Conceiving Citizenship in the Cases of Political Turmoil: The Continuities and Discontinuities in Weber’s and Arendt’s Approach

Recent years have seen a rise in the re-theorization of citizenship, often because of the complex dynamics of globalization, securitization, and precarity under neoliberalism which have produced conflict and political turmoil. How does one theorize citizenship in these times? Perhaps an examination of Weber and Arendt can be insightful since both scholars have historically operated in moments of rupture. Max Weber had voiced against the partaking of his country in aggressive foreign policy but he himself couldn’t evade the devastations of the First World War. Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, experienced the Second World War and studied the conditions that gave rise to totalitarianism and stressed the Kantian power of judgement. Furthermore, both have experienced the centralization of state power in the hands of few and imagined power and action in a post-conflict and post-war situation. The purpose of this research is to settle and spot the continuities and discontinuities of the concept of ‘citizenship’ in the theories of Weber and Arendt to examine the extent to which we can learn modern articulations of citizenship. To this purpose, this research aims to answer the question of ‘how citizenship was conceived and received during times of political turmoil?’ How did these two writers construct the concept of citizenship? What sorts of philosophical assumptions were at work in their constructions? In addition to these, their construction of the citizenship concept will be settled in a historical context. The research contends that both writers assume ‘citizen’ to be a free individual and this freedom of the individual can be realized through a ‘responsibility ethic’ at its extreme degree. The performative turn within citizenship must account for the responsibility ethic in relation to the multiplicities of actions, actors, choices, orientations to engage in politically turbulent times critically and reflectively.