Abstract
This article discusses the challenges and opportunities of turning to the pre-modern world to address contemporary problems. To do so it compares Maarten Prak’s approach to practical citizenship in Citizens without nations with Jurgen Habermas’s infamous evocation of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’. While different in important respects – not least in terms of the kind of historical citizenship they recover and the methods by which they do it – Prak and Habermas nevertheless share an important similarity. This is that both are quite idealistic, in an aspirational sense, about how their pre-modern forms of citizenship can benefit and improve the modern world. This sense of idealism can be contrasted with Max Weber’s preference for excavating ideal types that described, for better or worse, the normative values and behaviours of particular cultures in the past. This response then outlines the normative practices of Prak’s citizenship and asks whether they are really commensurate with modern life.
Highlights
This article discusses the challenges and opportunities of turning to the pre-modern world to address contemporary problems
Part II tells four stories of pre-modern European citizenship in broadly chronological order – the rise and fall of the Italian city states, the federalised urbanism of the Dutch republic, the synergy between cities and the state in eighteenth-century England, and the corresponding lack of complementarity between citizens and states in continental Europe. These stories are informed by what Prak takes to be the key determinant on the wider efficacy of urban citizenship: namely its relationship – or not – with the coordinating and distributive power of political states
The conclusions are tentative, Prak feels able to argue that it is possible to discern equivalent practices of citizenship beyond Europe before the nineteenth century. This is contra Max Weber, who took western urban citizenship to be a source of European exceptionalism
Summary
On the other hand, ‘ideal types’ for Weber were not ideal in an evaluative or aspirational sense; rather, for better or (more often) for worse, they were culturally and socially normative for historical actors whose attitudes and behaviour were informed by the structures, values, and practices so described in place and time.
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