Abstract

The earlier entries in this slim volume build to the principal essay from which the collection takes its name. For instance the first essay, “What is a People?” argues that “citizenship” is a social construction based on mutual acceptance in a political community, not a fact of birth into a blood-based nation. Then in “Learning from Catastrophe,” Habermas argues that the signal event of the twentieth century was neither the rise of fascism nor the fall of communism, but rather the creation of the welfare state by West European and North American democracies. Habermas believes that the social welfare state based on an inclusive concept of citizenship shows that democracies can transform social life in the image of a moral vision, the ideal of an association of free and equal citizens.