Introduction

The act of doing policy to or imposing policies on citizens is the cardinal sin of policy practice. As the chapters in this volume have illustrated, to avoid this sin the last half century has witnessed a great experiment that has celebrated and promoted neoliberal principles with the ideas of individual freedom and the sovereign consumer citizen at their core, the great deception being that consumer-citizens are free to choose, don't have policies imposed on them and are free from the stifling confines of bureaucratic states. As the chapters have shown, this is by and large a failed experiment but, despite the economic crisis, the laboratory is still open for business. As processes of financialization have invaded increasing aspects of daily life, the evidence from this volume clearly demonstrates that the effect has been to constrain the autonomy of individuals and weaken the ties of community and solidarity. The loss of collective voice has not been counterbalanced by a stronger individual choice. Moreover, the idea of citizenship has been distorted and used against citizens as large corporations have been able to enjoy the rights of citizenship while evading their duties.

In this concluding chapter we focus on the relationship between the foundational economy and new emerging forms of citizenship. Our starting point is the argument that foundational thinking is necessarily underpinned by the fostering of a new and universalistic model of citizenship, a model that views citizenship as more than a status that brings with it a bundle of rights that one possesses qua citizen, but as something that is also a dynamic part of daily life (Barbera et al, 2018). As a number of the contributors to this volume suggest, this perspective moves beyond citizenship as a collection of rights and responsibilities to emphasize the active and social nature of citizenship where people continually work on, engage with, dispute and argue over their rights and duties. Of course, this is easier said than done, and there is a danger of underestimating the depth of the structural and economic crisis and its effects on the capacities of individual citizens. Moreover, this perspective risks converging with the idea of ‘caring liberalism’ (Jessop et al, 2013: 111) and concentrating on the goal of individual ‘activation’ in terms of self-entrepreneurship and human capital as the main, if not the only, horizon for people's wellbeing.