Ordinarily, a preface is just a preface, an opportunity to identify key themes and thank many people. Not always, however. Sometimes it provides, if inadvertently, indispensable clues to a book. The preface to Anna Stilz's book, a thoughtful, compelling meditation on liberal citizenship, calls attention to itself as Stilz elucidates her title: “This book is called Liberal LOYALTY because if offers a defense of loyal or committed citizenship. It is not an argument in favor of supererogatory displays of patriotism.” Then: “The book is called LIBERAL Loyalty … because it claims that the reason we should be loyal citizens … is simply that we care about liberal justice, and not that we share a national identity, are especially patriotic, or cherish a sentimental attachment to our state” (p. vii). No supererogatory displays of patriotism. Not especially patriotic.

Stilz's approach to citizenship returns the state front and center to democratic politics, an invaluable contribution in itself. The author vindicates the so-called particularity assumption, the idea that “there is a special bond or obligation that ties the citizen or resident to her state, and to her compatriots, and not to others, and requires her to support these people and these institutions and not others.” She vindicates it by turning to “extra-institutional principles” (p. 8). She appeals not to common sense; rather, hers is a “philosophical” approach, one that “can be discovered purely in sustained reflection” (p. 9). There is a kind of “liberal value with reference to which our obligations to particular states and compatriots might be justified.” It involves “those duties that are mediated, and thus ‘filled out’ or fully defined, only by the establishment of public authorities” (p. 21).

The conception Stilz proffers looks to both Kant and Rousseau, more specifically, to a Kantian Rousseau, that is, the (allegedly) rationalist Rousseau of On the Social Contract, rather than the (allegedly) nationalist or patriotic Rousseau of Poland, Corsica, or Letter to d'Alembert. Hence, the careful, if also selective, reading of Rousseau, who, along with Kant, “thought that the value of equal freedom could only be realized through the state” (p. 21). Prior to state determination, then, we lack “a complete set of clear and definite ‘natural duties,’” which can speak to our property and other acquired rights (pp. 21–22). Stilz provides grounds for supporting not just legitimate states but particular legitimate states. Making quick work of the cosmopolitan challenge, which misses the significance of the state, she turns to the liberal-nationalist case for citizen loyalty, according to which citizens are loyal to their state because it reflects and protects the national culture, which keys their identity. She looks for an alternative that does not “appeal to a nation defined in cultural terms” and finds it in Jürgen Habermas's constitutional patriotism, which redeems the “radical democratic potential inherent in Rousseau's theory” without its nationalist or patriotic baggage. Shared citizenship, we are told, can provide necessary political unity just as well as “the cultural nation” (p. 24). Stilz's recovery of Rousseau, then, leads straight to Habermas's constitutional patriotism, the very heart of the book.

Stilz deploys Habermas's political vision to great analytic effect. With attention concentrated on democratic process, however, little, if any, attention is paid to the affective dimensions of citizenship. How, in short, can identification with a process suffice to sustain political motivation? As she remarks of the nationalist claim, her own “motivational thesis is at best unproven” (p. 151). Indeed, Habermas's shared citizenship can provide sufficient reasons for meeting obligations insofar as lawmaking discourse entails ethical-political reasoning of a kind that “answers the question ‘Who are we?’” Bound up with a people's constitutional history and traditions, citizenship can become “a locus for particular identities and for democratic solidarity” (p. 163). Citizens can distance themselves from or bracket their purely private interests and adopt a common or general perspective, the “we.” Citizens can adopt this perspective, we are told, because law, with its appeal to ethical-political reasoning, possesses “the power to motivate citizens' allegiance and shape their particular identities” (pp. 164–65). Habermas recognizes that his theory of constitutional patriotism might thus seem to rely on the very thing he rejects, “an already existing national-cultural identity” (p. 166). He may or may not be able to fend off this charge insofar as constitutional patriotism presupposes “at least theoretically, a ‘best answer’ to questions about rights, which stands outside any nation's traditions or self-understanding,” which in turn provides citizens a permanent moral standpoint, the idea of an always “freer, more equal political community,” from which to criticize their own political institutions, arrangements, and practices (pp. 170–71).

Either way, given Stilz's reliance on Habermas and democratic process, where procedural norms and substantive rights presuppose and engender one another, one feels compelled to ask: What precisely is patriotic about constitutional patriotism? It is not that one should not challenge and contest entrenched and commonly understood terms of political discourse, but it is not clear why she wants the patriotic mantle when she does so little with it. Why is this not a work of democratic, constitutional, or liberal citizenship?

Stilz offers Habermas assistance in the book's concluding chapter: “[J]ustice gives us reason to form a shared intention to participate together with our fellow citizens in a democratic process” (p. 174). She notably compares a democracy to an orchestra; like a voluntary association, it “generates obligations to play our role, to treat compatriots with respect and concern in relevant contexts, and to contribute to fulfilling collective obligations” (p. 191). The analogy illuminates her argument, though perhaps not quite in the way she imagines. When discussing why someone might join an orchestra, she speaks of a trombone player who “values” playing Beethoven, her favorite composer. Unable to play him alone, the musician decides to join an orchestra (p. 184). Yet not even music can move Stilz's pen to passion: not Beethoven's compositions, not the orchestra's performance, not the art of playing trombone. Obligations may follow from membership, but the trombone player feels stolid, the connection to the orchestra feels instrumental, much like Stilz's all too rational citizen and democracy.

Turning the final page of Liberal Loyalty, then, I recalled the inaugural references to patriotism. I recalled them not because Stilz's argument, intent notwithstanding, invoked an undue patriotism. I recalled them because her cool, analytic, dispassionate sensibility feels rather peculiar, given that the subject is not just citizenship (and thus politics) but a kind of patriotism. Where is the love? Or, better, where is the passion, the animation, the adrenaline? Where is the visceral register that forms such a critical dimension to politics, a world of causes, campaigns, enemies, and enmity? If history and tradition matter to constitutional patriotism, then what of the ceremonies, rituals, myths, and symbols reflective of them? Here, the author is silent.

Stilz wants good citizens, but for the right reasons only. She rejects, convincingly, the liberal nationalist claim that a national culture or identity—and it alone—must play a supplemental role in any viable liberal conception of citizenship. Yet she does not adequately address how the energy and drive that such a supplement can provide—aspects without which politics threatens to become technocratic, duty bound, grinding—can be secured by a rational liberal understanding centered on process. Stilz does seek what she calls sufficient citizen motivation, meaning that citizens can be given reasons, even good reasons, for political participation, obeying the law, remitting taxes, paying reparations, and so on, but this approach never feels as though it is enough. She might deem such a reaction a compliment, but given her preface, I suspect that she feels it, too, especially in a political culture (ours) beset by money, power, and corruption.