Antinomies of citizenship1

Étienne Balibar

Abstract

Ever since their origins in ancient societies, the concept of the citizen and the
corresponding ‘community of citizens’ (the Greek politeia, the Roman civitas) have
moved in polarities which accounted for a permanent tension between rights and duties,
membership and exclusion, participation and representation, etc. In periods of crisis
of the political institution, such as the current ‘trans-nationalization’ of the law and
the global economy, the constitutive tensions can become genuine antinomies, which
confront individuals and collectives with radical choices. This lecture will try to clarify
their formulation and show what is at stake in their uncertain perspectives.
Keywords: citizenship; democracy; insurrection; constitution; National and Social
State; neo-liberalism; end of politics

I called this Cassal Lecture ‘Antinomies of citizenship’, providing the very general
and short abstract above, which, as you certainly realize, was written before I had a
perfectly clear idea of which material I would include and how I would try to organize
it. The funny detail is that, when reading it again, I realized that the word ‘democracy’
itself was missing. This might suggest a preference or a hierarchy, whereby citizenship
would appear as the dominant concept, either from the juridical, the political or the
historical point of view, whereas democracy would feature only as a qualification or an
attribute of citizenship, whether essential or secondary. This is by no means a merely
verbal consideration, not only because such ideological issues as the opposition between
‘republican’ (or neo-republican) discourses and ‘democratic’ traditions (whether
liberal or not) are often presented in terms of such preferences and hierarchies, but
because in a sense the very understanding of ‘political philosophy’ depends on this
kind of choice, as contemporary critics such as Jacques Rancière (1995) have rightly
insisted. But in fact my position is not to grant ‘citizenship’ a dominant position with
respect to ‘democracy’, it is rather to explain that the ‘democratic paradox’, to borrow
Chantal Mouffe’s (2000) felicitous expression, forms the intrinsically problematic
aspect of citizenship, therefore its most determining aspect. What I believe is that
citizenship’s problem, in its various historical figures, with all their enormous
differences, lies in its antinomic relationship to democracy. I would gladly submit
that – conversely – democracy as a historical – even a ‘material’ – reality (which is
not to say a regime, rather a tendency or a process of transformation) can be defined,
precisely, as the antinomic element of citizenship, in the complex sense in which the
philosophical tradition has elaborated this category: namely this element that brings

Journal of Romance Studies   Volume 10  Number 2, Summer 2010: 1–20

doi:10.3167/jrs.2010.100201 ISSN 1473–3536 (Print), ISSN 1752–2331 (Online)

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 2 Étienne Balibar

in contradiction, and a permanent tension between destruction and construction,

crystallizing at the same time a problem which can never be completely solved, and
which cannot become ignored or completely suppressed. I will submit that there lies
at the heart of the institution of citizenship a crucial contradiction which is due to
its intrinsically antinomic relationship to democracy. And I have remained enough
of a dialectician, even a materialist dialectician, to believe that this kind of intrinsic
antinomy forms the essential driving force of historical transformations, indicating
the point of articulation of theory and practice.
In other terms there is nothing ‘natural’ in the relationship between citizenship
and democracy, even if we must retrieve and retain something essential from those
philosophers who, like Aristotle, or Spinoza, or Rousseau, or Marx, argued that
democracy should be considered ‘the natural’ or ‘most natural’ form of citizenship.
In fact what I believe is that such a formula ought to be interpreted, or should be
pushed dialectically to meaning precisely what I said a moment ago: historically it
is the democratic antinomy that forms the driving force of the transformations of
citizenship as a political institution. Therefore democratic citizenship is a problem, a
stake, an enigma, an invention, a lost object or treasure to be sought and conquered
again. Such considerations, which certainly involve a definite conception of political
philosophy, are anything but entirely speculative. There are circumstances in which
the antinomy becomes particularly apparent, where the double impossibility of
abandoning the notion of citizenship and of simply maintaining its established
construction takes the form, precisely, of an acute crisis of democracy: the democratic
practices and rules, the common understanding of the meaning of the word democracy
itself, the consequences of its dominant use, be it intentionally perverted or naively
traditional. This seems to be eminently the case today, not only for what concerns
certain qualifications of the notion of citizenship – such as ‘national citizenship’
or ‘social citizenship’ – whose historical dominance was more or less unchallenged
for a whole period, but more profoundly for the category as such, whose capacity
to pursue the route of its historical transformations, seems to have been brutally
annihilated. I take it in particular that the interpretation of the emergence of the so-
called ‘neo-liberal’ paradigm of governmentality as a process of ‘de-democratization’,
that Wendy Brown (2005) in particular has recently introduced in the critical
debate along Foucauldian lines, is best understood as an extreme expression of the
destructive side of the antinomies of citizenship in the contemporary moment. This
would also mean that it indicates the challenges that any project of rethinking and
re-inventing citizenship – little different in my opinion from a project of rethinking
and re-asserting politics itself – should meet. It is some aspects of this complex of
contradictions and challenges that I would like to try to discuss tonight.
I am going to present three successive arguments – describing from a cavalier point
of view what seems to me to form a virtual (and partial) dialectic of the antinomies of
citizenship. They concern respectively: 1) what I call the political ‘trace’ of equaliberty
in the construction and the contradictions of modern citizenship (therefore essentially
modern national citizenship), which I identify with a permanent differential of
insurrection and constitution; 2) what I consider to be the effective democratic albeit

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 Cassal Lecture 3

limited character of ‘social citizenship’, as it was instituted in the form of the (mainly
European) national and social state (an expression which I prefer, for materialistic
reasons, to that of Welfare State), and the aporia of the progression of this most
progressivist historical figure; 3) the extent to which what has been labelled the ‘neo-
liberal’ response to this crisis – or perhaps the neo-liberal contribution to this crisis
– in the form of the absolutization of utilitarian individualism, not only represents
a moment of lethal danger for democracy, but could also raise again the possibility
of democratic transformations beyond its ‘representative’ institution. To conclude, I will
allude to the determinations which could become associated with the representation
of the agents of this virtual process of the democratization of democracy itself (a term
which I tend to prefer to that of subject, although it clearly refers to some of the issues
currently debated in terms of political or post-political subjectivation).2
Let me start, then, with the trace of equaliberty. In other places I have proposed
a condensed genealogy of the Roman formulas aequa libertas and aequum ius
which Cicero in particular would present as essential definitions of the regime he
calls res publica,3 and I have coined the portmanteau expression equaliberty that I
am again using now to encapsulate the unities of opposites lying at the heart of the
‘universalistic’ notion of citizenship invented by the successive revolutions of the
bourgeois era which open and define political modernity: a unity of ‘man’ and ‘citizen’,
now considered correlative notions in spite of the practical restrictions, which affect
the actual distribution of political rights and powers, and a unity of the abstract
notions themselves, equality and liberty, which are now seen as components of the same
constituent power, in spite of permanent tensions among them and the tendency
of bourgeois political ideologies to grant one of them a primacy or an ontological
privilege over the other, presenting it as the ‘natural right’ par excellence. I want
to insist particularly on the conflictual element which is inherent in this ‘fusion’ of
opposite notions, which accounts for the revolutionary character of simultaneous
claims of equality and liberty whenever they are raised to achieve an extension of
the powers of the people or an emancipation from domination taking the form of a
conquest of rights. It is this combination of conflict and institution that I call the trace
of equaliberty, or the continuous reiteration of its enunciation.
It is true that revolutionary moments, where the power inherent in the exercise
of rights is reclaimed in the form of a regime change (for example, from monarchy
to republic) or the demise of a dominant class or caste whose privileges need to be
abolished, give this reiteration an exceptionally visible and symbolic expression. But
the ‘insurrectional’ element which accounts for the emancipatory effects of the claim
of rights (petitio iuris) can and must take many other forms which have a different
phenomenology in terms of movements, campaigns, party mobilization, temporal
condensation or distension, violent or non-violent relationship of forces, rejection or
use of the existing institutions and juridical forms, etc. Think of the various national
histories of the conquest of civil, political and social rights in Europe, which in fact
are not processes isolated from one another, or the various forms of decolonizing
processes, or the articulation of the episodes of civil war and civil rights campaign in
the century-long history of the emancipation of the Black population in the U.S.,

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 4 Étienne Balibar

etc. However I maintain that the conflictual element is always determining because
there is no such thing as an originary distribution of equaliberty, and no such
thing as a voluntary surrendering of privileges and dominant positions of power.
As a consequence, struggles are always necessary, and more than that a principle of
legitimacy has to be asserted which Rancière (1995) felicitously called la part des sans-
part, or the claim of the share of those who are deprived of a share in the common
good. It manifests the essential incompleteness of the ‘people’ as a body politic, and
aims at universalizing it through the development of a conflict in which an exclusion
from recognition, or dignity, or rights, or property, or security, or speech, or decision-
making, is ‘negated’ in a relationship of forces. The insurrectional moment, whose
past event forms the immanent foundation of any popular constitution which is not
deriving either from tradition, or from a transcendent justification, or from simple
‘bureaucratic’ efficacy, however these various sources of legitimacy can contribute
to the representation of the political, and whose future return forms a constant
possibility in the face of the limitations and the denials affecting the realization of
democracy in the current constitution, is ineludible. The consequences are obviously
considerable.
I want to emphasize two interrelated dimensions in this respect. One of them
concerns the intrinsically problematic character of the political community which
derives from the articulation of citizenship with different forms of insurrection whose
horizon is a genuine universality of rights. Such a community is neither achievable
as a homogeneous unity nor representable as a perfect totality, but it can also not
become dissolved in a purely individualistic notion of juxtaposed subjects brought
together by the invisible hand of their common utility, or their mutual dependency,
or in the radically antagonistic picture of civil ‘enemies’ who have nothing in common
but the opposition of their interests. We come very close here to the description that
Mouffe (2000) has proposed of the ‘democratic paradox’, but we are also approaching
the antinomic character of the institution of citizenship which takes continuously
new forms. Accordingly, the name, the extension, the historical and ideological bases
of its recognition by citizen-subjects, who identify with its existence and somehow
appropriate it in their own way, may undergo considerable variations. This instable
and problematic character of the civic community has been long concealed or, better
said, it has been displaced because of the strong degree of identification of the notions
of citizenship and nationality – what in other places I have called the constitutive
equation of the modern republican state, which derives its apparently eternal and
indisputable character from the permanent strengthening of this state, but also, as
we know, from many mythical, or imaginary, or cultural justifications (see Balibar
2004). However, at the end of a certain historical cycle (probably the period in which
we find ourselves nowadays, at least in certain parts of the world), the contingent
character of this equation becomes also apparent, which means at the same time its
historical grounding and its fragility, or its exposure to decomposition and mutation.
This is also the moment (or perhaps it is once again the moment) in which it becomes
apparent that, however powerful it really is, the national interest is never a factor of
absolute unity of the civic community.

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 Cassal Lecture 5

But, from the theoretical point of view, this is only one aspect of the discussion, since
the nation, or the national identity, however effective it has been in modern history, is
only one of the possible institutional forms of the community of citizens, and does neither
encapsulate all of its functions, nor completely neutralize its contradictions. The main
point, therefore, is to understand that citizenship, as a political principle, cannot
exist without a community, but that this community cannot be completely unified,
that its essence cannot be the consensus of its members. This makes all the equivocity
but also the strategic function of such terms as res publica central in the European
tradition of defining and instituting citizenship, which was considered as the Latin
equivalent of Greek politeia, or ‘constitution of the citizen’, and whose translation in
classical English, we may remember, was common-wealth. Citizens as such do not exist
outside a community, whether territorial or not, whether seen as a natural or cultural
legacy, or as a contractual or historical construct, for a fundamental reason which was
already expressed by Aristotle, namely that the principle of citizenship (or perhaps
we should better say co-citizenship) coincides with the idea of a reciprocity of rights
and duties which, as such, binds together the co-citizens, inasmuch as it is effectively
implemented and obeyed. Perhaps we should say, in a slightly more complicated
manner, that it coincides with the idea that the reciprocity of rights and duties
involves a limitation of power of the rulers and a discipline of the ruled, in particular in
the form of the accountability of the magistrates before their constituencies, and the
obedience of the citizens to the rule of law (Riesenberg 1992: 42 ff.). But the necessity
of the community is not identical with its absolute unity or homogeneity, far from
it, because, as I recalled a moment ago, the rights have to be conquered, i.e. imposed
against the resistance of vested power interests and existing dominations: they have
to be ‘invented’ (in the words of Lefort 1981) in the modality of a conquest, and the
content of the duties, or the responsibilities, has to be redefined according to the logic
of this agonistic relationship.
With this idea we come to the second aspect of the dialectic of citizenship.
The idea of a community that is neither dissolved nor unified is hardly reconcilable
with a purely juridical or constitutional definition of the community, therefore
of citizenship itself. But it is conceivable as a historical process and a principle of
permanent reproduction and transformation. And in fact this is the only way to
understand the temporality, therefore the historicity of citizenship as an institution.
Not only is citizenship permanently traversed by crises and tensions, but it is a fragile
institution which over the long run has been destroyed and reconstituted several
times on new bases, within a different institutional framework, from the city-state
to the nation state (and perhaps beyond the nation state, if transnational and post-
national federations become realities). But citizenship as a constitution is threatened
and destabilized, delegitimized by the very democratic power that forms its constituent
power (or whose constituted power it represents), namely the ‘insurrectional’ power
of universalistic civic movements claiming inexistent rights, or broader rights, or
an effective realization of equaliberty. This is what in the beginning I have called
the differential of insurrection and constitution, which no purely formal or juridical
representation of the political can account for. Precisely for that reason it essentially

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 6 Étienne Balibar

belongs to the concept of the political, as a concept which is embedded in history and
collective practice. Otherwise we would be reduced to imagining that the inventions
and conquests of rights, the new definitions of duties or responsibilities, which
correspond to broader and more substantial conceptions of rights, derive from an
‘idea’ that is always already given, either as a pre-historical origin or as a post-historical
destination, or, even more paradoxically, we should advocate a purely conservative
notion of citizenship, resisting its own democratization and probably for that reason
– I will return to this – unable to counteract its own ‘de-democratization’. This would
be, not a political concept of citizenship, but an anti-political one, inasmuch as politics
means the transformation of given realities and the adaptation to their changing
conditions. With the help of concrete historical analyses, against any deductive or
normative or prescriptive concept of politics, we should be able to demonstrate
that citizenship experienced a permanent oscillation between destruction and
reconstruction, where the insurrectional moment at the same time was feared by and
necessary to the institutions. As a consequence, if we admit that citizenship as a more
or less partial realization of the principle of equaliberty is also one of the material
embodiments of universality in the field of politics, we will have to admit that there
is no such thing as possessing or inhabiting forever the realm of universality, in the
manner in which classical philosophers imagined the achievement of the Rights of
Man and the Citizen, or defined the human subject (in fact the modern citizen) as
a representative of the universality of the human species, or its eternal destination.
To borrow an expression used by Gilles Deleuze (1985: 281 ff.), particularly in his
analysis of the function of the movie art in colonial countries during the process of
their own emancipation, this universality should rather become conceptualized in
the modality of ‘un peuple manquant’ [‘a missing people’], which it is a question of
creating out of its own absence or negation.
To finish on this first point, I would like also to draw attention to the fact that
such a differential of insurrection and constitution, combined with the disharmony
of the community that it seeks to transform, is not a purely speculative notion of
contradiction, but involves conflicts that can be very violent indeed. I am thinking in
particular of conflicts on the side of the state and conflicts which affect the history and
the figure of emancipatory movements. Until now I have used a fairly generic notion
of institution, describing citizenship as an institution and suggesting that equaliberty
leaves a trace within institutions, but also one whose reactivation confronts their
specific resistance. But I have avoided using the term ‘state’: not because I would
consider that the question is irrelevant, but on the contrary because I wanted to
keep the possibility of indicating now how the identification of political institutions
with the form of a state construction, where the political practice of agents is strictly
predetermined by their relation to a bureaucratic apparatus of power, intensifies the
antinomic character inherent in the figure of citizenship.
It may be useful in this respect to recall that the notion of the ‘constitution’, or
the ‘constitution of citizenship’, has been profoundly transformed along the path
of historical development, in a direct relationship to the growing importance of the
state, itself intensified by the hegemony of the capitalist market and relationships

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 Cassal Lecture 7

of production. Ancient constitutions, centred on the direct distribution of rights,

the rules of exclusion and inclusion, and the organization of the accountability
of the magistrates, were essentially what we can call ‘material constitutions’,
i.e. constructions of an equilibrium of competing powers, lacking the sovereign
neutrality of the legal form (Mortati 1998). Modern constitutions are ‘formal
constitutions’, couched in the universality of the legal form, which corresponds to
the autonomization and the monopoly of representation of the community by the
state. Modern constitutionalism which performatively declares the universality of
rights and protects them from violations is therefore hardly to be separated from a
principle which, in her commentary of the Weberian distinction of types of political
legitimacy and his thesis of the increasing domination of the rational bureaucratic
type, Catherine Colliot-Thélène (1998) has called the principle of the ‘ignorance of
the people’, or the ‘ignorant people’, which we could also rephrase as principle of the
incompetence of the people.4
This shows how acute the contradiction becomes between participation and
representation in modern citizenship and why the differential of insurrection and
constitution crystallizes in particular in the development of systems of education.
Many of us, myself included, would consider that the development of a public
system of mass education, whatever its imperfections, is an essentially democratic
result and a precondition for the effective democratization of citizenship. We also
know that democracy and meritocracy compete here in a very versatile manner. The
articulation of the representative state with systems of mass education contributes to
enable the ‘commoner’ or the ‘average citizen’ to participate in political discussions
and contestations of the power monopoly of the state apparatus, as it contributes
to the inclusion of social categories formerly excluded from the public sphere.
Borrowing the famous Arendtian expression, it constitutes a basic form of the ‘right
to have rights’, which is not a bad expression for the objectives of what I call the
insurrectional moment of citizenship (Balibar 2007). But the meritocratic principle
of the same systems of education (and what would be a non-meritocratic system
of mass education? This is profoundly enigmatic) is also a mechanism of selection
and exclusion of the mass from the possibility of really controlling the action of the
magistrates and participating in the administration of public affairs. It excludes the
possibility of collective self-government by creating a hierarchy of knowledge which
is also a hierarchy of power, even without taking into account the class character (or
the oligarchic mechanisms) that, more than ever, characterizes our contemporary
school systems. By recalling the class dimension of contemporary constitutions of
citizenship, however, I want not only to describe a tension between official democratic
principles and oligarchic realities, but also, more disturbingly, to point at another
kind of contradiction affecting modern constitutions of citizenship, this time on the
side of the insurrectional movements themselves.
I will not justify at length the idea that class struggles have played – and still
play – an essentially democratic role in the history of modern citizenship,
notwithstanding their totalitarian deviations. This was the case not only because class
struggles, especially the organized class struggles of the working class – in the whole

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 8 Étienne Balibar

spectrum of their reformist and revolutionary tendencies – were an essential agent

in the definition and the recognition of basic social rights, rendered at the same
time more necessary and more difficult by the rise of industrial capitalism, decisively
contributing to the emergence of what I will discuss in a minute under the heading
of ‘social citizenship’, but – more directly relating to my current concern – because
they illustrated in a typical manner the articulation of the individual and the collective
which is essential to the very notion of insurrection. As I have argued elsewhere, it
is a crucial aspect of modern citizenship that the rights of the citizen are borne by the
individual subject but conquered by collective movements and campaigns which each
time invent new forms and languages of solidarity (see Balibar 2010). The reciprocal
thesis is indeed that, within the forms and institutions of solidarity and collective
inventions of equaliberty in the form of extended rights, there takes place an essential
process of subject-formation or autonomization of the individual. This is what the
dominant ideology stubbornly denies, suggesting that collective political activity is
alienating by its very nature. We must resist this prejudice, but we cannot all the same
believe that the class struggles represented an unlimited or unconditional principle
of universality. It is not by chance that the mainstream of class organizations of the
Labour movement – in spite of many efforts and acute conflicts which formed so
to speak an insurrection within the insurrection – have remained largely blind to
the problems of colonial, cultural, or domestic oppression, both theoretically and
practically, when they were not directly nationalist, racist and sexist. This was due
to the fact that the resistance and the protest against definite forms of domination
created or relied on counter-communities which involved their own principles of
exclusion and hierarchy. Our attention is therefore drawn to the fact that there is no
such thing as absolute universalities or emancipations, but only finite or limited moments
of insurrection, and that the internal contradictions of the politics of emancipation are
transferred into and reflected within the most democratic constitutions of citizenship,
contributing at least passively to its de-democratization.
Given the amount of time that I have already spent discussing my first point, which
is also the most theoretical, I will now cut through the other two points, which indeed
form a dialectical progression, in order to give an idea of how I see their articulation
from the point of view of the current conjuncture. Allow me to be rather brief on the
issue of ‘social citizenship’ and its relation to the transformation of the representative
function of the state and the modes of organization of politics itself, in spite of the
rather fascinating complexity that this subject has acquired in discussions about the
dramatic change that it has suffered in the last three decades. Whether the notion of
‘social citizenship’ entirely belongs to the past, and to what extent, is a question that
is anything but easily resolved, especially now that the financial crisis has brought
attention to the importance of the capacities of resistance of social systems to what
Robert Castel (1995 and 2003) called the negative forms of individuality. But, let us
note in passing, this is a moment when our descriptions and judgments are heavily
dependent on the ‘geo-political’ place – I would prefer to say the ‘cosmopolitical’
place, in the etymological sense – where our discourse is constructed and enunciated.
The extent to which ‘social citizenship’, as it was developed in Western Europe in the

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 Cassal Lecture 9

twentieth century, and to a lesser extent in the U.S., i.e. in the dominant capitalist
society of the period, represents a general form or a virtually universalistic invention
in the history of citizenship, is a fairly open question, whose answer depends at the
same time on how we understand its dependency on imperialist global structures,
and how we analyse its own contradictions. It is on this second aspect that I want to
propose some remarks to open the possibility of a reflection on the consequences of
its current crisis.
The notion of ‘social citizenship’ was proposed initially by Thomas Humphrey
Marshall in the wake of the great transformations prompted by World War II in
the rights of organized labour and the protection of individuals against the risks
considered typical of the proletarian condition (but more or less associated with every
form of social life not guaranteed by the revenues of property). It has recently been the
focus of intense scrutiny and redefinition that has highlighted both its political and
its anthropological dimensions (by Sandro Mezzadra, Robert Castel and Margaret
Somers among others).5 Of primary importance in my view is the fact that – after
heated debates which trace back to the controversies of the Industrial Revolution on
the connection between charity, philanthropy and the disciplining of the workforce
– it was not conceived as a simple mechanism of insurance or compensation for
the most degraded forms of poverty or the exclusion from the very possibility of a
decent family life for the paupers, but as a universal mechanism of social solidarity
that concerned virtually all citizens and encompassed all social strata (the rich were
entitled to this protection as were the poor, which symbolically means not so much
that the poor are treated like the rich than the reverse: the rich are treated like the
poor, especially given the fact that most of the new social rights are linked to the
actual engagement in a profession, in other terms a formal universalization of the
anthropological category of labour as a defining character of the human).6 Note
here once again that this posed a sharp problem of gender equality, especially in a
historical moment in which most women were still incorporated in social life mainly
as wives of ‘active’ men, subjected to them. Equally important is the fact that the
negative element consisting of the protection from and prevention of insecurity (in
fact a typical ‘negation of the negation’) was also, for very powerful economic and
ideological reasons, at least indirectly associated with an agenda of the reduction of
inequalities, to which no political party could not formally adhere. It included in
particular a maximization of the chances of upward mobility through the opening of
educational institutions to any citizen or future citizen, or the ideal dismantling of
the cultural monopoly of the bourgeoisie (its exclusive access to the famous capacités
or capabilities),7 and the progressive taxation of the revenues of capital, which had
been completely ignored in classical capitalism (and is today again increasingly
neglected). For these reasons the political system tendencially instituted or aimed
at in the form of ‘social citizenship’ (largely anticipated in the name of a ‘social-
democratic’ programme) was not reducible to a collection of separated social rights,
especially not a collection of social rights granted from above to ‘weak’ individuals
who should be seen as passive beneficiaries, whose entitlements should be scrutinized
in permanence and adjusted to a minimum by the state, as liberal ideologists were

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 10 Étienne Balibar

never tired of claiming. More precisely it made these social rights a fluctuating reality
whose movements of increase and decrease, in the face of persisting inequalities and
a structural dissymmetry of the social powers of capital and labour which was never
really challenged, completely depended on a permanent relationship of forces.
It is important to remark here that in no social-democratic regime of Western
Europe the complete system of social rights was incorporated into the formal
constitution or the superior norm (Grundnorm) of public law – Britain being in this
respect a special and perhaps an emblematic case because lacking a unified formal
constitution. In fact the relevant notion here is again that of a ‘material constitution’
of citizenship, no doubt sanctioned by law at various levels, but essentially made of
the equilibrium of powers among social classes, the contingent reciprocity of rights
and struggles, therefore social movements. There is no doubt to me that the idea –
broadly shared among Marxists – that the so-called ‘Keynesian compromise’ trading
the recognition of social rights and an institutional representation of labour in politics
against the moderation of wages and the practical abandonment of the revolutionary
perspective of the overthrowing of capitalism on the side of the working class, therefore
in a sense the end of the ‘proletariat’ in the classical sense and as a consequence the
relative neutralization of the violence of social conflict, contains an essential element
of truth.8 This neutralization was sought in permanence, but it was one side of the
medal. The other side was the permanence of the struggle, as became clear a contrario
when the imbalance of forces at the global level combined with the ossification of
the system itself to launch a new cycle of proletarianization (which Castel calls the
emergence of the precarious class, or ‘précariat’). It produced also the displacement
of social violence towards other fields: the colonial and postcolonial arena to be sure,
the periodic outburst of warfare among nations, but also the whole range of what the
Durkheimian school of sociology called ‘anomy’, namely the individual and collective
forms of interiorized ‘irrational’ violence, or violence without a utilitarian goal. It was
correlative of the imposition of social norms of morality and rationality, the essential
form taken by the category of ‘duty’ when the rights of the individuals are not only
civil and civic, but also social.9
I want to conclude this very schematic attempt at a definition of social citizenship
by emphasizing once again the crucial character of the tension between conflict and
institution, in other terms the persistence of the political dimension, which continues
in other ways the dialectics of insurrection and constitution. It is insufficient in my
view, as well as historically wrong, to think of the emergence of social citizenship
either as a unilateral concession granted by the bourgeois state in the name of its
integrative function, or a logical consequence of the necessity of a regulation of the
free play of the market, due to the fact that market capitalism tended to threaten
the integrity of the workforce on whose utilization it relied. These factors existed,
no doubt, but a third conflictual element was needed in order to have them push
in the same direction. Historically this element was ‘socialism’, in the variety of its
formulations and implementations. In other places I have insisted on the idea that
the state which implemented social citizenship to a greater or lesser degree was to be
defined as a ‘national and social state’: not only in this sense that the social agenda

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 Cassal Lecture 11

of reforms was by definition carried on within national boundaries under the aegis
of national sovereignty, which also required a sufficient degree of autonomy and
economic control for the nation, but in this sense that – especially in periods of acute
crisis, such as the modern total wars – it was only on the condition of universalizing
social rights that the nation state could survive (Balibar 2004: 180–202).10 Therefore
the two attributes of the state, the ‘national’ and the ‘social’, were knit together in
a system of reciprocity, or mutual presupposition. But this description ought to
be carried one step further. In fact the ‘socialist’ element, which belongs at least
momentarily to the insurrectional side of citizenship, or embodies for a certain
historical period some of the radical sides of democracy, became embedded in the
national horizon but was never simply identical with nationalism, except – let us not
forget – when in conjunctures of acute crisis they became merged in a totalitarian
discourse and practice. It has powerfully contributed to granting reality and relative
autonomy to a political public sphere that was reducible neither to the bureaucratic
operations of the state nor to the private contractual dimensions of civil society.
Socialism in this sense was never achieved; it was a contested project or an agenda
of reforms that continuously reignited conflict in the middle of the institutional
articulation of capital and labour, property and solidarity, market logics and state
rationality, therefore maintaining a political character for the public sphere. This was
the case in certain limits only, however, due to the articulation of social citizenship
with a reproduction of capitalist social relations on the one side, and to the exigencies
of the relative neutralization of antagonism, or violent antagonism within the public
realm on the other side: in other terms the construction of apparatuses of political
consensus which prevented adversaries from becoming enemies, but also tended to
freeze existing relationships of social forces and achieved compromises.
Hence what I have called in anticipation the aporia of progress to which the history
of social citizenship provides an almost perfect realization. It is only in the name
of unlimited progress, or the possibility of pushing the movement toward equal
capacities in society, as an ideal and a collective desire, that the transformation of
vested forms of domination and the conquest of an enlarged horizon of liberties
for the mass can be pushed ahead. But the limits of the progression are structurally
inscribed in the material constitution that combines the national and the social, the
reproduction of capitalism and the effective generalization of equal rights. So that the
very real achievements of democracy in the National Social State, or the progressive
moments in its construction, are inseparable from a periodically renewed imposition
of its limits, which may take the form of counter-reforms or more violent reactions.
It is a crucial question for our analysis of the contemporary crisis of the idea of
social citizenship and the progressive dismantling of its realizations, which is also
a deep crisis of the democratic principle, to decide whether this crisis which affects
the contents of social rights in the fields of job security or medicare or access to
superior education as well as the legitimacy of political representation, is due only to
the ‘external’ assault of a liberal or neo-liberal form of capitalism empowered by the
transnational scale at which financial markets now operate, or also due to the ‘internal’
contradictions and limits of social citizenship itself. In that sense the perspective

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 12 Étienne Balibar

of continuous progress towards greater and bolder enunciations of rights, and more
intensive articulations of the autonomy of the individual and the importance of
solidarity, would be prevented not only because of the interests it confronts, but
because of its intrinsic contradictions.
I believe that this second hypothesis is the correct one. It is more dialectical than
the idea of a conspiracy of nasty capitalists and it is also more political, since it allows
us to imagine practical possibilities, as it does not represent the popular classes, once
beneficiaries of relatively important social conquests and now progressively deprived
of their security and collective hopes, as simple victims: they are genuine actors, whose
capacities of influencing their own history depend on the transformations of external
and internal conditions, but also on their own representations of the system in which
they act. It is on this basis, however allusive and incomplete, that I will now consider
some aspects of the current discussion on the meaning and effects of so-called ‘neo-
liberalism’. I will rely on the presentation of the issue that has been offered by Wendy
Brown (2005) in her essay on ‘Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy’, which
has been widely discussed and is becoming increasing influential in critical circles.
In her essay Brown argues that neo-liberalism is essentially different from classical
liberalism, as it removes the distinction between political and economic liberalism,
more precisely the relative autonomy of the economic and the political sphere that
was so crucial for the representation of the state as an agency external to the field
of economy, whose interventions should be reduced to a minimum. This crucial
change makes it possible to combine the deregulation of the market with permanent
interventions of the state throughout the field of civil society (and even the intimate
life of subjects) in order to facilitate the emergence of citizens whose subjective
concern is the utilitarian calculus. This allows Brown to give a very convincing
account of the apparently contradictory mixtures of libertarian discourses and
coercive moralizing or religious programmes that have been so influential since the
‘Reagan–Thatcher revolution’ of the 1980s. I completely agree with this side of her
analysis, which other critics have complemented in their own way (Harvey 2005;
Renault 2008). It includes a description of the unlimited extension of market criteria
such as the individual or aggregate calculus of ratios of inversions (costs) and results
(profits) to private and public activities which, in the classical model or bourgeois
capitalism (and even more in what I have called the National Social State), were in
principle considered irreducible to commodity production and the law of value, such
as education and scientific research, the quality of public services and administration,
public health and judiciary processes, national security, etc. I will take this description
for granted, and I want to concentrate on Brown’s more philosophical idea that
neo-liberalism is indeed a powerful form of political agency whose actors are in fact
spread throughout society. However it is a political agency or political formation
which could be called also anti-political, since it not only neutralizes the element of
conflict inherent in the classical Machiavellian picture of politics (not to mention
the idea of a constitutive ‘insurrection’ without which there would be no collective
assertion and constitution of rights), but renders it a priori meaningless, by creating
the conditions of a society (or civilization) where the actions of the individuals and

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 Cassal Lecture 13

the groups – including their possible violence – are measured against a single criterion
of utility. It is in order to describe this preventive neutralization or suppression of
social and political antagonisms that Brown would retrieve Michel Foucault’s notion
of governmentality and draw its political consequences.11
Governmentality as defined by Foucault, we remember, encompasses the whole
set of practices which allow it to modify the ‘spontaneous’ behaviour of individuals
or exercise power over their own power of resistance and action, either through the
use of coercive, disciplinary methods, or through the diffusion of cultural and ethical
models, or a combination of both. Why is there a challenge of neo-liberalism so lethal
to the traditional definition of politics, including class politics or the kind of liberal
politics which made it possible to develop an internal critique of existing dominations,
which she calls ‘de-democratization’, but which is also clearly a disqualification of the
very notion of active citizenship? This is apparently because neo-liberalism does not
simply advocate a retreat from the political, but has embarked on a new definition of
its ‘subjective’ motivation as well as its institutional instruments. This new definition
is also what Brown calls a new rationality, because it simultaneously modifies the
subjective and objective conditions of the political experience, the material constraints
under which increasingly numerous individuals of all classes find themselves situated,
and the values or conceptions of the ‘good’ (and the ‘bad’) to which they submit the
evaluation of their own actions, ultimately their possibilities of valorizing their own
life and prizing themselves. Allow me to indicate which problems in particular I
believe are involved in such a theorization (each of which of course would deserve a
long and careful discussion).
A first problem, it seems to me, concerns the very diagnosis of a crisis of
traditional political systems, be they liberal or authoritarian, that is involved in this
description. Admittedly this crisis ought to be considered not a simple episode of
tension and doubt, but a deep and irreversible phenomenon, precluding any return
to the previous paradigms of social action in an unmodified form. We can agree
on that, but there remain two opposite possibilities: one which would view this
transformation as essentially a negative symptom of the decomposition of traditional
structures, which were both structures of domination and structures of resistance
to domination, but leading per se to no sustainable regime of social life, therefore
corresponding to an extremely unstable situation in which many different and largely
unpredictable evolutions become possible;12 the other one – it seems to me, the
one that, in agreement with Foucault’s notion of the productivity or positivity of
power, Brown herself would endorse – would see it not as a dissolution, but precisely
as an invention or an alternative solution to the problems of the adaptation of the
individual’s behaviour to the necessities of capitalism and its political organization.
This is indeed where the idea that the current crisis of the model of ‘social citizenship’
(wherever it was sufficiently developed) was due not only to the increasing power of
its adversaries, ‘the revenge of the capitalists’ as it were but also to the development of
its internal contradictions, could play a significant role. But we must be aware of what
such a thesis ultimately means, namely that a social and political regime is historically
possible that is not so much anti-democratic, as were various forms of authoritarian,

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 14 Étienne Balibar

dictatorial or fascist regimes, than a-democratic, in the sense that democratic demands,
movements and values (such as equaliberty) no longer play any significant role in its
development. This would be a real change of the forces of historical transformation, or
a way of transiting from history to something like a ‘post-history’, that we must take
very seriously. Much more seriously in any case than the lenient visions of Francis
Fukuyama at the time of the collapse of the Soviet system in Europe.13
However, I don’t think that the story can stop here. On the one hand, it seems
to me that one should discuss the extent to which Brown’s view of the processes
of de-democratization and similar analyses are dependent on the particularity of
U.S. history and society (which, to say in passing, was not the typical site of the
development of social citizenship and the national social state, for reasons both
geopolitical – the U.S. hegemony in the capitalist world – and cultural – tracing
back to its highly individualistic ideology of the frontier). It would be utterly unfair,
of course, to reproach Brown for not taking into account six years ago what the
current financial crisis is suddenly revealing, namely that the neo-liberal model has
its own internal instability and lethal contradictions, or that it is in any case rather a
model of permanent crisis than a new model of relative stabilization of contemporary
capitalism. It will be most interesting to observe the ways in which she includes in her
analyses the typically north-American dimensions of the neo-capitalist model revealed
by the crisis, and also the meaning of the political reactions that, as to now, it has
elicited in U.S. society. Nothing has taken a final shape in this respect. But I have
another question, which concerns the latent apocalyptic consequences of the idea of
de-democratization as it is constructed here.
This question, I must admit, is prompted by both the analogies and the differences
which I perceive between this description and what I would call Karl Marx’s
nightmare. By this formula, I refer to the model of the so-called ‘real subsumption’,
which Marx elaborated in an additional chapter of Capital, Book I (the so-called
‘unpublished chapter’, published posthumously).14 Clearly, Marx left this chapter
aside in the end because its implications were devastating for the very idea of
proletarian or revolutionary politics, which it would condemn to the alternative of
withering away forever or experiencing a messianic reconstitution out of its very
conditions of impossibility. The idea of real subsumption is the idea of a capitalism
that does not only use (or ‘consume’) the labour force of the workers and pushes
to a maximum its production of surplus labour or its capacities of exploitation: it
is the idea of a capitalism that in the end produces (or reproduces) the labour force
itself as a commodity, by determining in advance and imposing on it ‘useful’ and
‘manageable’ qualities, through the modeling of human needs and desires.15 The
Marxian apocalyptic vision sees the extinction of politics qua constitutive dimension
of history as a result of an extreme, pure economic logic, whereas the post-Foucauldian
discourse sees it as a result of power logic and the invention of a new rationality. But
both representations are clearly haunted – and rightly so – by the problem of the
production of voluntary servitude in modern societies, which would not be so much
the result of the imaginary fascination for a personal sovereign, than the combined
effect of multiple mass practices, micro-powers and everyday behaviours.16 I am aware

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 Cassal Lecture 15

that Brown is very cautious in her anticipations and diagnoses, but others are less so,
and in fact there are various forms under which we see the return of the apocalyptic
in contemporary critical theory: ranging from the idea of a transformation of history
into a pure simulacrum or a ‘virtual’ process, to the idea of self-destructive ‘bio-
politics’ reducing social life to ‘bare life’.
More rapidly, I will indicate two other problems that seem to me worth discussing
within the perspective of a process or moment of ‘de-democratization’ provoking
the crisis of the national-social state, exploiting it, or resulting from it. Such a de-
democratization is clearly linked with an intensification and increasing technological
sophistication of procedures for controlling the life, movements, opinions and
attitudes to others of the individuals and the groups, which are territorial and
mobile, national and transnational. One thinks of the technologies of electronic
and biological identification and registration, which Giorgio Agamben (2004)
among others has denounced.17 But there are also the psychiatric and behaviourist
classifications of individuals since early childhood, onto the measurements of alleged
dangerous character of adults, which are even much more destructive from the point
of view of the suppression of freedom and self-ownership. However the ‘positive’
counterpart of these procedures of control, namely the development of a new ethics
and care of the self, in which individuals are called to ‘moralize’ their own conduct
according to the universal principle of maximizing one’s own utility or productivity,
has in fact a dark side that does not stop in the production of voluntary servitude.
I am thinking in particular of the description proposed by Castel of what he calls a
phenomenon of negative individualism associated with the dismantling or the decay
of the social institutions and the forms of public solidarity which secured a more or
less complete incorporation, or to borrow Castel’s favourite category, an affiliation of
individuals to a community of other citizens over several generations. A de-affiliated
individual – for example a young jobless national or immigrant – is a subject to
whom contradictory injunctions are continuously addressed, such as to display
the capacities of an ‘entrepreneur’ of himself, whereas all the collective conditions
which make self-reliance possible are in fact denied to him. This produces not only
despair, sometimes self-destructive violence, but it produces a tendency towards the
demand for compensatory communities based on the imaginary of collective hyper-
power, which are negative or impossible communities in the same sense in which de-
affiliated individuals are negative or impossible individuals. They can be local, based
on the development of gangs, but they can also become tendentially global, based
on a religious or a national and racial imaginary. This raises the problem of the new
function of ‘populism’ in contemporary politics. I agree with Ernesto Laclau (2005)
that populism should not be demonized, because in a sense there is no more a ‘people’
in the political without a ‘populism’ than there is a ‘nation’ without a ‘nationalism’
or a ‘common’ without a ‘communism’. Therefore some forms of populism, in spite
or because of their very ambivalence, are the necessary condition for the formation
of a universalistic political discourse which looks beyond the particularity of the
democratic demands of different groups or movements seeking emancipation from
heterogeneous forms of domination. In that sense we may have to admit that the

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 16 Étienne Balibar

spectre of populism, for better or worse, is always already haunting the dialectic
of insurrection and constitution with which I started this presentation. But I also
ask a reverse question: under which conditions is a populist form of identification
with the missing community, or the imaginary community, a framework for the
mobilization of democratic demands? And when is it merely a screen on which
imaginary compensations for the de-socialization of negative individuals, therefore
also a collective demand for the exclusion of stigmatized ‘others’, becomes projected?
I would not completely separate the discussion of the violent tensions and ambivalent
effects of the articulation between affiliation and de-affiliation, or socialization and
internal exclusion of the autonomous individual, or positive and negative individualism
and communitarianism, from the discussion of the crisis of political representation that,
clearly, forms another aspect of the neo-liberal transformation of the structure of the
political. This has become quite a commonplace, which produces thousands of pages
of more or less interesting political theory a year. But the question of representation,
in view of its defence as a fundamental guarantee of liberal political systems – the one
that totalitarian systems claimed to overcome and in fact reversed in the name of the
organic unity of their respective peoples – or in view of its critique as a mechanism of
expropriation of the citizen’s initiative and competence, is too often simply identified
with the question of parliamentary representation, which represents only one of its
aspects and one of its historical possible forms.18 The crisis of parliamentary democracy
is nothing new: some of its symptoms, such as the tendency towards the corruption of
the elected representatives of the people who then become intermediaries between the
economic corporate interests, the constituencies and the administrative and legislative
state machine, are contemporaneous with its very constitution. They present no
significant difference over three centuries between the era of the ‘rotten boroughs’ and
the era of the private or public additional salaries or abusive financial compensations
for MPs. What is much more interesting from the point of view of a theory of the
antinomies of citizenship is the crisis of representation itself, in its general concept, as a
capacity for free and equal citizens to delegate their power to representatives at whichever
level in order to perform public functions, acquiring power precisely inasmuch as they
entrust it to others. Let us not forget, however, that in the republican tradition a teacher
or a judge as well as a politician is a ‘representative of the people’, who was selected
according to more or less direct procedures which presuppose a democratic acceptance.
There seems to be in the crisis of politics indicated by the term de-democratization not
only a disqualification of this or that form of representation but a disqualification of the
principle of representation itself: it is, on the one hand, supposedly made unnecessary
or even irrational in view of the calculable optimization of processes of ‘governance’ of
social programmes and social conflicts which would result of their essentially utilitarian
nature, and on the other hand impracticable and supposedly counterproductive when
the responsibility of the citizen-subject is essentially perceived in terms of his or her
potential deviancy from social norms.
Isn’t it here, however, that we might try and sketch what I would certainly
not call a hope, but an alternative way of reasoning? We can try and ground it on
the interpretation of some forms of resistance, solidarities, collective inventions,

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 Cassal Lecture 17

individual revolts that are prompted or intensified by the very spread of the neo-
liberal style of governance, which taken together might delineate the figure of a new
kind of insurrectional politics, therefore also dialectically make it possible to imagine
new modalities of the constitution of citizenship.19
I am not abstractly choosing, however, between the two antithetic figures or
symbolic modes of subjectivation that may correspond to the idea of insurgent
citizenship. One is the deviant subject, resisting procedures of control, moralization
and normalization imposed by the rationality of the neo-liberal order, which are even
more coercive than that of the National Social State, although they probably no more
than develop the germs already given in the disciplines and punishments of the latter.
A deviant ‘citizen-subject’ is a ‘minoritarian’ one who invents what Foucault would
have called heterotopias rather than utopias, which are also self-imposed protections
against the nihilistic forms of violent negative individuality.20 The other figure that
comes to mind is that of the militant or ‘majoritarian’ subject of collective political
action, who joins campaigns for civic or democratic causes which also have a moral
dimension, such as the defence of the environment, or the solidarity with illegal
migrants hunted and dehumanized by the very militarized society which pushed them
into the realm of illegality, or the apparently more traditional causes of the defence of
labour rights and popular culture. I am not even sure that the two figures, in fact pure
ideal types, can be completely separated. They correspond to heterogeneous political
logics, however, and they are occasionally incarnated in separated practices which
do not originate in the same parts of the society, or the global world, and above all
do not speak the same political language. This is also the reason why they can form
only transitional unities or alliances. But these unities or alliances are also justified by
the discovery that multiple forms of inequalities and exclusions are combined in a
single complex system, or a network of political exigencies. It is on the basis of such
remarks that, I hope on another occasion, I would try to elaborate a little more on
the idea of a public sphere that is not already given, even if it can make use of existing
structures of communication and rights of expression, but constructed, or ‘missing’,
as the people itself, and the idea of a political actor who is not the incarnation of a
single empirical-transcendental type – such as ‘the Worker’, or ‘the Proletarian’, or
‘the postcolonial subject’, or ‘the Woman’ or ‘the Migrant’ – but rather a collective
and composed, hybrid political actor, working and framing itself across internal and
external borderlines. Its permanent task is to overcome its own split interests as much
as confronting the power of its adversaries. But these are probably parts of one single
problem.

Notes
  1. This article is a slightly revised version (much of the ‘oral’ formulas and indeed the
‘Gallicisms’ have been retained) of my Cassal Lecture in French Culture, delivered on 12
May 2009, at the Institute for German & Romance Studies, University of London, in
collaboration with Royal Holloway College, University of London. I express my gratitude
to these institutions, and particularly to Professor Naomi Segal, Professor Mandy Merck,
Professor John O’Brien and Ms Flo Austin. An extended version appears (in French) as
the introductory essay of my volume (Balibar 2010).

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 18 Étienne Balibar

  2. Many of these themes are already present in the analyses that I have carried out over
the past twenty years, now collected in the volume La Proposition de l’égaliberté (Balibar
2010). I try not pure and simply to repeat, but also to simplify and rectify them in the
hope of reaching a better clarity.
  3. I would call it a community of citizens in the ancient sense: see Cicero, The Republic, I, 31:
‘et talis est quaeque res publica […] et quae, si aequa non est, ne libertas quidemn est. Qui
autem aequa potest esse...?’ [‘and every State is such (…) but if it is not equal for all, it does
not deserve the name of liberty. And how can it be equal for all? (Cicero 1928; translation
modified)].
  4. See also Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007: xxxvii ff.).
  5. I recommend Mezzadra’s excellent critical edition and commentary of T. H. Marshall’s
classic essay ‘Citizenship and social class’ (1950) recently published in Italian (Marshall
2002). A thorough discussion of problems related to the notion of ‘social citizenship’ is
to be found in Somers (2008).
  6. On the crucial debate between a paternalistic and a universalistic conception of welfare,
see Sassoon (1996).
  7. Pierre Rosanvallon (1985) has studied the crucial importance of the correlation between
‘capacité’ and ‘propriété’ in the constitution of French liberalism; see also Rosanvallon
(2000).
  8. This is Antonio Negri’s point in his recent essay (Negri 2009).
  9. On the transformation of the sociological notions of ‘norm’ and ‘anomy’ in the work of
Michel Foucault, see Stéphane Legrand (2007).
10. In a recent article, Sandra Halperin (2009) basically pursues the same argument.
11. ‘This mode of governmentality […] convenes a “free” subject who rationally deliberates
about alternative courses of action, makes choices, and bears responsibility for the
consequences of these choices. In this way, Lemke argues, “the state leads and controls
subjects without being responsible for them”; as individual “entrepreneurs” in every
aspect of life, subjects become wholly responsible for their well-being and citizenship is
reduced to success in this entrepreneurship. Neo-liberal subjects are controlled through
their freedom – not simply […] because freedom within an order of domination can
be an instrument of that domination – but because of neo-liberalism’s moralization of
the consequences of this freedom. This also means that the withdrawal of the state from
certain domains and the privatization of certain state functions does not amount to a
dismantling of government but, rather, constitutes a technique of governing, indeed the
signature technique of neo-liberal governance in which rational economic action suffused
throughout society replaces express state rule or provision. Neo-liberalism shifts “the
regulatory competence of the state onto ‘responsible’, ‘rational’ individuals [with the aim
of] encourag[ing] individuals to give their lives a specific entrepreneurial form” (Lemke
2001: 202)’ (Brown 2005: 43 ff.).
12. This is very much, for example, the view of Immanuel Wallerstein (1995).
13. Who remembers today Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the ‘end of history’? See his bestselling
book The End of History or the Last Man (1992).
14. The ‘unpublished chapter’ of Capital, Book I is translated as ‘Appendix: results of the
immediate process of production’ (with an Introduction by Ernest Mandel), in Marx
(1990: 943–1084).
15. Marcuse (1964) combined this view with post-Freudian concepts in One-Dimensional
Man, whose influence I believe is very strong on Brown.
16. Current discussions about the modern forms of ‘voluntary servitude’ increasingly return
to the namesake pamphlet by Étienne de La Boétie (published posthumously in 1576)
(see La Boétie 2002, with commentaries by Abensour, Clastres, Lefort).
17. See Foessel and Garapon (2006).

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 Cassal Lecture 19

18. Important discussions on the genealogy of ‘representation’ in modern politics are

developed in Italy under the guidance of Giuseppe Duso (2003).
19. I am referring to the title, and the content, of the recent book published by James Holston
(2008) on the experience of illegal communal structures in the favelas [shanty towns] of
the Brazilian big cities.
20. This is essentially the notion proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their
collective work Mille plateaux (1980). Foucault’s notion of ‘heterotopia’ is essentially to
be found in his essay ‘Different spaces’ (Foucault 1998).

Works cited
Agamben, Giorgio (2004) ‘Non au tatouage biopolitique’, Le Monde (11 January).
Balibar, Étienne (2004) ‘Homo nationalis: an anthropological sketch of the nation-form’, in
We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton
University Press), 11–30.
——— (2007) ‘(De)constructing the human as human institution: a reflection on the
coherence of Hannah Arendt’s practical philosophy’, Social Research 74.3, 727º38.
——— (2010) La Proposition de l’égaliberté: essais politiques 1989–2009 (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France).
Brown, Wendy (2005) ‘Neoliberalism and the end of liberal democracy’, in Edgework: Critical
Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 37–59.
Castel, Robert (1995) Les Métamorphoses de la question sociale (Paris: Fayard).
——— (2003) L’Insécurité sociale: qu’est-ce qu’être protégé? (Paris: Seuil).
Cicero (1928) De Republica, De Legibus, with trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (London: William
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la démocratie, ed. Gérard Duprat (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), 16–40.
Deleuze, Gilles (1985) Cinéma 2: l’image-temps (Paris: Éditions de Minuit).
——— and Félix Guattari (1980) Mille plateaux: capitalisme et schizophrénie, II (Paris:
Éditions de Minuit).
Duso, Giuseppe  (2003)  La rappresentanza politica: genesi e crisi del concetto, 2nd ext. edn.
(Milan: Franco Angeli).
Foessel, Michaël and Antoine Garapon (2006) ‘Biométrie: les nouvelles formes de l’identité’,
Esprit (August-September), 165-73.
Foucault, Michel (1998) ‘Different spaces’, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 2,
ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press), 175–85.
Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History or the Last Man (New York: The Free Press).
Halperin, Sandra (2009) ‘Power to the people: nationally embedded development and mass
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