The ‘Impossible’ Community of the Citizens: Past and Present Problems

Abstract

In the wake of previous reflections on the antinomies of citizenship—which derive both from the tension between an ‘insurrectional’ logic of equal liberty and a ‘constitutional’ project of building a community of citizens, and more recently from the conflict between (national) social citizenship and neoliberal forms of global governance—this paper focuses on problems of ‘representation’ and ‘agency’ linked to the idea of democratizing democracy itself. It will try in this sense to propose a more specific determination to the idea of an unfinished, although contingent, history of citizenship in the modern world.