CHANTAL MOUFFEmeans a necessary separation between religion and politics. But such a distinction is not
at the same level as the other ones, and we will have to examine later in which way it
should be understood.
Against the view defended, for instance, by the pluralist school of Harold Laski and G. D.
Cole, it is important to acknowledge that membership in the political community, that
is, citizenship, should not be envisaged as constituting one identity among others, located
at the same level as other identities linked to inscriptions in voluntary associations. Citi-
zenship is indeed one of the weak points in liberal doctrines. This is why they are vulnera-
ble to the communitarian critique. In order to delineate a conception of citizenship that
would reconcile the strong meaning it had in the civic republican tradition with the
pluralism constitutive of modern democracy, I have argued that we need a conception of
citizenship as a political identity that consists in identification with the ethico-political
principles of liberal pluralist democracy and with a commitment to defend its institutions.
Citizenship, when conceived as allegiance to the ethico-political values constitutive of
pluralist democracy, reveals the impossibility for democratic politics to do without an
idea of political community and a reference to the common good. Citizenship refers to
the dimension of political community, and, pace liberals, it is not something that can be
understood in individualistic terms. It always entails a collective element. I want to stress,
however, that, in order to be compatible with pluralism, political community needs to be
conceived as a discursive surface and not as an empirical referent. Politics is about the
constitution of political community, not something that takes place inside a political
community. Political community, as a surface for inscribing demands where a ‘‘we’’ is
constituted, requires the correlative idea of thecommon good, but a common good con-
ceived as a ‘‘vanishing point,’’ a ‘‘horizon of meaning,’’ something to which we must
constantly refer but which cannot exist under modern conditions. In such a view, the
common good functions as a ‘‘social imaginary,’’ that is, as that on which its very impossi-
bility of achieving full representation bestows the role of a horizon that is the condition
of possibility of any representation within the space that it delimits. In other words, it is
once a condition of possibility and a condition of impossibility.
The common good can also be envisaged as specifying what we can call, following
Wittgenstein, a ‘‘grammar of conduct’’ informed by the ethico-political principles of
modern democracy: liberty and equality for all. Citizenship understood as allegiance to
the ethico-political values constitutive of modern democracy could, I believe, provide the
type of consensus required in a pluralist democracy. Indeed, such a consensus concerning
principles does not imply negation of conflict and division, and in consequence the cre-
ation of a homogeneous collective will. Conflicting interpretations of those principles will
always exist. And this is why there will always be different conceptions of citizenship.
PAGE 322322.................16224$ CH16 10-13-06 12:35:38 PS