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Three Rawlsian Rationales for a Cultural Turn in Digital Citizenship Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2025

Julian Culp Open the ORCID record for Julian Culp [Opens in a new window]
Julian Culp*
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The American University of Paris, France
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Abstract

This article defines and defends three Rawlsian rationales for a cultural turn in education for democratic citizenship within digitized societies. Due to the importance of political culture for realizing deliberative democracy, it is misguided to hold that a primary or exclusive focus of such education should be on learning how to use digital tools for engaging in politics. Pace this technique- or skills-oriented focus, this article argues that the educational responses to the wide-ranging cultural developments of the digital political public sphere should not be a matter of “training” but of “cultivation.” Accordingly, democratic education for digital citizenship should pay attention to nurturing citizens’ political virtues so that, when they are dealing with fundamental political questions, they are willing to comply with the requirements of public reason and a corresponding duty of civility.

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Research Article
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The Review of Politics , First View , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame

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References

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80 My argumentation is supported by the fact that Rawls does not state that the demands of public reason do not apply to the nonpublic political culture that is situated in between the public political forum and civil society. To the best of my knowledge, Rawls, Political Liberalism, 443, n. 13, mentions the nonpublic political culture once, in a footnote of “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” and does not elaborate on the moral or political demands that exist within this culture.

81 Cf. also Rawls, Political Liberalism, lix. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), ch. 1, argue that political elites play an important gatekeeping role.

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