Dispositions of good citizenship: Character, civility and the politics of virtue

This dissertation offers a critical account of the practical means by which normative Anglo-American citizenship discourses produce a conception of the good citizen as one who exhibits strength of character through civil conduct. It is situated in the context of recent intellectual debate over the constitutive features of good citizenship under conditions of late modernity, and is particularly concerned with those discourses that promote 'character' and 'civility' as important virtues of good citizenship. In this regard, my contribution in this dissertation consists in bringing normative reflections on good citizenship into dialogue with an approach to social theory that uses practices as the starting point for analyzing social relations. My argument is therefore located in the theoretical space opened up by the recent 'practice turn' in social theory, and triangulates among the respective contributions of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Norbert Elias in order to develop a relational conception of citizenship. Doing so allows me to develop a set of conceptual tools that shows how the image of the good citizen promoted by Anglo-American citizenship discourses is constituted through a process of 'civic regulation' that depends upon the double articulation of dividing practices of 'identity-difference' and 'virtue-vice'. These practices condition the emergence of character and civility as technologies of good citizenship that ostensibly work to contain self-interest and to negotiate differences. But my analysis reveals that when character and civility are advanced as pre-political goods, they neglect the extent to which citizenship is a condition of otherness that is constituted by and through power relations. Indeed my argument demonstrates that when the virtues of character and civility are put into practice, they work to cultivate a specific conception of civic life that often contains politics and limits the expression of difference. Within this context, I contend that the possibility of multiple forms of citizenship means that the attempt to ground good citizenship in character and civility is increasingly open to contestation. This insight creates the possibility for a new politics of citizenship---that is, a kind of politics that challenges the form and content of so-called 'civil' practices and modes of conduct.