From Subject to Citizen offers an original account of the Second Empire (1852-1870) as a turning point in modern French political culture: a period in which thinkers of all political persuasions combined forces to create the participatory democracy alive in France today. Here Sudhir Hazareesingh probes beyond well-known features of the Second Empire, its centralized government and authoritarianism, and reveals the political, social, and cultural advances that enabled publicists to engage an increasingly educated public on issues of political order and good citizenship. He portrays the 1860s in particular as a remarkably intellectual decade during which Bonapartists, legitimists, liberals, and republicans applied their ideologies to the pressing problem of decentralization. Ideals such as communal freedom and civic cohesion rapidly assumed concrete and lasting meaning for many French people as their country entered the age of nationalism. With the restoration of universal suffrage for men in 1851, constitutionalist political ideas and values could no longer be expressed within the narrow confines of the Parisian elite. Tracing these ideas through the books, pamphlets, articles, speeches, and memoirs of the period, Hazareesingh examines a discourse that connects the central state and local political life. In a striking reappraisal of the historical roots of current French democracy, he ultimately shows how the French constructed an ideal of citizenship that was "local in form but national in substance." Originally published in 1998. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The book offers a fresh and timely perspective on the broader field of early postcolonial South Asian history.

Offering a corrective to previous views of Spanish-American independence, this book shows how political culture in Peru was dramatically transformed in this period of transition and how the popular classes as well as elites played crucial roles in this process. Honor, underpinning the legitimacy of Spanish rule and a social hierarchy based on race and class during the colonial era, came to be an important source of resistance by ordinary citizens to repressive action by republican authorities fearful of disorder. Claiming the protection of their civil liberties as guaranteed by the constitution, these &"honorable&" citizens cited their hard work and respectable conduct in justification of their rights, in this way contributing to the shaping of republican discourse. Prominent politicians from Arequipa, familiar with these arguments made in courtrooms where they served as jurists, promoted at the national level a form of liberalism that emphasized not only discipline but also individual liberties and praise for the honest working man. But the protection of men's public reputations and their patriarchal authority, the author argues, came at the expense of women, who suffered further oppression from increasing public scrutiny of their sexual behavior through the definition of female virtue as private morality, which also justified their exclusion from politics. The advent of political liberalism was thus not associated with greater freedom, social or political, for women.

Most Americans believe that the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 marked the settlement of post-Revolutionary disputes over the meanings of rights, democracy, and sovereignty in the new nation. In The Citizenship Revolution, Douglas Bradburn undercuts this view by showing that the Union, not the Nation, was the most important product of independence. In 1774, everyone in British North America was a subject of King George and Parliament. In 1776 a number of newly independent "states," composed of "American citizens" began cobbling together a Union to fight their former fellow countrymen. But who was an American? What did it mean to be a "citizen" and not a "subject"? And why did it matter? Bradburn’s stunning reinterpretation requires us to rethink the traditional chronologies and stories of the American Revolutionary experience. He places battles over the meaning of "citizenship" in law and in politics at the center of the narrative. He shows that the new political community ultimately discovered that it was not really a "Nation," but a "Union of States"—and that it was the states that set the boundaries of belonging and the very character of rights, for citizens and everyone else. To those inclined to believe that the ratification of the Constitution assured the importance of national authority and law in the lives of American people, the emphasis on the significance and power of the states as the arbiter of American rights and the character of nationhood may seem strange. But, as Bradburn argues, state control of the ultimate meaning of American citizenship represented the first stable outcome of the crisis of authority, allegiance, and identity that had exploded in the American Revolution—a political settlement delicately reached in the first years of the nineteenth century. So ended the first great phase of the American citizenship revolution: a continuing struggle to reconcile the promise of revolutionary equality with the pressing and sometimes competing demands of law, order, and the pursuit of happiness.

This important, theoretically sophisticated work explores the concepts of li beral democracy, citizenship and rights. Grounded in critical original research, the book examines Australia's political and legal institutions, and traces the history and future of citizenship and the state in Australia. The central theme is that making proof of belonging to the national culture a precondition of citizenship is inappropriate for a multicultural society such as Australia. This becomes an object lesson for the multicultural regional polities forming throughout the world.

In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. The result is a groundbreaking reassessment of colonial rule in Africa and its enduring aftereffects. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.

What can the universals of political philosophy offer to those who experience "the living paradox of an inegalitarian construction of egalitarian citizenship"? Citizen Subject is the summation of Étienne Balibar’s career-long project to think the necessary and necessarily antagonistic relation between the categories of citizen and subject. In this magnum opus, the question of modernity is framed anew with special attention to the self-enunciation of the subject (in Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, and Derrida), the constitution of the community as “we” (in Hegel, Marx, and Tolstoy), and the aporia of the judgment of self and others (in Foucualt, Freud, Kelsen, and Blanchot). After the “humanist controversy” that preoccupied twentieth-century philosophy, Citizen Subject proposes foundations for philosophical anthropology today, in terms of two contrary movements: the becoming-citizen of the subject and the becoming-subject of the citizen. The citizen-subject who is constituted in the claim to a “right to have rights” (Arendt) cannot exist without an underside that contests and defies it. He—or she, because Balibar is concerned throughout this volume with questions of sexual difference—figures not only the social relation but also the discontent or the uneasiness at the heart of this relation. The human can be instituted only if it betrays itself by upholding “anthropological differences” that impose normality and identity as conditions of belonging to the community. The violence of “civil” bourgeois universality, Balibar argues, is greater (and less legitimate, therefore less stable) than that of theological or cosmological universality. Right is thus founded on insubordination, and emancipation derives its force from otherness. Ultimately, Citizen Subject offers a revolutionary rewriting of the dialectic of universality and differences in the bourgeois epoch, revealing in the relationship between the common and the universal a political gap at the heart of the universal itself.