What is the notion of citizenship that reveals itself in such varied and successive appearances as “civic” participation, “civil” society, and “civil” rights? Th e law provides us with positive defi nitions, defi ning individuals’ relationship to given states, which grant rights to participate in civil society. But such defi nitions conceal as much as they reveal. Th e full meaning of citizenship comes out only in relation to other categories which citizenship excludes. Th is is true not only because all categories of meaning are defi ned against their opposites, but also because citizenship as a specifi c category is characterized fundamentally by the principle of exclusion. Citizenship, typically conceived as a bundle of rights, functions de facto as a bundle of privileges, that is to say, of rights that must be granted, rights which (in spite of universalist justifi cations) are always granted to some and not to others, and which are granted on the condition that right-holders renounce their claims on other rights. Th e non-citizen tends to become not only uncivil but also uncivilized, deprived not only of specifi c civil rights but also of human dignity. Th e citizen is civilized while the non-citizen is made barbaric. It becomes necessary therefore to develop the following thesis: that the essence of the citizen is the proletarian tramp. So argues Joseph Grim Feinberg in this Czech translation of an article published in English as “Th e Civic and the Proletarian,” in Socialism & Democracy 27 (2013), no. 3.
In this essay, I reconsider the politics of contemporary philanthropy by navigating between two dominant ideological perspectives on civil society: depoliticization and demonization. I do so with reference to the recent tribulations of three famous magnate-philanthropists, Osman Kavala, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and George Soros. By revisiting my concept of the “civil society effect” – the romanticizing of civil society as a domain free from instrumental political motivations – I aim to shed light on the broader political terrain of contemporary capitalism, in which private capital is too easily understood as a neutral medium for political transformations. At the same time, I focus on the histories and genealogies that the depoliticization of civil society silences, especially the imperial legacies that opponents of liberal philosophy – new authoritarians such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán – frequently invoke with pugnacity.