The Citizen's Contract
In an article originally published in OpenDemocracy, Sam McLean, Director of Public Participation at RSA Projects asks how ideas like "active citizenship" and "civic virtue" can be turned into practical realities.
Britain is not broken
Hardly a publication known for its gooey-eyed liberal optimism, an article in the latest copy of The Economist is right to argue that while damaged by excessive individualism, our society is far from broken. Empirical analysis supported by recent Ipsos MORI public opinion data shows that our society is largely more tolerant, environmentally aware, and safer than a decade ago. As Axel Honneth has argued, growing recognition of the rights and identities of minority groups over the last four decades surely represents some sign of social and ethical progress.[1] While rightly commited to the need 
for civic renewal, Philip Blond and others on the collectivist side of the individualist-collectivist political divide see things differently. Based on a repudiation of both social and economic liberalism, they consider people today to have too many individual rights and too few collective responsibilities. Rooted in a nostalgic longing for a mythical utopia, their argument for increasing responsibility by cutting our rights-based culture down to size is dangerously misguided.[2]
The world-view which only casts the state in the role of the devil, does indeed succeed in redistributing responsibility from state to citizen. But it does so without any realistic strategy for fostering the behaviours and ways of thinking people and communities need for active citizenship to flourish and thereby reduce state dependency in areas of public life where the state is a barrier rather than enabler of citizen activism. This one-dimensional view of the state, prominent at the moment, becomes all the more important in areas of social and economic deprivation where levels of what Amartya Sen terms ‘inequality of capability’ are lowest, where public services are most widely needed, and where civic health is least likely to flourish.[3]
Re-invigorating civic virtue
While our society is not broken, civic virtue is certainly in need of repair. As Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre have argued, the language and importance of behaviour directed by civic virtue and common purpose has been gradually 
eroded from our public discourse.[4] Anyone committed to resuscitating progressive political philosophy and politics in the UK needs to seriously engage with and recognise the value of a shift in modern conservatism towards the ideals of civic responsibility and citizen activism. It is easy to blame neo-liberalism and unfettered markets for our so-called moral decline. But as Žižek writes convincingly in his latest book, it is equally the failure of the political left to construct an effective opposition and alternative to it. In domestic politics, it is one of the great failings of the Labour Party that the Conservatives have been able to position themselves effectively as the party of collective social action.[5]
Today, there is growing consciousness of our need to make fundamental changes to our political culture. Voter turnout has become the major indicator of our civic and political health, when it should be the depth of citizen participation in the civic and political decision-making of everyday life. Rather than viewing ourselves as ‘everyday citizens’ whose identities are intimately related to the life experience and outcomes of other citizens, we have been encouraged to reduce our citizenship to that of the passive consumer primarily interested in maximising our own self-interest.
This philosophical speculation is supported by public opinion data. In the past three decades, feelings of civic belonging have declined and questions of national identity and cultural cohesion have become more prominent. As Nick Pearce aptly describes it, in our increasingly globalised world of mass migration, the ‘progressive dilemma’ for citizens and policy-makers alike, is how to establish strong civic attachment and identity between different groups of people without compromising cultural difference and individual freedom.[6]
Autonomy and civic virtue
But as Matthew Taylor argues in his recent essay on twenty-first century enlightenment, the problem is not individual autonomy itself which is necessary for people to create self-authored lives they value; nor is the problem citizen rights.[7] The problem is having individual autonomy and rights which are divorced from the common good. Following in a Hegelian tradition of thought including in recent years, Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth, the challenge for political and social progressives today is how to reconcile autonomy with the collective good in a materialist culture where consumer choice is re-packaged as human freedom and civic solidarity is reduced to the polite indifference to the actions and values of others.[8]
The re-emergence of civic republicanism provides us with one political philosophical framework for understanding how progress might be made on this question. For civic republicans, individual autonomy can only be realised in a society which also exhibs what Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre call civic virtue.[9] Given that we rely on some level of social order and positive freedoms to allow us to make choices in our lives, we can only have autonomy if we make our contribution to developing and maintaining a healthy public sphere marked by vibrant forms of citizen activism and deliberation.
The civic republicanism of Hannah Arendt provides us with some key principles for delivering such a public sphere. First, the common good and not the interests of a particular group of citizens should be the guiding principle of all public policy and decision-making. Second, collective decision-making should be 
as inclusive as possible and include a significant degree of public involvement. Third, informed deliberation needs to be at the heart of public decision-making. Fourth, the good society is dependent on every citizen having the power and independence to be free from the domination of others. Fifth, the legitimacy of public instititions demands strong civic participation in collective decision-making guided by other-regarding intentions. And sixth, the good society is one where economic inequality is limited.
The civic republicanism of Arendt shares many points of commonality with the Kantian proceduralism of both Habermasian and Rawlsian versions of deliberative democracy, including the importance they place on the democratic public sphere as a place of active participation and collective decision-making. But there are differences - civic republicanism is both more practically grounded in the everyday lives of people and is more concerned with tackling questions of ethics and the good life. This can be seen in the different ways they normatively justify the importance of having a democratic public sphere. For Habermas and Rawls, it is the procedure through which society attempts to solve political problems rationally and legitimately, while excluding questions of ethics. While for Arendt and other republican democrats, the democratic public sphere is the medium of a self-governing political community which is fundamentally concerned with ethical questions about the nature of being a citizen.[10]
The Citizen’s Contract
How might we turn this civic republican emphasis on civic virtue and active citizenship into practical public policy? And how can they inform a new way of looking at citizen rights and responsibility necessary for developing stronger civic responsibility and solidarity at the local level? These questions are the focus of a forthcoming RSA Citizen Power pamphlet, Everyday Citizen’s: the case for the Citizen’s Contract.
The pamphlet puts forward the case for a place-based community-focused Citizen’s Contract, which is being developed at the RSA as part of our flagship Citizen Power programme to cultivate civic innovation and citizen activism in Peterborough. Locally deliberated, the Citizen’s Contract is designed as a symbolic and formal agreement holding public services, community and third sector organisations and citizens all to account for improving the civic health and outcomes in their area.[11]
The Citizen’s Contract consists of strong citizen rights and responsibilities. Citizen rights include the rights to: influence so people have more power over local and national decision-making; community ownership so local people have an economic stake in the future of where they live; resourcefulness so people have the networks of support they need to be independent; transparency of public information so people can hold public authorities more effectively to account; resillience so individuals and communities can overcome personal and local challenges, and creative individual and collective self-expression. These would sit alongside citizen responsibilities to commit a certain proportion of their time to community and voluntary work, participate in public decision-making; support the most vulnerable in society; protect the environment; cultivate civic health and well-being, and be more independent.
In the pamphlet, we show how these rights and responsibilities are connected to important ‘civic capabilities’ - or civic repblican principles - people and communities need in order for civic virtue to be cultivated in practice through the Citizen’s Contract.
| Civic Capabilities | Examples |
|---|---|
| Influence | Participation in decision-making |
| Belonging | Involvement in community activity |
| Independence | Economically and emotionally, self-reliant and resilient |
| Rational deliberation | Self-reflection |
| Resourcefulness | Social networks |
| Empathy | Other-regarding behaviour |
Our recommendation of the Citizen’s Contract is supported by some of the most innovative thinking being developed around rights and responsibilities in public services, particularly in the areas of public service entitlements and guarantees, community-contracts and pledges, and the role of ‘declarative norms’ in behaviour change. The benefits of a place-based Citizen’s Contract are clear: they have the potential to improve levels of citizen participation in community life and local public service performance. And if designed and implemented with the necessary care to local conditions and needs, they have the potential to reduce dependency on public services while helping to build more resilient communities where civic virtue and solidarity are more likely to flourish.
Sam McLean is Director of Public Participation and Head of the Citizen Power programme at the RSA.
Bibliography
1 A. Honneth (2007). Disrespect: The normative foundations of Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press
2 P. Blond (2010). Red Tory: How left and right have broken Britain and how we can fix it. London: Faber and Faber
3 A. Sen (2003). Inequality re-examined. Oxford: Oxford University Press
4 H. Arendt (1968). On Revolution. London: Penguin. A. MacIntyre. (1981). After Virtue: A study in moral theory. University of Notre Dame Press
5 S. Žižek (2009). First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso
6 N. Pearce (2008). ‘Diversity versus Solidarity: A Progressive Dilemma?’ in S. White and D. Leighton (eds.) (2008). Building a Citizen Society: The emerging politics of republican democracy. London: Lawrence and Wishart Limited
7 M. Taylor (2010). Twenty-first century enlightenment. London: RSA.
8 C. Taylor (1979). Hegel and Modern Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A. Honneth (1996). The Struggle for Recognition: Moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge: Polity Press
9 M. Sandel (1998). Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10 J. Habermas (2004). Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press. J. Rawls (1993). Political Liberalism. New York Columbia University Press.
11 Citizen Power community website
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