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Global Citizenship Education. Modern Individualism under the Test of Cosmopolitanism

Sébastien Urbanski and Lucy Bell (2024)

Leiden: Brill. Open access.

Extract: “4 The Social Totality in Practice
These issues of distinguishing holism, individualism, liberalism and republicanism are crucial for mapping the “conceptual framework” (UNESCO, 2015, p. 10) that constitutes the dynamic notion of global citizenship education, which itself deserves “conceptual clarity” (Tang, 2015, p. 6). Education professionals, whatever their specific logic of actions, are to a large extent the guarantors of “a conception of the collective good […] in an individualistic society [whose] definition of the common good is the imperative of ensuring the autonomy of each person” (Descombes, 2013, p. 154). In sociology, Boltanski and Thévenot’s approach makes it possible to explore two aspects mentioned above. One aspect is the aspirations of individuals imbued with individualistic morality, as evidenced by the ‘worlds’ (civic, domestic, industrial, inspired, opinion, market) typified around Smith, Rousseau, Saint Augustine, etc. The other aspect is the modes of construction of what is common, based on individual interactions within situations where the hierarchy of beings in presence – and sometimes the definition of these situations – is played out, since people, with similar critical skills to sociologists’, can question social reality on the basis of a ‘world’ or ‘city’ as a typified reserve of topoi prevalent in a given society (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006).” (p. 35)

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