SALVATORE VECA

Una filosofia politica della cittadinanza

N. 152

Summary - The principal thesis of this article is the following: a political philosophy of citizenship must formulate analytically a normative argument that provides the best possible and consistent interpretation of the notion of citizenship. Such argument has a pertinent sense only within a wider normative theory. This theory is defined by a sequence of several stages which, starting from the constitution of freedom and from the reasons for the political obligation, 1) solves previously the question of the conversion of subjects into citizens; 2) defines the field of collective choices and binds them to some correlation with the individual choices; 3) meets the request for democratic equality put forward thanks to the inference from equal rights of citizenship and formulates a basket of principles of distributive justice; 4)defines the nature of open questions and of the dilemmas of the Welfare State, laying stress on pluralism as a fact and as value in the democratic theory; 5) outlines a global theory of distributive justice to be important for the "citizens of the world" from a cosmopolitical point of view (Kant). In a metatheoretical perspective, the normative theory of citizenship is put forward taking seriously the fundamental relation with the positive or explanatory theories of regimes, institutions and political actors. A normative theory of citizenship is defined within a moral version of the world. This theory is empty if it is not in harmony with the fact that of the same world are given explanatory or descriptive versions. The epistemological thesis put forward by the a. on the "naturalized normative theory" is that an ethics for politics calls for history and political and social science. The thesis stems from W.V.O. Ouine and, more classically, from an interpretation of David Hume's political and moral philosophy.