The dispositions of ‘Good’ citizenship: Character, symbolic power and disinterest

Abstract

The problems of determining citizenly competence and finding an appropriate balance between public and private life have increasingly organized intellectual debate in civil society. Although civic republicans and liberals give different answers to these problems, they both claim that ‘character’ should be a necessary foundation for good citizenship. This article identifies a tension between character's analytical status as a category of explanation and its normative status as a moral category. Although most civic republicans and liberals recognize that the concept of character is socially constructed, the concept typically appears as a pre-political good whose social origins are hypostatized or forgotten. This article uses the sociological insights of Pierre Bourdieu in order to explain how character simultaneously appears as a social construct and as a moral good by exploring how the concept is mobilized by civic republicans and liberals as a solution to the problem of ‘good’ citizenship. The goal of the article is three-fold: first, to use Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field and symbolic power to clarify the analytical and normative aspects of the concept of character and its relation to citizenship and civil society; second, to demonstrate how power shapes and conditions character formation in civil society; and third, to offer an account of the practical means by which character is promoted by civic republicans and liberals as a solution to the challenges facing civil society.