ABSTRACT
One theme running through this book has been Rawls’ account of reasonable citizenship, which includes a set of moral capacities and dispositions. Another has been the need for a civic education that includes the teaching of a set of public principles and norms, as well the inculcation of a set of virtues that promote fair interactions between citizens who may not share comprehensive views of the good life. These political virtues include toleration, civility, and fairness, amongst others.1 But a number of theorists have claimed that even this is not enough. They argue that a further requirement is that citizens share common feelings of identification with their society’s institutions, history, and people. More particularly, some have argued that a Rawlsian account of justice, if it is to meet the requirement of stability, requires such feelings. In the present chapter I will examine these claims, and defend an account of the proper role for patriotism (or something close to it) in a Rawlsian theory of justice. The question will then be how a Rawlsian program of civic education can and should involve the cultivation of feelings of identification. Many of those who defend a program of patriotic civic education focus their attention on the teaching of history. I will argue that their proposals have serious problems, and that the proper place to try to inculcate the relevant forms of identification will be in something more similar to traditional ‘civics’ classes. It will be an open question whether or not the resulting account of civic education deserves to be called ‘patriotic.’ Following Eamonn Callan, let us define patriotism as “an active identifi-
cation with one’s particular nation as a cross-generational political community whose flourishing one prizes and seeks to advance.”2 Some authors attempt a more fine-grained, normatively loaded definition by distinguishing between malign and benign forms of identification, and reserving the term ‘patriotism’ for the benign form and ‘nationalism’ for the malign form. This results in a somewhat artificial contrast between patriotism and nationalism. Another way of drawing a distinction between patriotism and nationalism might seem to become important when discussing policies for multinational
societies in which cultivating identification with the existing political community is different from cultivating identification with a particular nation. But this way of drawing the contrast can become blurred in practice, since some defenders of nationalism propose creating ‘wider’ national identities even in such cases. For example, David Miller recommends cultivating a British national identity that would include English, Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish identities.3 This nationalist proposal is essentially the same as the proposal Charles Taylor recommends under the name of patriotism, for Canada: finding policies that promote an identity that would subsume a plurality of feelings of belonging to different nations that are nested within a single but significantly decentralized state.4 In contrast with the first, normative way of drawing the boundaries of patriotism, I leave open the question of whether patriotism is, overall, good or bad. With regard to the second, I leave nationalism to the side in this chapter, and focus on patriotism understood as identification with a people that has its own institutions of self-government.5
