Friends, Citizens, Strangers: Essays on Where We Belong

Extract

Friends, Citizens, Strangers: Essays on Where We Belong, Richard Vernon, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, pp. vii, 325.

“Should we put locality before citizenship, citizenship before human obligations?” This is the central question animating Richard Vernon's new book. He defines the three sorts of relationship it invokes as follows. Ties of friendship are those partial relationships which “arise from the particular and local character of our lives, lived as, clearly they must be, in particular local contexts”; ties of citizenship are those that “arise from sharing political space, from common subjection to law, and from participation in institutions and processes through which consent to political authority is generated”; and ties among strangers “arise among those who are ‘only humans,’ [who are] categorically but not concretely related to us” (3–4). Vernon recognizes that all three are important, and that is why he believes we need to face “the question of priority of attachment.” He himself does so through an investigation of citizenship, which he pursues in two ways. First, with a number of fascinating chapters—all of them models of scholarship in the history of political ideas—that examine how the question of priority of attachment was dealt with by eight writers, four English (Locke, Wollstonecraft, George Eliot and Mill) and four French (Rousseau, Comte, Proudhon and Bergson). Vernon claims that his question has, for historical reasons, been particularly pronounced in these two countries, although I must say that I cannot think of one country in which it has not. Regardless, he then deals with it more directly, in chapters about the notion of a crime against humanity and about the very nature of special ties and what they imply we owe each other. Finally, in the book's concluding chapter, Vernon offers us an outline of his own solution to the question.