The Experience of Home and the Space of Citizenship

Bibliographic Data

ID8100098
AuthorsKirsten Jacobson (corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume48
Issue3
Pages219-245
Publication date2010-08-24
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Southern Journal of Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-4283 • E-ISSN: 2041-6962
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.2041-6962.2010.00029.x
OpenAlexW1850101089
LanguageEN
Citations received19

I argue that, although we are inherently intersubjective beings, we are not first or most originally “public” beings. Rather, to become a public being, that is, a citizen—in other words, to act as an independent and self‐controlled agent in a community of similarly independent and self‐controlled agents and, specifically, to do so in a shared space in the public arena—is something that we can successfully do only by emerging from our familiar, personal territories—our homes. Finding support in texts from philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences, I construe the claim that citizenship is a developed stance as a spatial issue . I conclude that a state (or, for that matter, a philosophy) that takes the human being to begin as an isolated individual agent fails to recognize the essential spatial relationships on which we depend—namely, those arising through our way of being‐at‐home in the world; and, as a result, such a stance not only misconstrues the parameters on which citizenship is itself possible but also risks developing a social situation that encourages behaviors we see in the agoraphobic—namely, the behaviors of alienated and fundamentally homeless human beings

Citizenship · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Good citizenship · Object (grammar · Political science · Politics · Public space · Sociology · State (computer science · Computer Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Psychology · Law · Philosophy · Social Psychology

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