Callan & citizenship as shared fate

I am continuing to work through Callan's Creating Citizens (1997), and though I have not finished the entire work, I want to examine how Callan's argument is impacted by Williams' (2003) conception of citizenship as shared fate. Prima facie, it seems that, though Callan's emphasis on importance of identity might be overblown, at the core, the Rawlsian conception of citizenship developed by Callan works within the framework of citizenship as shared fate.

Williams claims that “A community of shared fate is not an ethical community as such. Its members are not bound to each other by shared values of moral commitments, but by relationships of interdependence, which may or may not be positively valued by its members” (p. 229, emphasis in original). She is making an important point in this statement – people can be linked in a community of shared fate without feeling a commitment to other members of that community. She points to slaves and slave owners as being a community of shared fate. A community of shared fate simply requires that the actions of members have an impact on the other members. This linkage, a connection through the capacity to have an impact, is what generates obligations among members. This is opposed to what Williams sees as the common perspective: that the sharing of values generates obligations. The legitimacy of these communities then rests on the degree to which this connection is recognized by members as bearing an obligation to 'reciprocal justification'.

I want to offer two criticisms/thoughts. First, Williams says the community of shared fate is not an ethical community. This works when though of descriptively, as she notes it should be, but when thought about as a normative ideal, which arises when she discusses the legitimacy of a community of shared fate, it appears that this community is an ethical community because members of a legitimate community of shared fate must share a moral commitment to reciprocal justification. Still, it is a significant distinction that the obligation to others arises from the entanglement of lives rather than a shared commitment values. Too many conceptions of citizenship fall into a trap of confusing the source of this obligation – leading to an emphasis in citizenship education on patriotic commitment to a set of purportedly agreed upon values rather than a commitment to a set of individuals with whom one is entangled.

Despite the fact that Callan might put too much emphasis on inculcating shared values rather than developing a commitment to the community of shared fate, the foundation of citizenship for Callan seems to be very similar to Williams and leads to the need for a similar commitment to reciprocity. Callan builds his case of Rawls' analysis, which begins, like all social contract theories, with the fact that people are entangled with one another. Callan puts emphasis on the concept of reasonableness, which is what generates the commitment to reciprocity. (At this writing, I don't have access to Callan's book, so will have to substantiate this argument later). Williams notes that “the idea of citizenship as shared fate is implicit in many recent accounts of citizenship in multicultural societies, including some of the accounts I have criticized above for tying citizenship too strongly to an ideal of national identity” (p. 230). However, she does not identify these accounts! I believe that Callan falls into this category and that, at the core, his argument, though perhaps not its conclusions, fit within the conception of citizenship as shared fate.


Callan, E. (1997). Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy. Oxford political theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.  

Williams, M. S. (2003). CITIZENSHIP AS IDENTITY, CITIZENSHIP AS SHARED FATE, AND THE FUNCTIONS OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION. In Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies (Vol. 1, pp. 208-248). Oxford Scholarship Online Monographs.