The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. By Barbara Cruikshank. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. 160p. $41.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Extract

There is a certain comfort, a certain ease, with which many contemporary political thinkers reach for an ideal they call “democratic citizenship” in response to a wide range of problems produced by relations of power: problems of social and political inequality, for instance, problems of injustice, problems of exclusion and marginalization. In The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects, Barbara Cruikshank undertakes the important task of disturbing that ease. “Citizen,” she argues persuasively, is not the atonym of “subject.” Instead, a citizen is a particular kind of a subject, a subject forged in ways that not only enable but also, unavoidably, constrain human social and political possibility. Those who would criticize relations of power need to examine, Cruikshank suggests, the ways in which citizens are made: what she calls the “technologies of citizenship” (for instance, the pedagogic programs, the social services, the social movements) through which modern democratic societies produce members capable of acting politically—and inclined to act politically—to advance their individual and their shared interests.