Home / Summaries / 3.2 Parker; Listening to strangers: Classroom discussion in democratic education / culturally-wholeness-politically

Political Friendship

Q: There is a cognitive and an emotional dimension of trust, what do these entail?

Cognitive dimension: One believes that one's own vulnerabilities won't be exploited. Emotional dimension: One feels uafraid though vulnerable before one's fellow citizens.

6 important questions on Political Friendship

Allen calls fellow citizens not acquaintances but "strangers"; what particular mode of citizenship is needed among them in our times?

Political friendship

What is at the core of political friendship?

Equity, not affinity or intimacy.
Equity = justice, reason, righteousness, justness, fairness?

Were liking one another necessary, democracy would be impossible.
We the people are bound together, not culturally so much as politically, by the problems they face in common.

Why is political trust important?

Allen: distrust makes impossible any serious sense of solidarity among citizens. (p.2824)
Distrust paralyzes democracy because citizens feel insecure with one another.
"Trust in one's fellow citizens consists in the belief, simply, that one is safe with them".

There is a cognitive and an emotional dimension of trust, what do these entail?

Cognitive dimension: One believes that one's own vulnerabilities won't be exploited.

Emotional dimension: One feels uafraid though vulnerable before one's fellow citizens.

On what idea does Allen's "talking to strangers" rest?

Not on an idealization of unanimity, not on consensus, for that scheme exaggerates equality while requiring repression of emotion and suppression of facts.

Wholeness instead of oneness. Because nowhere does "one" mean full, total, complete, all.

In the social imaginary of "we the people", wholeness carves out a space for imagining a political solidarity that falls at that midway point between acquiescence (berusting) and domination (overheersing), where equity and trust among strangers might exist.

What is claiming one's majority? Then and now.

Under the first US constitution: to claim one's majority as a citizen was to both culturally and politically assimilate into and, thus, acquiesce to, another kind of majority (white majority).

After the illusion of oneness had been revealed at Little Rock, to claim one's majority was to practice standing on equal footing with strangers.