Global Policy Forum

By Brunella Casalini

One of liberalism's main categories, from Rawls to Dworkin, is the idea of the person as bearer of certain fundamental rights requiring universal recognition. The tension between this universalistic aspiration of rights and the specificity of the body politic, which the concept of citizenship has embodied since its beginning in XVII century, is an issue that liberalism rarely deals with. Several among the most conscious liberal thinkers have admitted that and thus revealing liberalism's cosmopolitan and Illuministic roots in the end, there is only one justifiable community from an ethical point of view: the community of mankind (1). Nevertheless, the existence of a plurality of culturally distinct nations more often than not berefts the body politic of any theoretical underpinning and its supposed homogeneity, or its necessary degree of internal cohesion, is taken for granted. In both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, for example, Rawls imagines a close society in which you are born and die as a citizen (2) and the issue of liberty of movement is considered only as one of citizen's fundamental rights within the state. All the questions linked to the problem of inclusion and exclusion, immigration and rights of legal residents and illegal aliens living in the national territory are absent and thus left without an answer. Left unanswered also are the challenges that these problems represent for the identity of a political community that intends to defend and guarantee the person's rights consistently.

Liberal theory has not yet brought the consequences following from its main categories into account. For example, the possibility of appealing to supranational organs of justice, such as the European Court of Justice, has already transformed - according to some contemporary analysts - the old nation-state into the agent or executor of decisions taken outside the state's borders. While, at the same time, the extension of a set of fundamental rights to legal residents now taking place both in Europe and The Unites States is devaluating the meaning of the citizen's status (3).

The United States case is worth studying more than any other if we want to understand this contemporary development because it has long been considered (unjustifiably, as I will argue in what follows) either an exception to the exclusive and particularistic character of the European nation-state and an example of a liberal and inclusive political identity founded on constitutional patriotism, or because some aspects of American contemporary experience seem to anticipate the traits of a post-national citizenship. The defence of rights by an extensive and widespread judicial review today considered a model also for the European Court of Justice contributed, particularly in the constitutional jurisprudence of the last thirty years, to an almost complete equalisation of legal residents and citizens status, through the extensive application of due process and equal protection of the law. This phenomenon has been interpreted as opening the way to a process of reshuffling - if not of actual devaluation - of the functional meaning of citizenship (4).

The modern procedural republic, the fruit of liberal individualism, emphasises and defends the existence of rights considered so fundamental as to be indispensable and prior to any conception of the common good whatsoever. According to some critics of American contemporary society, this liberal trend has changed public life radically, impoverishing social ties and weakening the motivation for political participation. Faced with the current degradation of loyalties toward the state, in the last decades, liberalism s critics have shown a growing temptation to look back at the early Republic in search of an alternative to liberal thought. Thus is the appeal to the lost souls of American political tradition - Protestant, Republican, Populist and Communitarianist (5) - now common. Michael Sandel, for example, holds that Republicanism may still represent a corrective to the impoverishment of American life, while recognising the dark episodes that have riddled the history of the Republican tradition, starting with its coexistence with racism, exclusion of women and nativist hostility (6).

From this point of view, my paper has two aims. The first is to present a reconstruction of the main moments in which American citizenship has been defined. I will emphasise the plurality of civic ideals (often conflicting) that have moulded American political identity, generating lines of development contradictory to the liberal and universalistic image spread by most of the literature on the subject, e.g. Hartz, Lipset and, more recently, Schlesinger and Walzer (7). The second aim is to offer an analysis of the latest developments and the most meaningful transformations that have occurred in the second half of this century in such areas as immigration and citizenship. The comparison between the past of American citizenship and its present intends to bring to light the ambivalence of the contemporary devaluation of citizenship and at the same time to deal with the implications of resorting to the communitarian tradition. Though pointing out liberalism's indifference to the ties holding the political body's numerous members together, we cannot forget the positive, transformative strength revealed by rights talks in history as is evidence by the civil rights movement in the 60s and 70s. Rather than giving up liberalism altogether it seems worth considering as I will maintain here the possibility of reconciling liberalism and republicanism, starting over with the thought of Madison.

I Federalists, Antifederalists and the Issue of Citizenship

According to line of interpretation which sees liberalism's hegemony in American political tradition in its origins, belonging to the national community has never been relevant for American constitutionalism. Thus, in The Morality of Consent (1975), Alexander Bickel argued that "the concept of citizenship [played] only the most minimal role in the constitutional scheme ... The original Constitution presented the edifying picture of a government that bestowed rights on people and persons, and held itself out as bound by certain standards of conduct in its relations with people and persons, not with some legal construct called citizen" (8). In sharp contrast to this account, American history proves that the extension of the Constitution's formal domain was limited for a long time by the kind of answer given from time to time to the question: Who belongs to 'We the People'?

As late as the beginning of the XX century and to a smaller extent as late as the 50s and 60s, a large part of American population were deprived of the enjoyment of the most fundamental rights because of its exclusion from the status of citizenship on the basis of race, gender and census. The 1856 Supreme Court opinion Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which justice Taney maintained that blacks were not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States (9), is the saddest example of the weight given to a citizen formal legal standing. Women, on the other hand, were second-class citizens, or rather they were citizens only in a derivative way: their will was in fact subordinated, from a legal point of view, to that of their husbands. If the Revolution had demolished the patriarchal relationship between sovereign and subjects, it certainly did not impinge on the domestic sphere. Considered moral guardians of the new republic, women had none of the privileges of American citizenship: the vote, the right to hold office, eligibility to serve on juries or as judges, and, if married, the right to independent ownership of property (10) were all denied them.

Overturning Bickel's interpretation, it is possible to read the silence of the Constitution on the issue of citizenship as an important clue, as Roger M. Smith asserts (11), of the crucial role played by the citizen's formal legal status and of the constituent s necessity of coming to a compromise on such matters as slavery and the relation between state and federal citizenship. In the heated national debate of 1787 between Federalists and Antifederalists, one of the fundamental issues at dispute was the competition of diverging and conflicting civic ideals. Antifederalists granted important functions to the state in matters such as civic education and religion. They were suspicious of the constitutional clauses, in particular of Art. VI, section 3, which deprived of any public support and prevented the imposition of religious oaths for holding public offices. Henry Abbott, an Antifederalist in North Carolina, defined the secular underpinnings of the Constitution as dangerous . Indeed, he believed it encouraged Pagans, Deists, and Mahometans to hope that they could obtain office in the United States (12).

Another negative element, according to the Antifederalists, was the wanting homogeneity of a republic of such great dimensions and open borders. Their critique of the liberal immigration politics of Pennsylvania went along the following lines. Pennsylvania they observed has chosen to receive all that would come there. Let any indifferent person judge whether that state in point of morals, education, energy is equal to any of the eastern states. [which] by keeping separate from the foreign mixture, [have] acquired their present greatness in the course of a century and a half, and have preserved their religion and morals Reasons of equal weight may induce other states to keep their blood pure (13).

Antifederalists civic humanism clashed with Federalists liberal-republicanism views. For the latter, the very enlargement of the orbit and the pluralism of sects, interests and opinions would be the great advantage of the new republic in comparison to the old republic of small dimensions. The commercial republic, as envisioned by the Federalists, was more inclusive and less demanding in terms of civic virtues. The new federal state would be peaceful and industrious and would count more on citizens private virtues (such as economy, lack of indolence and frugality) than on their active participation in public life. Though the republican lexicon of both sides laid stress on public interest and the common good rather than on an individualistic conception of rights (14) resemblance between them ended there. In a civic humanism's discourse the citizen was seen to use Benjamin Rush's description - as mere public property (15). Less than private virtues, a sense of sacrifice toward the public good and the armed citizen's spirit were emphasised in Antifederalists language. It is not by chance, in fact, that we owe the introduction of the II amendment into the Bill of Rights, which was to establish the base of an armed citizenry (16), to the Antifederalists themselves. In Madison's liberal-republican view, on the other hand, prevailed the idea of a political economy of virtue, respecting the private citizen, and a conception of the republic in which justice (the defence of rights) and public good could not be separated (17). To realise this aim, the Federalist experiment focused on the enlargement of the orbit and on the choice of representatives, constituting in keeping with the aristocratic view of politics belonging to classic republicanism - a selected body of Optimates made up of independent and landed citizens, gifted with a wisdom that would allow them to resist the call of particular interests and able to dedicate their time to public life. The country s great size, by driving away the representatives from the requests of local and particularistic pressures, would make it possible, according to Madison, to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation it may well happen that the public voice pronounced by the representatives of the people will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose (18).

Nevertheless, at times, Federalists answered the Antifederalists fears about the lack of homogeneity of American population in a contradictory manner that indirectly confirms the consciousness of the difficulties posed by the nation-building process. In The Federalist Madison argued that the only way in which one could remove differences was by abolishing freedom itself, or by compelling every man to follow the same opinions, ideas and interests (19). Whereas Jay tried to deny the evidence of diversity, affirming the existence of a homogenous country and a united people, which has the same ancestors, which speaks the same language, which professes the same religion, which believe in the same political principles. A people with similar habits and traditions (20).

If in the Founding, the term nation was used with caution in order not to fan state resistance, the Federalists liberal-republican view implied a clear supremacy of national citizenship. Federalists believed that neither the check of the federal courts of justice, nor the constitutional bonds imposed on the states in such matters as currency or the prohibition on retroactive laws were sufficient to strengthen the federal government. A common monetary policy and a uniform regulation of commercial relations were necessary for the creation of a strong economic federation, and so were a public army and navy necessary as a solid bulwark against foreign countries. But they were still not enough. Madison attempted to direct the integration process toward the transformation of the central government within the national political arena, proposing to give the federal government the power of veto over state legislation and then struggling for a Bill of Rights to which it would be possible to resort to not only against federal government but also against state governments (21). Madison's failure to stem the Antifederalist hostility which some have compared to the hostility of the supporters of a Europe of States toward any federal European project (22) left undecided the problem concerning the relation between state and federal citizenship, which was to remain a part of the issue of slavery until the end of the Civil War. The consequences of these uncertainties were great, first of all due to the deep disparities among the citizens of the different states. If the first Amendment, for example, made it unconstitutional for Congress to make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, the impossibility of counting on the Bill of Rights against the infraction of the fundamental rights by the state government meant that the situation of each state was to be considered separately. Thus some states continued to impose religious tests for access to public offices, while others, such as South Carolina, kept the Protestant religion as a state religion (23).

The Constitution fixed some guiding principles with regard to the form of government the states could assume: it established that no title of nobility could be granted and in Art. IV, section four, the republican form of government for all states. The constitutional dictates rejected the monarchical form of government and all of the old noble aristocracies, but for their vagueness they gave rise to different orders of power, which as Fenimor Cooper pointed out in The American Democrat were not necessarily fit for free governments . Article IV, section II, of the Constitution maintained that The Citizen of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of citizens in several States . This clause could have left open an intervening space open to federal government's establishing a more uniform treatment of citizens of the different states. All the efforts made in the following years by African Americans appealing to the privileges and immunities clause with the aim of striking the slave states hostile and discriminatory attitudes toward them, were probably one of the major reasons why the federal courts and the Supreme Court never developed the liberal meaning of this constitutional dictate in the last century. Indeed, it clearly could have had incendiary consequences (24). The Constitution (art. I, section eight), in the end, entrusted Congress with the task of fixing the main lines of naturalisation policies. But, there were ambiguities in these matters as well: states, in fact, in observance of the federal criteria, preserved a concurring power on naturalisation legislation. This power had repercussions too often forgotten by historians. The myth of an America with open gates up to 1875 collapses if we consider the fundamental role played by the states in immigration regulation leading up to that moment, with measures such as: the ban of immigrants convicted of crime by the Europeans governments, the prohibition of geographical mobility and entry to poor immigrants or to immigrants with mental or physical handicaps, as well as other measures legislating racial subordination (25).

II Ascriptive and Consensualistic Ideals

The image of an America as the Anti-Europe, granting equality to all and refuting the old Continental feudal hierarchies, and the idea of an America as the land of freedom and asylum for all oppressed peoples promoted in works such as Common Sense by Thomas Paine or Letters from an American Farmer by Crí¨vecoeur - were attractive from a rhetorical point of view, but difficult to reconcile with the country's fears of disruption and moral degeneration. From the beginning, doubts arose about the wisdom of allowing Catholics, Jews and others to have free access to citizenship and in the subsequent course of events repeated emphasis was laid upon the dangers that could arise from the entry and welcoming of immigrants who had been living under monarchical or aristocratic forms of government, and who consequently were not held to be adequately trained in the exercise of republican virtues.

After the ratification of the Constitution, the dispute over citizenship was all but closed. Federalists and Jeffersonians were divided over the Anglophilia of the former and Francophilia of the latter and of the distance between the Federalists project of a centralised, commercial republic and the Jeffersonians preference of an agrarian, strongly decentralised republic. But this was not all. The Federalists will to strengthen the national community against the states still powerful local pressures and their fears of a possible wave of immigration from revolutionary France, which could eventually favour their political adversaries, pushed them into a hereditary conception of loyalty to the nation. Thus did they become champions of a nativist politics and suspicious of the Lockean consensual theory of citizenship with its potentially anarchical consequences. The naturalisation law enacted in 1798, which lengthened the residence requirement to fourteen years, and the Alien and Sedition Acts aimed at deporting and silencing political dissidents, were both expressions of the Federalists intention of affirming that American citizenship was a matter of birth, heritage, and natural allegiance as of choice, and that certain sorts of 'blood were more truly American than others (26).

The Jeffersonian victory and the adoption in 1802 of a new naturalisation law, which moved residence requirements for the access to citizenship back to five years, set the triumph of the rhetoric of consensus. Not the jus soli, considered as a residue of a feudal conception of citizenship by the Jeffersonian democrats, but a voluntary act of choice was placed at the very base of citizens loyalty to the state. However, we need not overestimate the effects of these transformations and their liberal and inclusive meaning. Among the reasons prompting the democrats to reject birth as a criterion for the accession to citizenship was, in fact, also the desire not to be obliged to recognise as citizens Blacks and Indians who were born in the United States (27). It is not surprising then that the consensual rhetoric had no effect on the conditions of Indians, Blacks and women. On the contrary, it even gave greater strength to justifying the exclusion of those subjects who, for their supposed natural inferiority, were not seen as able to respect and subscribe to the loyalty oath that linked the citizens to the republics. The principle of consensus did not even have any relevance in the case of the peoples of Louisiana and Mexico, who were never asked an act of assent to the political situation created by their annexation to the United States (28).

The years in which the word democracy was no more used with the negative meaning it had had during the Founding, the years of the Jacksonian democracy and of the universal male suffrage, were the same years that saw the stiffening of exclusion barriers along lines of race and gender. From Crania Americana by George Morton to the works of Josiah Nott, George R. Gliddon and Louis Agassiz, a new American school of ethnography mobilised itself for upholding the white race's supremacy with pseudo-scientific proofs (29). Classed among the inferior races were not just Blacks and Indians, but also the Chinese and Mexicans. During the Mexican War of 1848, racist arguments were advanced by democrats and their Whigs adversaries alike. If Daniel Webster, one of the major exponents of the Whig party, feared the conquest of a people inferior to the Anglo-Saxon race in culture, manners, morals and religion, Jacksonian democrats, on the other hand, saw in the annexation of Mexico a proof of the United States manifest destiny, or, in other words, a sign of their superiority over those peoples who had been subjects to the negative influence of Jesuits and Spanish despotism (30).

III The Republican Machine

Republican America inherited from the Founding Fathers the feeling of its institutions internal fragility, a feeling which periodically roused anxieties tied to with the nightmare of decadence and corruption. An action aimed at the normalising and discipline of the body politic emerged in the nineteenth century in response to these anxieties. It went further than the mere exclusion of the inferior races from citizenship. The American civic religion imposed the duty of creating subjects up to the task of that providential destiny, the signs of which had been deciphered by the first Puritans in the sublime geography of the New World, while at the same time republican theories stressed a particular emphasis on civic virtues. Both of them urged an effort to mould the American citizen, an effort that was renewed with more and more strength during each wave of immigration or each new conquest. The conversion of individuals into a republican machine (31) - imagined by Benjamin Rush in The Mode of Education Proper in a Republic (1876) - was to become the recurrent idea of the American, democratic republic in the Jacksonian era.

The birth and the diffusion of penitentiaries, almshouses, lunatic asylums, common schools and temperance societies (32) sustained particularly by the Whigs - together with the state regulation of undesired immigration, mostly consisting of penal transportation from Europe, mentally-ill or physically handicapped immigrants, were all demonstrations in different directions of the same widespread disciplining power (33). A power aiming at the discipline not only of bodies and behaviours, but also of as Tocqueville put it souls . The reason at the base of this complex and paradoxical complementarity between democratic republic and social control was singled out by Tocqueville himself in the chapter of De la démocratie en Amérique dedicated to the despotism of the majority (34), where - as Emilio Santoro observes the French philosopher underlines that, as paradoxical as it may seem, a democratic republic like the United States, which thinks of law and order as emanating from popular will, treats disobeying minorities with more severity than monarchical regimes not taking into consideration their subjects will (35). After 1830, with the creation of common schools, financed by public taxation, there was an unprecedented expansion of scholastic attendance. The educational philosophy of these schools was meaningful for the relevance it gave to the task of moulding the future republican citizen more so than the general aim of illuminating students. A school superintendent in Illinois in 1862 unequivocally stated the inspiration of the educational project standing at the base of the common schools: The chief end is to make GOOD CITIZENS. Not to make precocious scholars ... not to impart the secret of acquiring wealth ... not to qualify directly for professional success ... but simply to make good citizens" (36). Scholastic education was conceived first and foremost as moral education. A fundamental role in the transmission of moral principles was assigned to religion, to the reading of the Bible and to prayer. In the great metropolis common schools were the first means of assimilating the sons of the new immigrants into the American culture, and eradicating prejudices, manners and ties which still bound them to a different country. The interiorization of the ethics of work and sacrifice, of patriotic values and of Christian religious principles, of respect and reverence of laws constituted the recipe for the formation of individuals oriented to the new republican, capitalist and Protestant republic. Future citizens had to feel a moral duty to protect and defend American institutions, a duty that, for the more conservative, coincided with the denigration of working organisations and foreign cultures in America (37).

In those same years US penitentiaries took in a number of foreigners and first generation citizens out of proportion to native born citizens such that one may presume that the penitentiary acted as a means of socialisation, substituting public schools for those persons who slipped out of the net of the scholastic system (38). In America (and unlike) Europe, in fact, prisoners were not subject to severe corporal punishments. They were subject to an initial period of strict, solitary reclusion, which left the prisoner with the feeling of being lost, isolated and deprived of all his past social ties. Then followed a re-education phase which mostly consisted of Bible readings and then an increased desire to work resulting the from long, monotonous periods spent in loneliness and inactivity (39). The components constituting the re-education process were not different in substance from the educational principle that inspired the common schools: self-control, interiorization of community values and moral principles, a bent for sacrifice and hard work, frugality and sobriety, all of which were the very virtues required of citizens of the modern, American republic a far cry from the ancient republican virtues.

Within this politics of discipline, it is worth mentioning the general attitude toward indigence. The aim of abolishing all social distinctions and hierarchies between gentlemen and commoners, of creating, in other words, a middle-class society (40), produced a natural social contempt for the extremes of poverty and wealth, of which clearly the poor were the primary and sole victims. One of the first putative causes of poverty was located in the poor's moral failure. They were considered guilty of not being able to recover from a state of dependence that induced them to vicious behaviours such as drunkenness and laziness (41). The answer that the Jacksonian democracy gave to the problem of pauperism was twofold: the creation of institutions, the so called almshouses (42), in which the poor were segregated from healthy society, and a policy of exclusion of immigrants who were so poor as to lack means of subsistence. Until 1875, in fact, states exercised control in many ways on immigration. A control that was particularly unfair toward indigent or mentally and physically-handicapped immigrants, indeed of all persons who could become too heavy a burden on the community. They were considered a dangerous mob menacing the new continent with the contagious disease pauperism, which had already infected Old Europe. Many feared that European states were sending their lazy and intemperate subjects as well as mentally and physically disabled, to burden America (43). Masters of vessels transporting disabled or indigent immigrants or women with children without husbands were demanded security for those aliens passengers whom the town officials thought might become public charges or were obliged to pay a sum per alien passenger landed. Moreover, the poor could always be subject to deportation. These measures did not explicitly involve any ethnic discrimination, but as a matter of fact they affected, particularly during the first half of the nineteenth century, Irish who were forced to leave their country to escape famine.

Even in the frontier, which had been defined by Turner as the training ground for American democracy, things were not that different: none of the new states in the West granted Blacks and Indians political and civil rights. In Oregon and California discriminatory legislative measures were taken against Chinese immigrants, who were exploited in the hard work of building the western railroads and in agricultural labour, and who were deprived of the rights of property and even of the possibility of taking along wives and children or of marrying an American woman.

IV Myth and Reality

The Reconstruction amendments could have been a turning point in a liberal direction for American citizenship. Sanctioning the supremacy of national citizenship and forbidding states from enacting laws restricting immunities and privileges of the citizens born or naturalised in the United States, the normative content of the XIV amendment could have permitted - as was to happen in this century in the 60's a strong civil and political rights politics. Cultural and political resistance stopped all meaningful and radical changes. The separate but equal principle, asserted by the Plessy v. Ferguson sentence of 1896, was a de facto denial of the recently acquired equal citizenship of Blacks. At the same time a renewed nationalism introduced the pledge of allegiance in elementary schools (44) and a revival of doctrines inspired by Darwinian evolutionism nourished a never completely appeased racism. For the new, as for the old, ethnographic school sexism and racism were two of a kind: lower races represented the 'female type of human species, and female the 'lower race of gender as Nancy Stepan writes (45). This racist wave gave rise to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to a punitive law that involved the loss of citizenship for American women who intended to marry aliens excluded from access to the naturalisation process (46), and then to the Quota Act of 1924, which was a negative response to flux of immigration coming from eastern and southern Europe beginning in the end of the past century. Finally, during the first and second World War, legislative measures regarding naturalisation requirements reflected the same rising fears of ideological threats that had inspired the Alien and Sediction Acts in 1798. The Idea of America as the anti-Europe was again promoted as a bulwark not only against the European feudal past but also against the communist and totalitarian danger. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, with its ban on communists and supporters of world communism, saw the attenuation of the ethnic connotation of aliens, and the rise of its prevalently ideological characterisation.

The image of the melting pot, of a pluralistic and united society, in spite of ethnic and racial differences, needs to be revised by the light of recent historical studies. It would be just as proper to speak of different forms of pluralism experienced by the various ethnic and racial groups, as it would be proper to bring our attention to the sufferings inflicted on them by the disciplining process of the body politic. The melting pot as Bourne, Kallen and Dewey already maintained at the beginning of the century has been less a real acceptance of pluralism as much as an attempt to reduce heterogeneity to one colourless and flavourless fluid, not unlike the European nation-state building in its substance, though more complex and controversial in its inspiring principles because of the interaction of competing civic ideals. As Randolph Bourne wrote when describing the American nation: [the] Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of just whatever dominant race is guilty of in any European country, the imposition of its own culture on the minority people (47).

If the melting pot has never been a reality, whence does the idea draw its resilience? It draws its resilience from its ritual character. It is just an example of those symbolic ceremonies of communitarian consensus, on which the American nation is founded. Ceremonies centred we might say not on a myth of origin (A. Smith) as on a mythology of rebirth and palingenesis. Indeed, the idea of fusion - present both in the Biblical imagery and in that of alchemy (48) - recalls the idea of an uninterrupted transformation and regeneration so as to permit the appearance of a new man. The reference to the new, to what is not yet here, evoked by the symbology of fusion as much as by the narration of the Puritan errand as Sacvan Bercovitch maintains in his works (49)- has had the power of neutralising the internal dissent in American history. It masqueraded economic and social inequalities, stopped individualism from growing into anarchy and veiled national particularism with a national-universalistic ideology.

V Liberal Citizenship

American citizenship underwent a change in a liberal direction only in the second half of this century, beginning with the civil rights acts of the 60s, the 1965 immigration law, marking the end of exclusion on ethnic grounds, and the new course of the Supreme Court of the 50s, which started a process of nationalisation of the Bill of Rights through the partial incorporation of the first eighteen amendments into the XIV amendment. To give a complete picture of the new situation, we must keep in mind the deep demographical change caused by the high number of legal admissions of new immigrants, the strong flow of political refugees, particularly of Vietnamese and Cubans, the presence on the national territory of an increasing number of illegal immigrants, coming from the colander border separating Mexico from the United States and, last but not least, the activism of ethnic groups, who often compete in immigration battles. Notwithstanding the internal resistance of a public opinion desirous of strengthening restrictionist measures the liberal political rhetoric, inspired by the ideas of open society and rule of law, has transformed the face of American citizenship, well beyond the simple redefinition of the criteria of belonging.

A new constitutional jurisprudence, informed by the principle of the equality before the law, abandoning a long dated deference in such areas as immigration, has reduced the disadvantages deriving from the status of legal resident considerably and recognised some fundamental rights even to illegal immigrants. With the Plyver v. Doe opinion of 1982, which was in certain respect as momentous as Brown v. Board of Education in the implications that it bears on the definition of national community (50), the Supreme Court declared Texas s attempt to exclude children of undocumented aliens from the enjoyment of the rights to free public education unconstitutional. In this case, the Court did not limited itself to affirming that aliens within the national territory were entitled to some constitutional protections, whatever their legal status, but recognised their substantive rights, thus enlarging as Schuck observes the national community to uncertain dimensions and on the basis of uncertain principles (51). Legal residents, on the other hand, in these years have conquered rights almost equal to those of American citizens, being now admitted to the entitlement of practically all social benefits and services. Among rights reserved to citizens remain exclusively the right to vote, the right to serve in a popular jury and the right to hold public offices or being chosen for some high (or not so high) public positions within the public administration.

Unlike citizens, the legal resident might be subject to deportation. Nevertheless, even this risk and disadvantage are now diminished thanks to the evolution in the application of the due process principle (52). Therefore, many legal residents eligible for citizenship end by renouncing to require naturalisation. Schuck reports that according to the 1980 census, more than the 25% of legal residents did not ask for naturalisation, a percentage that rises to 56% in the case of Latinos . And this is in spite of the fact that the required qualifications for the access to citizenship are not burdensome at all. Indeed, the only criterion for exclusion still persisting applies to those belonging to a Communist party or any other totalitarian group and supporting political organisations whose goal is subversion through unconstitutional means of American institutions and government. Otherwise, to apply for access to citizenship it is sufficient to be fluent in English, to have a good knowledge of American history and institutions, five years of residence in the United States and, finally, to take an oath of allegiance to the principles of the United States Constitution. An oath whereby the new citizen must (1) support the Constitution of the United States; (2) renounce and abjure absolutely and entirely all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign, prince, potentate, state or sovereignty of whom or which the petitioner was before a subject or citizen; (3) to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (4) to bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and (5) (A) to bear arms on behalf of the United States when requires by the law, or (B) to perform non-combatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law, or (c) to perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law (53).

VI Oaths of Allegiance

The oath of allegiance, together with the clauses against communists and subversives and the rejection of dual citizenship, seems to represent one of the few remaining traces of the republican inspiration of the constitution. The practice of oaths has been very frequent since the origins of American history. The Puritans settlers of New England as Levinson reminds us had agreed even before leaving old England to prohibit settlement of those 'not comformable to their government, and by 1634 local governments measured conformity in part by a citizen's willingness to take an oath of loyalty pledging, 'by the great and dreadful Name of the everliving God, to be 'true and faithful to the government of the commonwealth (54). This entailed, among other things, a promise of not doing any evil against the government, or being a party to those who would do it. Indeed even today some American citizens are required to take oaths in certain situations, for example in order to accept employment in various universities, to become members of a bar, or to apply for a passport. But no citizen by birth is required to take an oath to become a citizen.

Oaths of allegiance have been subject to a strict scrutiny and to a substantial suspicion by a Supreme Court more and more attentive to the protection of individual rights. In West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), judging the case of a child, a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses, who had been suspended by school for refusing to recite the pledge of allegiance, the Supreme Court declared the suspension unconstitutional. In his famous majority opinion, Justice Jackson affirmed: If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein (55). In dissent with Jackson, only three years before, Justice Frankfurter said as Sandel writes - that The Constitution should not be understood to prevent states and school districts from 'evok[ing] that unifying sentiment without which there can ultimately be no liberties, civil or religious, or from 'inculcating those almost unconscious feelings which bind men together in a comprehending loyalty (56).

If the supporters of republican revival have reasons to appeal to Justice Frankfurter's opinion, both liberals and republicans should recognise here one of the many internal contradictions of American citizenship (57). If in a consistent liberal perspective the oath of allegiance might appear unjustifiable because it is limitative of the freedom of conscience, if required either to citizens by birth or to naturalised citizens, in a republican view the communitarian value of this act is belittled by the fact that it is compulsory only for naturalised citizens. Indeed, if any person born in the United States, even of alien parents, automatically becomes citizen without further qualifications.

VII The Devaluation of Citizenship

Diminished differences in the entitlements of civil and social rights between the citizen's and the legal resident's status have produced what some define as a process of devaluation of citizenship in the sense that being a citizen does not give any privileged access to particular privileges and rights. On the contrary, in certain respects, it might constitute only a supplementary burden. Indeed, in a society having an increasing tendency of flight into privacy, voting, serving in a popular jury or having the possibility of being elected to a public office might even be felt as a mere bother by citizens. American government has recently tried to revalue the meaning of citizenship with the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, excluding many aliens, even if permanent residents, from welfare programs and allowing the states to introduce further restrictions widening the gap between the rights of citizens and aliens. All this, with the aim of providing immigrants stronger incentive to become naturalised US citizens. The result of the 1996 Act has been as one might have imagined a flux of applications for naturalisation motivated mostly by the desire of not being deprived of all the rights legal residents had enjoyed until then and of avoiding further, future discriminations between citizens and aliens.

The 1996 reform of the welfare system does not tackle the difficult problems linked to the devaluation of citizenship. It does not help us to understand why there is something negative in the loss of value and significance of being a citizen. On the contrary, as Schuck points out, it discards in good measure the only positive aspect the loss of meaning of the citizen's status had produced in terms of respect for the liberal values of inclusiveness and equal treatment (58). The kind of revaluation of citizenship proposed by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act conceives the status of citizen only in a functional manner: becoming a citizen is seen here as a means for access to certain entitlements. Thus, it develops the citizen's passive and instrumental attitude toward institutions and favours the rise of a sort of entitlements mentality (59). The devaluation of citizenship may eliminate the sources from which civic virtues draw or it may push citizens toward more particularistic loyalties, strengthening ethnic identities and conflicts as the identity politics of the 70s demonstrates. A polity that devalues the status of the citizen may also encourage forms of the privatisation of citizenship (60), such as the spread to a great extent in the United States of private, residential, life-style enclaves, characterised by a homogeneous population in terms of class and economic status. These enclaves are now becoming a new locus of civic membership, constituting a real form of devolution of powers such as the police power traditionally monopolised by the state (61). In comparison to the equalisation of the legal status between citizen and legal residents much more meaningful phenomena - such as the electoral absenteeism and the decline of associations - could be added to those just mentioned to illustrate the present crisis of citizenship. Since the 60s electoral participation has seen a fast decline: voting percentages have decreased by nearly a fourth in federal elections and an analogous trend has taken place in state and local elections. The same trend of disengagement as R. D. Putnam has shown in his works (62) is confirmed by the data concerning the active commitment in religious and trade-unionist organisations, in scholastic associations of teachers and parents or in voluntary services (as with the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross). Gaining ground now only seem mass-membership organisations, such as national environmental organisations (for example, the Sierra Club), feminist groups (for example, the National Organisations for Women) and the American Association of Retired Persons (the so-called Grey Panthers ), presenting a fundamental difference in comparison to the classic secondary associations . As R. D. Putnam observes: For the vast majority of their members, the only act of membership consists in writing a check for dues or perhaps occasionally reading a newsletter (63).

VIII Conclusions

Confronted with this decay of the social capital, one has the impression that the United States is now as Mary Ann Glendon puts it like an athlete who developed muscles in his upper body, but [who] lets his legs grow weak [they] have nurtured [their] strong rights tradition while neglecting the social foundation upon which that tradition rests (64). Contemporary American citizenship must face a fundamental dilemma: any politics consistent with the guarantee and respect of individual rights or minority rights as any welfare measure cannot be sustained for a long period without the contribution of a citizenship that feels committed in and responsible for a common social project (65). The Communitarians critique of the procedural republic grasps the weaknesses of the liberal tradition, but it does not seem to offer adequate answers to the challenges of modern societies. It appears clear, for example, that we cannot satisfy through the strengthening of the communitarian identity of the nation the demands of recognition of their differences coming from marginal groups, such as handicapped persons, homosexuals, women, and ethnic minorities who mostly have suffered because of the prejudices and the discriminations of the dominant culture. These groups ask for a space in which their differences may have public visibility, consenting a real democratisation of the processes of collective self-determination. On the other hand, unconvincing and even dangerous seem some attempts, internal to the liberal tradition itself, to deal with the contemporary social crisis, interpreted as an attack on traditional morality, reinforcing familiar and religious values by measures such as a more severe divorce legislation or the re-introduction of prayer in public schools (66).

It would be crucial instead to recover the connection between public good and justice, or in other words between individual rights and public interests, which Madison considered the main objective of a liberal-republican politics. In revisiting Madison's thought it would be worth re-working the idea that a common view of the public interest within a complex society may be attained, respecting individual and groups differences, creating public arenas where the common identity is not discovered in a tradition but rises from the confrontation and the peaceful conflict of different opinions, traditions and interests. Conflict and numerous still are the lines of economic and social conflicts and divisions, besides those of ethnicity and race, within the American society when it finds channels of communication may constitute a source of communitarian ties even stronger than consent. As Sennett writes, following Coser, In conflict, they have to work harder at communicating; as often happens in labour or diplomatic negotiations, gradually the ground rules of engagement bind the contending parties together The scene of conflict becomes a community in the sense that people learn how to listen and respond to one another even as they more keenly feel their differences (67).

Because of the concentration of contemporary constitutional debate on the charter of rights and on the judicial protection of individual and minorities rights, many other important aspects of the American constitutional system have taken a back seat. Federalism, the role of legislative and constituent powers (68) are all instruments that could be available for a revaluation of citizenship (69). As James Bradley Thayer expected at the beginning of the century: [t]he tendency of a common and easy resort to [judicial review] is to dwarf the political capacity of the people, and to deaden its sense of moral responsibility (70). Today it would be necessary for non-judicial institutions to succeed in regaining an active role in political discourse and in constitutional decisions. The Supreme Court's role should be to assist the process, more than direct it as has often happened in this century.

In this regaining of space by non-judicial institutions a central role should be given to federalism. One of the first problems afforded by the United States after the Civil War and the enactment of the XIV amendment, we might say, has been to get a stronger federal power and to affirm the supremacy of national citizenship on state citizenship. Today, on the other hand, the attention must focus again on local powers, on the subsidiarity principle, on the logic of sharing the sovereignty of federalism, while at the same time avoiding losing the conquests made in this century in the defence of rights. Pointing out the possibilities of the federal system and of the whole system of constitutional mechanisms available to the American citizens we have to keep in mind that no political system could work without some form of civic virtue. What form? The prudence with which those who underline the crisis of civic participation make proposals to give new vigour to national community membership - such as the reintroduction of mandatory national service or the introduction of mandatory voting or the prohibition of private schools, etc - is a proof of the impossibility of re-creating civic virtue in its classic sense. And, maybe, it is even a proof of its undesirability, considering republican virtue's tendency toward intolerance and exclusion (71). What modern citizenship still needs is the discouraging of the perfect privatist's attitude, and the cultivating of a certain degree of privately oriented civic virtue as Shelley Burt calls it -, a virtue whose motivation is not an abstract belief or commitment to the ideals of a liberal polity but a very concrete sense of the benefits to which each individual is entitled in a free society (72). When I think here of a private citizenship, I do not have in mind Ackerman's two-track model of democracy, which implies a sort of schizophrenic behaviour of periodical shift, during the constitutional moments, from private interest to public reason. What I am thinking of are those qualities and abilities that are needed to be heard in a public context even if one is moved by particularistic reasons or interests. It is the very context of public discussion that imposes on the interlocutors giving to their reasons an appearance of impartiality and so respecting some social rules or norms. In this case the kind of use made of social norms and rule may appear instrumental, but we must remember as Elster teaches us that every time we remind someone to respect social norms we must oblige ourselves to a subsequent consistent attitude towards these same norms, if we do not want to lose our credibility (73). From this it follows that - quoting Dario Castiglione even from a selfish perspective, the normative and cognitive constraints of impartiality that come with arguing contribute to reach agreements that are to a large degree socially equitable (74). As long as we do not have a supranational public arena, national citizenship will be the most important locus for the political discussion necessary to acquire consciousness of our rights and duties. In the American case a sound grasp of its historical contradictions and of the demanding claims of its legitimating myth is the best way to reconstruct the significance of national citizenship.

Footnotes

An Italian version of this paper appeared in Ragion Pratica, 13 (1999), pp. 221-240.

1. See: J. Spinner, The Boundaries of Citizenship (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 1-13.

2. See: R. M. Smith, Civic Ideals (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1997), p. 481.

3. Cf. D. Jacobson, Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press,1996).

4. On the role played by the Supreme Court, see: P. H. Schuck, Citizens, Strangers and In-Between. Essay on Immigration and Citizenship, (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998), in particular: pp. 73-76, 82-87, 164-171.

5. I mention here only few of the most important texts: J. Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics. Virtue, Self-Interst and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York: Basic Book, 1984); R. Bellah et Al., Habits of the Heart. Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: The regents of the University of California, 1985), C. Lasch, The True and Only Heaven (New York and London: W.W. Norton &Company, 1991); id., The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995) and M. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent. America in Search of A Public Philosophy (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

6. M. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent, cit., p. 6.

7. See: L. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, S. M. Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical ad Comparative Perspective (New York, 1967, I 1963); Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America ( ..,1991) e M. Walzer, 'What does it means to be an American?', Social Research, vol. 57, n. 3, Fall 1990, pp. 591-614.

8. Quoted in R. M. Smith, Civic Ideals, cit., p. 116.

9. Internet source.

10. L. K. Kerber, 'A Constitutional Right to be Treated like American Ladies: Women ad Obligation of Citizenship', in L. K. Kerber, A. Kessler-Harris, K. Kish Skhalr, U.S. History as Women's History (Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina University Press, 1991), p. 25.

11. R. M. Smith, Civic Ideals, cit., p. 117.

12. I. Kramnick, 'The Great National Discussion', in id., Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, N. Y., 1990), p. 268.

13. Ibidem.

14. For the crucial rile played by the concept of common good in the XVII century debate and, particularly, in states constitutions, cf. B. A. Shain, The Myth of American Individualism (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1994), in particular see: pp. 30-32 and D. S. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge and London, 1988). For the revisiting of American revolutionary thought in republican terms, cf. J. Pocock The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975); B.Baylin, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) and G. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York: Norton, 1972 ).

15. Quoted in I. Kramnick, 'The Great National Discussion', cit., p. 273.

16. According to a republican interpretation the II amendment affirms the principle of an armed citizenry', cf. L. D. Cress, 'An Armed Community: The Origins and Meaning of the Right to Bear Arms', in The Journal of American History, vol. 71, January 1984, pp. 22-41. On the meaning of the II amendment exists a large literature. For a different, liberal interpretation see, for example, v.: R. E. Shalhope, 'The ideological origins of the Second Amendment', in Journal of American History, 69, December 1982, pp. 599-614.

17. D. F. Epstein, The Political Theory of the Federalist (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1984) p. 60

18. Quoted in I. Kramnic, 'The Great National Discussion', cit., p. 270.

19. Federalista, n. 10

20. Federalista, n. 2.

21. Cf. C. F. Hobson, 'The Negative on State Laws: James Madison, The Constitution and the Crisis of Republican Government', in William and Mary Quarterly, April 1979, pp. 215-235.

22. Cf. E. M. Meehan, 'European Integration and Citizens Rights: A Comparative Perspective', in Publius, Fall 1996, pp. 107-113.

23. In spite of the fact that art.. VI, section 3, of the federal Constitution prohibited it, in more then eleven states constitutions religious tests were required: Delaware required state officers to swear a Trinitarian oath; Georgia required that they be of the Protestant religion; Maryland demanded belief in the Christian religion - thus including Catholics as well as Protestants, but excluding Jews and nonbelievers; and New York discriminated against Catholics but did not bar Jews from holding office', R. A. Goldwin, Why Blacks, Women, and Jews Are Not Mentioned in the Constitution and Other Unorthodox Views, (Washington D.C.: The AEI Press, 1990) p. 19 S. Kutler, La controversia sulla preghiera nella scuola pubblica: costituzionalismo, pluralismo e politica simbolica, in T. Bonazzi (a cura di), La costituzione statunitense e il suo significato odierno, Il Mulino, Bologna 1988, p. 187.

24. R. M. Smith, Civic Ideals, cit., p. 187-189

25. G. L. Neuman, 'The Lost Century of American Immigration Law (1776-1875), Columbia Law Review, vol. 93, n. 8, december 1983, pp.1833-1901.

26. R. M. Smith, Civic Ideals, cit., p. 153.

27. Op. cit., p. 230.

28. Cf. J. N. Shklar, 'The Boundaries of Democracy', in id., Redeeming American Political Thought (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p.142 29. Cf. R. M. Smith, Civic Ideals, cit., p. 103.

30. Op. cit., p. 205.

31. Benjamin Rush wrote in 1786: Our Schools of learning, by producing one general, and uniform system of education, will render the mass of people more homogeneous, and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government. Our country includes family, friends, and property, and should be preferred to them all. Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him taught at the same time, that he must forsake, and even forget them, when the welfare of his country requires it. He must watch for the state, as if liberties depended upon his vigilance alone I consider it is possible to covert men into republic machines. This must be done, if we expect them to perform their part properly, in the great machine of the government of the state', cit. in L. Kerber, Federalist in Dissent (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 109.

32. ibid. 33. Cf. D. J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).

34. E. Santoro, Carcere e societí  liberale (Torino: Giappichelli, 1998), p. 35.

35. Ibidem.

36. C. F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic. Common School and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983, pp. 98.

37. Op. cit., p. 97.

38. T. L. Dumm, Democracy and Punishment, Disciplinary Origins of the United States (Winsconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, p. 107).

39. Ibidem.

40. Cf. C. Lasch, La ribellione delle élites, cit., pp. 47-69. Lasch undervalues the discriminatory effects produced by this productivist ideology.

41. D. R. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, cit., p. 162.

42. On the experience of the almshouses, cf. op. cit., pp. 180-205.

43. Neuman, 'The Lost Century of American Immigration Law', cit., pp. 1847-1848. 44. Francis Bellamy (1855-1931) wrote the pledge of allegiance. It was introduced into elementary school in 1892. It now says: I pledge allegiance to the Flag, of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all . For the pledge of allegiance see: J. Baer, The Pledge of Allegiance, A Centennial History, 1892-1992 (Annapolis, Md.: Free State Press, Inc., 1992).

45. Quoted in R. M. Smith, Civic Ideals, cit., p. 294.

46. The 1922 Cable Act established that a married woman citizen who married an alien ineligible for citizenship that is a Chinese, Japanese, or an immigrant from India shall cease to be a citizen of the United States', L. K. Kerber, 'A Constitutional Right to be treated as American Ladies', cit., p. 18. These federal legislation was anticipated in the preceding period by state laws affirming the same principles, cfr. ibidem, pp. 27-29.

47. R. Bourne, Transnational America', in Menorah Journal (1916), cit. in A. Ryan, Pragmatism, Identity, Patriotism and Self-Criticism', in Social Research, vol. 63, n. 4, winter 1996, p. 1051.

48. Cf. W. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, cap. III).

49. See: S. Bercovitch, Puritan America (1991); tr. it. America puritana (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1992).

50. Cfr. P. H. Schuck, Citizens, Strangers and In-Betweens, cit., p. 54.

51. Cf. op.cit., p. 55.

52. Cf. op. cit., p. 167-168.

53. Immigration and Nationality Act, paragraph 316 (a), 8 U.S.C. paragraph 1427 (a) (1982), cit. in S. Levinson, 'Constituting Communities Through Words that bind: Reflections on Loyalty Oaths', in Michigan Law Review, june 1986, p. 1452.

54. S. Levinson, 'Constituting Communities Through Words that bind: Reflections on Loyalty Oaths', cit., p. 1449.

55. Op. cit., p. 1451.

56. M. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent, cit., p. 53.

57. Regarding the tensions between liberalism and republicanism in contemporary American citizenship, cf. G. L. Neuman, 'Justifing U. S. Nazionalization policy', in Virginia Journal of International Law, vol. 32 (1994), pp. 237-278.

58. P. H. Schuck, Citizens, Strangers and In-Betweens. Essay on Immigration and Citizenship. p. 173.

59. Op. cit., p. 172.

60. Cf. P. H. Schuck, Citizens, Strangers and In-betweens, cit., pp. 194-195.

61. Cf. on the phenomenon of privatopia, G. Bonaiuti, ., unedited typescript.

62. Cf. R. D. Putnam, 'Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital', in Journal of Democracy, vol. 6, n. 1, January 1995, pp. 65-78

63. Op. cit., p. 71.

64. M. A. Glendon, 'Twentieth Century-Century Constitutions', in G. R. Stone, R. A. Epstein e C. R. Sunstein, The Bill of Rights in the Modern State (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 537.

65. Cf. ibidem.

66. Cf. W. Galston, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne and Sidney: Cambridge University press, 1991), cap. V.

67. R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998), p. 143.

68. For this last point, see in particular: B. Ackerman, We The People. Foundations, (Cambridge (Mass.) and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 44-45, where a revision of article V of the American Constitution is proposed.

69. Cf., for example, C. Sunstein, The Partial Constitution, (Cambridge (Mass.) and London: Harvard University Press, 1993).

70. Quoted in P. Brest, 'Radical Republicanism', The Yale Law Journal, vol. 97 (1988), p. 1629.

71. Cf. W. Kymlicka and W. Norman, 'Return to the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory', in Ethics, 104 (1994), pp. 368-369.

72. S. Burtt, 'The Politics of Virtue Today: A Critique and a Proposal', American Political Science Review, vol. 87, n. 2 (1993), p. 364.

73. J. Elster, Il cemento della societí  (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1995), pp. 184.

74. D. Castiglione, 'Public Reason, Private Citizenship', in M. Passerin D'Entreves e U. Vogel, Public and Private: Political, Legal and Philosophical perspectives, Routledge, forthcoming.