ABSTRACT

The liberal Western model of citizenship imagines society as a market place in which strangers meet to exchange goods and services. This is what we might call a ‘citizenship of strangers’ in which people, who have no necessary social connections with each other, interact in public. These strangers do not have or are not expected to have cultural identities that play an important role in the public domain. However, this political framework by itself was not sufficient to support civil society, which required some degree of additional social bonding through religion or nationalism. In civil society, religion was particularly important for creating social capital. We might say, for example, that in nineteenth-century England citizenship was not defined by deep cultural criteria; citizens were political actors who expressed their will through parliamentary institutions. However, these political citizens did in fact have considerable and important cultural identities, for example they were English speaking and predominantly Anglican. The key issue here is that the spread of secular citizenship constrained the relevance of cultural and kinship ties in the public domain, and replaced kinship as a principle of social organisation.