A review of Susan D. Collins' Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship

Susan Collins seeks a renewed conception of citizenship through an investigation of Aristotle's political philosophy. This is necessary, she argues, because liberal political theory has failed to reckon with the fact that the human good has an unavoidable political dimension. Liberal theorists often flee from the fact that every political community "requires specific virtues, molds characters, and shapes its citizens' vision of the good" (2). Their deferral of the question, "What is good for us to be and do?" leads not merely to a kind of self-righteous blindness to the ways in which liberalism shapes the public and private lives of its citizens. It also eviscerates liberalism's ability to respond to the challenge of "creedal and salvationist religions" (166) which in their more vociferous forms argue that liberalism is morally bankrupt. So we need a more capacious understanding of the seriousness and nobility of citizenship, along with a sense of its proper limits.

The rest 

Editorial Community: Comme-un?

Kuisma Korhonen Textual Communities: Nancy, Blanchot, Derrida    

Ignaas Devisch The Sense of Being(-)with Jean-Luc Nancy    

Marie-Eve Morin Putting Community under Erasure: Derrida and Nancy on the Plurality of Singularities    

Dorota Glowacka Community and the Work of Death: Thanato-ontology in Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy    

Timothy J. Deines Bartleby the Scrivener, Immanence and the Resistance of Community    

Angela Mitropoulos and Brett Neilson Cutting Democracy’s Knot     

Paulina Tambakaki Global Community, Global Citizenship?    

Daniel H. Ortega ‘En Cada Barrio’: Timocracy, Panopticism and the Landscape of a Normalized Community    

John Paul Ricco The Surreality of Community: Frédéric Brenner’s Diaspora: Homelands in Exile    

Jake Kennedy Gins, Arakawa and the Undying Community

Petra Kuppers Community Arts Practices: Improvising Being-Together

Natalie Cherot Transnational Adoptees: Global Biopolitical Orphans or an Activist Community?

“The Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition was highly privileged to have Étienne Balibar as its Distinguished Visiting Lecturer for 2006. This research article is the text of his remarks delivered at McMaster University on 16 March 2006.”

 Link to the (pdf.) file.