Twice a month, The duty challenges philosophy and the history of ideas enthusiasts to decipher a question topicality based on the theses of an outstanding thinker.
Fears of indoctrination, an unnecessary overhaul, an ideological program: criticism has multiplied towards the Culture and Quebec Citizenship course, the introduction of which is scheduled for 2023. On the other hand, the project was hailed by many who did not. had not failed to challenge the course it should replace, that of Ethics and Religious Culture (ECR).
Some people appreciated that part of the new course was devoted to citizenship education. Although it has been said that this subject was already taught, it was actually only touched on in the ECR course and its History and Citizenship Education component.
The thought of the contemporary Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe sheds a relevant light on what should be education for citizenship. The professor of political theory at the University of Westminster has put forward innovative proposals on the squareof politics, conflict in democracy and the importance of emotions in politics.
Conflict and Democracy
The philosopher does not subscribe to the liberal conception of democracy. To deliberative democracy, it opposes another model, a “radical and plural” democracy which is no longer based on antagonism, but on what it designates as agonism.
Sharing the same Greek etymology, the two terms, for Mouffe, refer to the conflict, but in different orders. Whereas an antagonistic conflict opposes enemies who want in principle the annihilation of the other, the agonist conflict brings into play adversaries who are admittedly in contradiction, who engage in a fight for ideas, but who, by virtue of by tacit agreement, recognize the legitimacy for one or the other of the camps to defend its positions.
The conflict is therefore not a defect of democracy, but one of its constitutive elements. According to Mouffe, denying this reality, abandoning oppositions, such as the left-right divide, has perverse effects. Instead of “pacifying society as some people claim, it would rather help create fertile ground for the rise of far-right movements” or, even worse, lead to the emergence of conflicts that cannot be negotiated. within the framework of a democratic policy. It is for these reasons in particular that the philosopher is in favor of the revitalization of a real ideological divide, of an agonist political confrontation.
The emphasis that Mouffe places on the conflict, which is at the heart of his thinking, can be used for the debate on the redesign of the Ethics and Religious Culture course. By placing political conflict at the center of democracy, the form that education for citizenship should take becomes clearer. It is no longer a question of developing skills to avoid conflict or of teaching mediation. Rather, it involves teaching primary and secondary students to become adversaries, to prepare them for political engagement.
Learning about conflict is however based on an “ethicopolitical consensus around the values of freedom and equality”. The philosopher believes that this consensus is essential so that politics does not sink into confrontation between enemies. Although the meaning of these values of freedom and equality may be the subject of differing views, the recognition of their necessity is essential. Indeed, the consensus on the “border between what is legitimate and illegitimate is always the result of collective bargaining”.
What is not the subject of consensus is therefore found in the field ofpolitical and can be debated in the arena of the Politics. Mouffe here takes up a classic typology between the and the policy by assigning it very precise definitions. Through the political, it refers “to the dimension of antagonism inherent in human societies, an antagonism which can take several forms and which can emerge in various social relations”. The politics, for its part, refers to “a set of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and which organize human coexistence”. The two notions are intrinsically linked, and to ignore one of them – the politics being often absent from the subject of a citizenship education course – prevents a real understanding of social phenomena.
This kind of learning about citizenship cannot be reduced to a simple transmission of knowledge relating to partisan contests. It is not a matter of teaching students that 125 deputies sit in the National Assembly or that the Premier of Quebec is called François Legault. In the light of Chantal Mouffe’s thought, the articulation of citizenship, democracy and skills is done through experimentation, that is to say political commitment, whether real or simulated. . In this context, the teacher plays the role of accompanist and recalls the importance of respecting a minimum ethicopolitical consensus. This therefore allows you to learn about conflict, but also to develop skills to understand, explain and analyze the and the Politics.
Collective emotions and identities
If we continue the reflection by drawing inspiration from Mouffe’s thought, the other main role of the teaching staff would be to teach students how to recognize and mobilize their political emotions. For the philosopher, “the primary goal of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions or to relegate them to the private sphere, but to mobilize them in favor of the promotion of democratic conceptions”.
This is a major difference from the traditional subject taught in a citizenship education course. Usually it presents the reason and the arguments that flow from it as the only elements to be taken into account in politics. Mouffe does not reject all rationality, but she suggests considering it as part of the object of conflicts, while affects, passions and emotions can be the engine of mobilization.
To mobilize emotions in political struggle, it is necessary to distinguish between collective and individual emotions, as well as between moral and political emotions. If it is a transgression of moral standards or if the argument is based on Good and Evil, it is a moral emotion. If the emotion is a reaction to an attack targeting political gains or the place a group occupies within society, we will see it as a political emotion.
The issues surrounding the various groups that make up society bring us back to the complex question of collective emotions. Rather than talking about groups, Chantal Mouffe uses the term “collective identities”. These identities do not correspond to the groups described in particular by modern sociology, but to the identities that emerge in the conflictual dimension of the political – so in the political – “on precarious and still vulnerable ground”. The philosopher refuses to see groups with perfectly defined social identities, just as she opposes the idea of ignoring the relational aspect of the different fragments of society.
Each fragment of society can thus be articulated according to “chains of equivalence” with the aim of politically constituting an “us” and a “them”. In other words, the opposing camps can each be formed from several fragments. The challenge is to bring together, through struggles, the fragments with democratic demands that are part of the same chain of equivalence. To take an obvious example, unions and employers are not part of the same chain of equivalence, at least when the individuals who make up these fragments construct their identity based on this polarization.
It is therefore through debates, not just rhetoric as is often the case in traditional citizenship education, and through understanding social structures that students can mesh with fluctuating collective identities. This then allows them to recognize their political and collective emotions in order to mobilize them to take part in the political conflict.
If Chantal Mouffe has not written directly on citizenship education, her works are nonetheless relevant to reflect on the question. By putting the agonist conflict back at the heart of the policy, with an emphasis on the political and by relying on emotions as a motor for mobilization, it provides avenues for the design of renewed content in citizenship education. Learning these concepts could make it possible to train citizens who are able to really take their place at the political level.