The Uniqueness of the Historical Birth of Civic Politics in America

MARCELA GONZALEZ; MARTIN PLOT

Baltimore

Congreso; Changing Lives, Resistant Institutions. Eastern Sociological Society, 79th Annual Meeting; 2009

The Eastern Sociological Society

Evidently, to pertain to certain kind of polity must imply the acquisition of some sort of intellectual habitus. As we will show in this paper, confronted with some contemporary scholars, for whom nationhood and ethnicity are almost synonyms, a citizen of a polity built upon immigration from diverse origins tends to be shocked. The surprise springs from the contrast between the incorporated practice of understanding nations as sheer political creations, and the challenging claim that polities should somehow express some sort of pre-existent ethnic identity. Of course, the distinction between political organization and comprehensive ideologies has been recognized and established before, but the main solution that democrats or liberals very often arrive at, usually accepts the thickness of those ideologies and limit itself to the proposal of a thinner overlapping consensus on rational political institutions. However, one should ask while studying this solution, why would somebody prefer the thin overlapping consensus when it is in contradiction with his or her thicker comprehensive ideology? Obviously, the solution may have a better fate where these contradictions are least probable, i.e., in those societies where the thick national identity happens to be rooted in the historically thick, not thin, political institution of new polities in a context in which ethnic homogeneity was not the relevant issue.