors between the subjective experience of alienation and the solutions to it they recommend, such as self-government rights for national minorities and religious disestablishment. In particular, I suggest that their arguments can be more effectively reconstructed by appealing to something that resembles, but is not quite the same as, alienation. Second, I also argue that alienation need not be an obstacle to a person’s enjoyment of the full value of their citizenship, and that it can even serve as the basis for a distinctive kind of civic virtue. Brudney, Daniel (2005) ‘Non-coercive establishment’, Political Theory 33: 812-39 Lu, Catherine (2017) Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge University Press) Stilz, Anna (2019) Territorial Sovereignty (Oxford University Press)