Elena on this blog

More people are visiting this blog lately, maybe it is because I have collected such interesting material from different writers. Please be well aware that none of this writers have published here on their own accord, almost all the posts have been published by me. I try to give the links on the internet where I take them from but sometimes I forget, still, I think you can just find those links by clicking on the posts themselves.

Participation is welcome, I just hope that if you do, you can concentrate on the subject and not on me personally which is what people who don't agree with something tend to do. We must be able to hold each other with love and decency even when we disagree about everything. Only that would make us civilized enough.

John Pilger, Julian Assange and B. Jonsdottir all in one day! I must be getting lucky!

It’s a pleasure for me to start finding people talking about the things that I’ve been trying to explore since I left the Fellowship cult. I don’t seem to be able to reproduce this text here so it must be read there for now.

http://www.ssrc.org/staff/president/ReligionSecularismandPublicReason.pdf

John Pilger on The War you don’t see

http://mikephilbin.blogspot.com/2010/06/john-pilger-war-you-dont-see.html

A wonderful debate on freedom of speech.

http://mikephilbin.blogspot.com/2010/06/julian-assange-alde-seminar-on-self.html

It’s very beautiful to find these people after all this time blogging about such things without others willing to support or dialogue about it and attacking and mocking me for it. Times are changing!

http://joyb.blogspot.com/
The 21st century will be the century of the common people – the century of YOU of US

The ideologies of the old school of politics, media, monetary systems, corporations , and all known structures are in a state of transformation. They are crumbling. Now is the time for fundamental change on all levels, we have to seize this moment. Because this is THE moment.

It is rare that generations and so many individuals get such an opportunity to transform the world as we know it. The big question is how do we transform it? Lets start by turning the pyramid of power upside down.

It is obvious that we are running out of planet, many people have lost the vital connection to our environment, most of humanity doesn’t comprehend cause and effect of lack of sustainability anymore and many of us feel lost, displaced and lonely. All the structures we thought would take care of us, be it systems, ideologies, religion, politics or institutions are failing. Big time!

To follow my intuition as a politician makes a lot more sense to me then the rivalry and manipulations of left or right ideology. The right and wrong ideology of the old world has simply outgrown itself. No longer do we have strong parliaments with a direct link between the general public and decision maker. We have so called professional politicians that are far removed from the reality most of us live in.

Parties and politicians are often in an unhealthy marriage with corporations and corruption is thriving in the political arena all over the world. Many governments and politicians talk about transparency yet the process of politics and laws is shredded in secrecy.

When everything collapsed in Iceland in 2008 I sensed that within this crises was to be found an incredible opportunity for change. Because of that I helped create a political movement February 2009. Its chief agenda was to bring forth democratic reform, such as people being able to call for national referendum and sever the ties between corporations and politics.
In order for profound change to be possible those of us inside parliament have to behave like activists by changing the traditions and revealing the unwritten rules of power.

We are creating a haven for freedom of information in Iceland. Information will set you free and thus it should be free to access by everyone. We went on a quest to find all the best possible laws from around the world that ensure freedom of expression, information and speech. By basing our laws on legislation that has already proven to be strong enough to withstand attacks from those that want us to live in a world with less flow of information about the darker side of politics, international corporations, war and oppression.

Information doesn’t have any borders any more. We live in a world where the super powers want to put global censorship laws on the Internet. We have to be a step ahead of them.

I joined forces with Wikileaks because I feel it is so incredible important that there are places in our world where whistleblowers and sources can feel save to drop important documents that governments and corporations want to hide from us.

Immi will make it possible for investigative journalists from around the world publish their stories if they are under treat to be placed under gag orders in their own countries, everyone should have free access to information, in our world there should be no gag orders, no prior restriction. Immi will provide a shield against that.

We should have a haven for those that are willing to risk their lives to blog or write news about things in their own world, even if we might not be able to save them from the risk they take, we could at least make sure that their stories will not be taken down from the internet, no matter what.

My hope is that immi will transform into the International modern media initiative, because everyday the freedoms we want to protect with it are eroding at an alarming rate. Here in Italy you are witnessing the end of the freedom of media with a new set of laws called legge bavaglio. There is no copyright on immi. Use it now! Without freedom of information, you don’t really have democracy but dictatorship with many heads.

The 21st century will be the age of us, the common people, where we will understand that in order to live in the reality we dream of, we have to participate and help co-create that reality.

I strongly encourage you to join this incredible Movement Beppe Grillo has co-created, run for office, be part of this opportunity of change. If I could become an MP in the Icelandic parliament, anyone can become a member of parliament.

Here is our first task: If there is something we have to make sure stays under the guardianship of nations not corporations then it is the following, water companies, energy companies, social welfare, education and health systems.

We have made everything so complex and grand, perhaps it is time to return to more simple ways, more self sustainable ways, we can do that by learning from each other, by helping each other locally and globally and by remembering that we as individuals can change the world, and now is the time to step forward – take on that challenge and be the change maker. Don’t expect others to do it, your time has arrived to make a difference!

A year and a half ago, I was temporary unemployed, single parent with the simple goal of figuring out how I as an individual could help create a sustainable future for the next generations. Needless to say: no one really believed I could be where I am today. Yet it is not a Cinderella story but a story I co-created with my society.

Most people have seen that left and right politics doesn’t have any meaning anymore. To create political movement based on common agenda of pressing issues of basic human rights and democratic reform is so important right now.

In order for the common people like us to co-create our society we have to have the democratic tools to do that. People need to get into parliaments to change the laws so we all can have the power that is rightfully ours, to impact our society and apply real pressure on those in power to work for us, not the elite.

M political movements chief aim has been to inspire ordinary people to take on political responsibilities. We don’t want people with political training, we don’t want professional politicians and we above everything else don’t want to be a political party. And remember no matter what they will tell you: power corrupts and disconnects people from the reality other citizens live in.

We created the Movement 8 weeks before elections, we had no money, and no one knew us, yet we got more then 7% of the vote at the general elections in 2009. I hope to see the same sort of numbers for your Movement in the 2010 elections.

One of the reasons why it is so important for groups to get representatives into places of power, is that it is a lot easier to get media attention on your causes, and it is handy to be able to confront or talk with ministers and other mps about important issues without delay.

When I was working as an activist one of the hardest challenges was to get the attention from both the media and the people in power to the cause, getting some changes implemented was nearly impossible. Now that I am getting a better understanding on how things work within the legislative body I have much better chance to help other activists and the general public to get attention and even legislative changes and resolutions on issues they are concerned about.

What might seem impossible now might be quite possible tomorrow because we are experiencing very rapid changes on all levels. So I encourage you to start to make the blueprint for the future you want to live in, to be passionate about your cause and to believe that everything is possible, today failings might turn into tomorrows successes.

But the most important part is if you have a chance to work within the belly of the beast to not become like them but to listen to your heart, to listen to your intuition and to be impeccable with your word. And finally not care at all if you loose that place of power.

Thank you all the people of the Movement in Italy – I know I am experiencing a truly historical moment here today. Thank you all who dare to be part of this massive movement of transformation of politics.

Craig Calhoun Religion, secularism and Public reason

It's a pleasure for me to find articles like the following in which the question of religion and the problems that we are facing are tread on.

file:///var/folders/bV/bVvO33opEz4w-3WiEQgS6++++TM/-Tmp-/WebKitPDFs-eLQegc/D3qjd4-ReligionSecularismandPublicReason.pdf

Reconceiving the secular and the practice of the liberal arts posted by Jonathon Kahn

Secularity and the liberal arts:

Reconceiving the secular and the practice of the liberal arts

posted by Jonathon Kahn

with Paul MacDonald, Ian Oliver, and Sam Speers

There’s nothing like a Great Recession to set off a storm of conversation about the nature of liberal arts education. Sites such as The Chronicle of Higher Education’s and The New York Times’ have conducted vigorous and multifaceted debates about whether students can afford to “indulge” in a “non-vocational” undergraduate education: an education where students prioritize what interests them in the here-and-now, regardless of whether these interests can obviously be “monetized” (as the phrase goes) immediately upon graduation. Varied defenders, such asDavid Brooks, Martha Nussbaum, and Michael Roth, emphasize the palpable and practical value of a liberal arts education, urging us to think more critically about how a broad and searching education can indeed yield immediate and obvious effects—economic, social, and political—even if these do not come with direct-deposit six figure bonuses.

To these defenses of liberal arts education, we would like to add our own voices. Between 2006-2009, with the support of the Teagle Foundation, four self-identifying secular liberal arts campuses—Bucknell University and Macalester, Vassar, and Williams Colleges—engaged in a project, “Secularity and the Liberal Arts,” that tried to get at the purpose and nature of liberal arts education by asking what it means for a liberal arts campus to unabashedly call its practices “secular.” Is there a way, we wondered, that by spending some time thinking critically and honestly about this crucial term—one that ostensibly governs our practices—we might get a better handle on the nature of liberal arts education?

From the start, this project was motivated by the tremendous reevaluation that the notion of the “secular” has undergone over the last two decades. It is now well acknowledged that the American academy, at least from the standpoint of theory, has been in a full-blown period of recovery from the dominance of the secularization thesis. One of the remarkable things about this conversation has been the tremendous variety of theorists—of different political and religious convictions—who have come to agree on one thing: that it is both philosophically incoherent and phenomenologically inaccurate to posit a secular scrubbed free of religion and committed to a neutral and rational public discourse. On this, Stanley Hauerwas, Jeff Stout, William Connolly, Wendy Brown, John Milbank, Saba Mahmood, and Charles Taylor (to name just a few) all unite.

Our “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” group wondered whether, or how, these theoretical moves had made their way onto our campuses.  Did the practices and ways of liberal arts life reflect the theoretical work that has been done of late on the secular? We suspected that life on liberal arts campuses, both in and out of class, did not reflect this profound eclipse of the secularization thesis. Our institutions have long valued a notion of the secular that limits and restricts religious expression in order, ostensibly, to promote tolerance and critical thought, to sustain democratic institutions, and to foster civic engagement. We suspected that our campuses’ underlying commitments to critical thought, tolerance, and political engagement were actually creating a public discourse that carefully polices the types of rhetoric and reasons allowed into play. Time and again, our reading group conversations as well as the qualitative research we conducted confirmed that students and faculty feel compelled to drop their religious commitments in many public spaces on campus: certainly at the classroom door, but also in places ostensibly more “private,” such as dorm life, and even in casual conversation. Indeed, at the start we encountered stiff resistance to the very idea that these discursive boundaries might be policed less rigorously; many faculty members and students have grown comfortable with hard-line—if under-articulated—secularist assumptions, which restrict the free airing of religoius commitments. After all, our colleagues reminded us, such assumptions are historically responsible for more good than bad—say, a great deal of intellectual freedom and iconoclasm—and remain, if flawed, the best available model. Did we not recognize our campuses’ secular self-identification as a hard-won accomplishment? What had changed, some of our colleagues wanted to know, that this accomplishment now needs to be challenged?

At the same time, religious groups also resisted our work because they felt that any conversation about the secular represented the promotion of a staunch secularism. For them, the very word was horribly tainted (think, for example, of Pope Benedict’s use of the term), and these religionists could not see any way that talking about the secular might prove helpful to them. Did we not see, then, following George Marsden et al., that the academy has successfully established secularism as its norm, and that it is not likely to give up this ground?

If, at first, asking questions about both the strengths and limits of our secular assumptions elicited anxious responses from secularists and religionists alike, over time we built trust by focusing on student learning. We wanted to consider whether these types of uncritical assumptions about the secular were stripping some students and faculty of fundamental aspects of their identities—in particular, their religious identities. We were moved to ask, what would campus life—both in and out of class—look like if these secularist assumptions were dropped? (For an account of the project in toto, see the group’s White Paper as well as “Varieties of Secular Experience,” a November 2008 conference headlined by Princeton Professor Jeffrey Stout’s keynote address, “Secular not Secularist,” and Swarthmore College President Rebecca Chopp’s lecture, “Secularity, Meaning and the Liberal Arts.”)

For liberal arts colleges, the stakes of this question are important. The mission of liberal arts education is not simply the conveyance of certain bodies of information or technical skills that are useful in a market economy. Liberal arts colleges understand themselves as places that promote education as a way for students to consider larger questions of meaning and value. Liberal arts colleges are places where students are not thought naïve to ask so-called big questions: “What is the meaning of my life?” “How do I understand death?” “Does evil exist?” “What are my obligations to my neighbor, my country, my world?” And finally, “How might my education—in whatever field I study—help me assimilate these questions?” We were struck by the way that considerations of the secular had the profound effect of renewing discussions of what might be called the deeper purposes of liberal arts education. Talk about the secular in general quickly turned into much more specific talk about what liberal arts colleges are for and how they are to serve their purposes.

Is a liberal arts education no longer secular when it allows this sort of deep commitment into public view and discussion? That depends on what is meant by the secular. What our project calls for is a revaluedconcept of the secular and secularity. The notion of secularity that emerges from “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” rejects the Enlightenment conception of universal reason and the idea that religion is a discourse that should be subject to special rules restricting its expression. Rather, it encourages the expression of views guided or governed by religious commitments. To be sure, liberal arts colleges are not going to pick up the mantle of any particular set of religious commitments. Nevertheless, under this version of the secular, it is reasonable to be religious. In short, the notion of secularity that emerges from our project is at odds with secularism conventionally or commonly understood.

Our notion of the secular has been heavily influenced by Stout’s understanding of secularization as the emergence of a discursive condition in which “the tendency of the people participating [is not] to relinquish their religious beliefs or to refrain from employing them as reasons,” but in which, rather, “participants [. . .] are not in a position to take for granted that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions they are.” On these terms, secular institutions such as liberal arts campuses would excel at anticipating and navigating differences among their citizens. What Stout means by “secular, not secularist,” we suggest, is just this. A secularist seeks to rid democratically and pedagogically orientated spaces (e.g., campuses and classrooms) of religious commitments in the pursuit of arrogating authoritative  forms of knowledge. Someone who possesses a revauled understanding of the secular as a discursive condition and practice seeks knowledge that helps us, as Stanley Hauerwas describes, “to act wisely in a context of conflict, ambiguity, and change.” When the authority of knowledge is less important than the things that can be done with knowledge (i.e., explicate its logic, argue with it, follow its implications, explore motivations for holding it, and reflect on how it shapes moral formation), the secular becomes a discussion between religious and non-religious citizens who are acutely aware that the demands of secularized democratic life require an extraordinary balance between cherishing one’s own convictions and holding to the awareness that these same cherished convictions are contestable, and that they may at times act as a bludgeon against other democratic citizens. A further type of knowledge emerges in this secular: a self-critical consideration of how one’s own commitments might be heard by citizens with differing ones, a knowledge required for acting compassionately, civilly, and democratically.

The result of our work led us to the following claims: When a liberal arts education is framed in terms of questions about life’s purposes, students express an unmistakable pent-up desire to introduce deep commitments, including religious ones, into public arenas, including the classroom. In turn, liberal arts colleges work best and allow students to become who they are when students are afforded the room to search and interrogate their commitments—especially their religious commitments—in public ways. The fear and, as the social scientific work of the group found, the reality is that liberal arts colleges are failing this mission insofar as students and faculty feel that when they step onto liberal arts campuses they have to bracket or repress just the sort of deep commitments, religious or otherwise, that might be crucial to addressing these sorts of questions.

What we also found, however, is that students and faculty are deeply unsure of how to express deep commitments more freely and fully. Confusion, uncertainty, and even hostility here remain the norm. What appeared glaringly conspicuous to us is the lack, across academic fields, of adequate models and examples of constructive exchange between conflicting deep commitments. Beyond flatly making room for the airing of these views (in the name of a notion of tolerance), faculty and students alike were perplexed by how to substantively engage with and learn from deep commitments different from their own.

One critical effect of this revalued notion of the secular is that it disrupts the dominant metaphor of “space” that is commonly used to talk about the secular. During the November 2008 conference, Bob Connor (whose essay, “The Right Time for Asking Big Questions” breathed life into many of our working groups) observed that spaces are conventionally referred to as secular (or not), and that when a space (such as a classroom) is normatively termed secular, it shuts down conversation that dwells upon deeper commitments. It seems clear to us that the space metaphor is tied to secularist tendencies; spaces are secular to the degree that they conform to a set of norms restricting free expression. But when the epistemological rules are relaxed, the metaphor changes. The secular becomes a type of conversation or discussion occurring in a wide range of venues. In other words, revaluing the secular turns the focus away from where certain discussions are allowed to happen (a secularist tendency) and, more substantively, toward the difficulties of the discussion itself.

Indeed, here is where work remains. With this revalued understanding of the secular—now properly understood as a set of discursive practices operating among differing a/theological perspectives—lots of questions remain. Our understanding of how to conduct these discursive practices is rudimentary at best; most of us lack the experience. Some of us worry that a more open-ended, free-wheeling notion of the secular creates a mess that we do not know how to clean up. Are our liberal arts institutions equipped to meet the demands of this notion of the secular? Have our institutions adequately reflected on questions about what a liberal arts education is for and how they are to best serve those purposes? More, are there limitations to this model of secular education? One of the stock criticisms of secularism is that it doesn’t understand the ways in which it wields power. We thus also need to think critically about the ways in which our suggested secular traffics in power. The tendency is to think that, because our understanding of the secular is more democratic than secularism (in that it invites more views into play), it is somehow innocent of “sins” or problems. This seems unlikely. In the end, all of us remain confident that these natural questions and concerns should not hold us back from proceeding and seeking (in our own small way) to reshape the truncated discursive practices that currently define the practice of liberal arts education on most liberal arts campuses.

Thus, the next steps in our program: Last fall, we four members of “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” felt a great desire to take the conversation, its readings, and our distinctive point of view to other liberal arts colleges and universities. With continued support from the Teagle Foundation, we developed a one-day workshop, “Reconceiving the Secular and the Liberal Arts,” to take on the road, as it were, to other liberal arts colleges and universities.  The workshop would introduce our revised secular ideal and begin to interrogate what this ideal might mean for the practice of liberal arts education. Like the first introductions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and culture as aspects of student learning, we insisted that redefining secularity as a flexible ideal and diverse set of practices would help campuses better reflect their increasingly cosmopolitan character.

Judging from the response to our call for applications, it seems that liberal arts campuses are ready for and deeply interested in this conversation. We received fifteen applications from a remarkably diverse set of institutions. Some were religiously affiliated, some were not; they hailed from all corners of the country and ranged from large universities to small colleges. The point is that there seems to be a strong demand in our modern moment to address this set of questions about the role and place of religion in the ostensibly public life of liberal arts education. More, given the diverse set of schools that responded to our workshop, there is clearly a demand for a conversation that challenges conventional notions of the secular. Schools with historically different ways of structuring the secular and the religious are eager to reach out to each other.

During the fall of 2010, we will visit seven of these institutions to conduct our workshop. We’ve invited four more members of our original “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” project and divided ourselves into teams of two, each comprising one faculty member and one religious life representative, to conduct these learning-based conversations on reconceiving the secular and the liberal arts.

We cannot emphasize enough the notion of “learning” here. We will travel to these campuses pretty confident about how we have come to revamp the secular, but we are genuinely uncertain and seeking to learn how this notion of the secular will play out in different liberal arts settings. We feel like we’ve cleared the brush away enough that having this new conversation about the secular is possible. But how this conversation will go and what it will lead to as yet remain unknown.

To us, “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” and the response to our current workshop, “Reconceiving the Secular and the Liberal Arts,” uncover vacant and fertile ground for a conversation about religion and the secular other than the rancorous and well-worn debate between “wall of separation” secularists and political theologians—largely Christian ones—who want to turn America into a theocratic state. Unlike these antagonists, we don’t offer one set of substantive norms for being an American citizen. Believe in religion, small-government, taxes, same-sex marriage, or not. The goal of our project is to develop better models of how citizens in a democracy can engage with their counterparts despite deep and abiding differences. Our final conceit, in other words, is this: Reconceiving the secular can lead to reconceiving the practices of citizenry. That these conversations are beginning to happen in thoughtful and inventive ways on liberal arts campuses only speaks to the enduring practical value of liberal arts education.

Calhoun, Craig. Nations Matter: book review

34 

Calhoun, Craig. Nations Matter: 

Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan 

Dream. New York: Routledge, 2007. 

Nations Matter is not Craig Calhoun’s 

most rigorous and comprehensive state- 

ment on nationalism (his 1997 book 

Nationalism is a better source on this 

topic); nor is Nations Matter Calhoun’s 

most complete treatise on cosmopoli- 

tanism (for that we will have to wait for 

his forthcoming Cosmopolitanism and 

Belonging). But Nations Matter holds 

many treasures for thinking about citi- 

zenship in the age of globalization. 

Nations Matter is a collection of previ- 

ously published essays, each one pitched 

to a slightly different audience. The 

common thread is that all are intended 

to sway liberal-leaning audiences to real- 

ize the danger of a cosmopolitan fantasy 

that denies the historical, and current, 

importance of nations and nationalism. 

Calhoun is primarily concerned here 

with the often-overlooked link between 

nationalism and liberalism. According to 

Calhoun, history proves that nationalism 

has often served to promote the establish- 

ment of democratic institutions, as well 

as the equitable distribution of resources. 

He further argues that the notion of 

international cooperation makes little 

sense in the absence of strong nations. 

The cosmopolitan dream of transcend- 

ing nationalism is, for Calhoun, a fanta- 

sy. He believes that nations matter more 

than ever in the age of globalization. 

Some critics will assume that this 

book is not worth reading due to the 

repetitive nature of its genre—a collec- 

tion of previously published essays on 

a hot topic. However, it is the impor- 

tance of the topic and the trajectory of 

Calhoun’s research agenda that warrant 

giving this book special attention. In 

short, Calhoun is onto something, even 

if his conclusions feel incomplete. His 

historically informed view of nationalism 

combined with his impressive knowledge 

of current trends in globalization have 

led him to some keen observations about 

why the liberal, cosmopolitan dream is 

inadequate as an empirical description 

and as a political ideal. But Calhoun is 

not entirely pessimistic. Although he 

warns that transcending nationalism is 

impossible, he believes that “nationalism 

helps locate an experience of belonging 

in a world of global flows and fears” (1). 

For Calhoun, nationalism is a source of 

solidarity that is crucial for democracy 

and for resisting neo-liberal versions of 

globalization. He wants well-intentioned 

liberals to stop focusing on what is wrong 

with nationalism—which he admits is 

responsible for some horrific historical 

events—and instead notice the transfor- 

mative potential of nationalism. 

Calhoun is at his best when he explores 

the relationship between cultural identity 

and forms of belonging. Nationalisms 

are better thought of as having family 

resemblances, rather than conforming to 

an essentialist definition. Nationalism, as 

a discourse, is a product of modernity, 

meaning the last three hundred years. 

Ideas about the individuation of the per- 

son and the nation are historically emer- 

gent and linked phenomena that form 

the social foundations for nationalism. 

Calhoun never loses track of the fact 

that cultural identity is a moving object 

of analysis and that nationalism is a rhe- 

Book RevIeW

35 

BOOK REVIEW 

torical tool of identity production. At the 

same time, he refers to national identity 

as a Durkheimian social fact that shapes 

individuals; thus, identity is not a matter 

of completely free choice. 

In chapter 5, “Nationalism, Political 

Community, and the Representation 

of Society: Or, Why Feeling at Home 

Is Not a Substitute for Public Space,” 

Calhoun draws our attention to the rela- 

tionship between modes of belonging 

and political participation. He shrewdly 

observes that nationalist claims to eth- 

nic or cultural similarity, on one hand, 

and common citizenship, on the other, 

ignore a crucial element that constitutes 

political community. These dichotomous 

perspectives focus on the continuity 

of nations and do not explain cultural 

reproduction or change. Whether claims 

to nationhood are based in ancient eth- 

nicity (the paradigmatic example being 

Germany) or an historical moment that 

constitutionally guarantees rights and 

obligations (the paradigmatic example 

being France), they underestimate the 

importance of institutions, networks, 

and movements that bring people 

together across diversity within nations. 

Affective attachments between concrete 

persons differ qualitatively from indi- 

vidual attachments to large-scale cultural 

categories, such as nations. Furthermore, 

affective attachments based on similarity 

do not necessarily create the foundations 

for navigating difference. 

Calhoun warns that social scientists 

are guilty of conflating nation and soci- 

ety conceptually, a mistake he sees as 

having political consequences. He argues 

that conflating nation with society leads 

to a failure to understand citizenship. 

According to Calhoun: 

Debates on nationality and 

citizenship need to problem- 

atize not only the contrast 

among territorial, civic, and 

ethnic models, and the ques- 

tions of how to understand 

immigrants, minorities, and 

aboriginal populations, but 

also the very way in which 

a rhetoric of nations and 

nationalism shapes the rep- 

resentation of political com- 

munity. 

Membership in a society 

is an issue of social solidarity 

and cultural identity as well as 

legally constructed state citi- 

zenship.  (104–5) 

Calhoun goes on to argue that broad- 

ening our understanding of citizenship 

requires attention to distinctions among 

different modes of social belonging. This 

is his most intriguing idea—that citizen- 

ship can serve as a safeguard against the 

darker sides of ethnicity and national-

THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2008 

36 

ism. Citizenship, then, becomes a meso- 

level theoretical tool (or, if you prefer, 

a metaphorical tool) for imagining the 

space between the demands of a dense 

web of local networks (for example, kin 

groups) and the cultural conformity 

associated with nationalism. Calhoun’s 

conception of public space—a space of 

discourse but also a space in which legal 

entitlements can be enforced—mediates 

between a diversity of interpersonal rela- 

tions and large-scale cultural categories. 

Thus, Calhoun makes the case in chap- 

ter 5 for the creation of public space, a 

space for engaging in discourse, perhaps 

even critical-rational discourse as Jürgen 

Habermas suggests, but also something 

beyond critical-rational discourse— 

a space to make culture and even to 

remake identities. 

Chapter 6, “Inventing the Opposition 

of Ethnic and Civic Nationalism: Hans 

Kohn and The Idea of Nationalism,” is 

the most impressive accomplishment of 

this volume. Calhoun critically examines 

the accepted notions of ethnic and civic 

nationalism by revisiting Hans Kohn’s 

1944 work, The Idea of Nationalism. He 

makes a compelling case for reinterpret- 

ing Kohn for contemporary audiences. 

Calhoun admires Kohn’s optimism about 

nationalism and his insistence about its 

importance for liberalism. For Kohn, 

liberal nationalism could serve as a valu- 

able step on the path to cosmopolitan 

integration. Calhoun finds this convic- 

tion remarkable in the context of 1940s’ 

politics—the rise of the Nazis, World 

War II, the threat of National Socialism, 

events that tended to highlight the evil 

side of nationalism. Calhoun sees Kohn’s 

sustained, and largely positive, attention 

to nationalism as holding valuable les- 

sons for contemporary liberals: 

Many have rejected nation- 

alism as a fundamentally 

illiberal imposition of the col- 

lectivity over the individual, 

of ethnic loyalty over human 

rights, and of tradition over 

reason. And even more com- 

monly, liberalism has swept its 

own tacit reliance on nation- 

alist thinking under the car- 

pet, failing to analyze why the 

population of any one country 

belonged there and why the 

state was entitled to keep oth- 

ers out. Liberalism generally 

took up questions about how 

to advance justice and liberty 

within “societies,” didn’t much 

examine what made a society 

a society, and (except when 

prodded by war) was vague 

on the relationship between 

a world of such distinct soci- 

eties and sovereign states and 

the rights of individuals in the 

world as a whole. These issues 

have come to the fore recently 

in response to globalization, 

with many liberals struggling 

with national identities and 

state boundaries and pro- 

claiming adherence to a more 

cosmopolitan ideal.  (126–7) 

Calhoun admits that The Idea of 

Nationalism has influenced its readers 

most by contrasting ethnic nationalism 

(read: irrational and particularistic) with 

civic nationalism (read: rational and uni- 

versalistic). However, he instead chooses 

to reinterpret it with an eye towards 

the insights that it offers about the link 

between nationalism and liberalism. In 

Calhoun’s eyes, Kohn was ahead of the 

wave of postwar modernization projects. 

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BOOK REVIEW 

Calhoun traces this insight to Kohn’s 

unlikely synthesis of values from cultural 

Zionism with Enlightenment liberalism. 

Kohn’s belief in the spiritual foundations 

of democracy indeed transcends the tra- 

ditional dualism inherent in contrasting 

ethnic with civic nationalism. This insight 

is undoubtedly a product of Kohn’s 

remarkable biography, which Calhoun 

weaves nicely throughout chapter 6. 

Nations Matter can be read as a 

defense of nationalism, a critique of lib- 

eral cosmopolitanism, or, in my view, an 

insightful look at citizenship today. He 

insists that a failure to appreciate the 

power of nations to motivate collective 

responsibility through solidarity will lead 

to unintended pernicious politics. He 

then begins to point towards citizenship 

and the creation of public space as the 

hopeful antidote for liberal pipe dreams. 

We can anticipate that Calhoun will con- 

tinue to explore the relationship between 

modes of belonging and political partici- 

pation and that he will continue to sup- 

ply us with nuanced observations about 

the emergence of globalization. For stu- 

dents of citizenship, Calhoun is a man 

to watch. 

Regina Smardon is an associate fellow 

at the Institute for Advanced Studies in 

Culture. She completed her Ph.D. in soci- 

ology at the University of Pennsylvania and 

is currently working on a book based on her 

fieldwork in a small Appalachian commu- 

nity that explores the meaning of disability 

and citizenship.