Active Citizenship Reviving and Extending Democratic Practices

Abstract

Contending that our current liberal understanding of politics is exclusive and unresponsive, this paper explores the possibilities for reviving and extending democratic practices through a renewed understanding of citizenship. In direct opposition to the passive and individualistic theory of citizenship presented in the work of John Rawls, a theory of active citizenship is retrieved through a critical synthesis of the unique works of Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe. Active citizenship is presented as a practice that is anti-foundational, anti-essentialist, conditioned by pluralism and antagonism, and necessarily active. This paper was initially part of a larger project that explored how active citizenship would necessarily call into question our practice of environmental politics, particularly interrogating environmentalism's reliance on ecology and the ontological and epistemological privileges granted to Western science, arguing that democratizing environmentalism requires constructing it primarily as an ethical-political dilemma rather than a managerial-technological one.