Preparation for Ethical Community: Learning from Education for Sittlichkeit in New Order Indonesia

The politics of identity draws on postmodernist rejections of the universals of liberalism in theorizing the claims of individuals and groups on the political community. An alternative grounding of claims is provided by Hegel's concept of Sittlichkeit , the idea of the ethical instantiation of the citizen in the community. Sittlichkeit shares the self-determinist claims of identity-based models of community. It shares in particular their rejection of the heteronomy of antecedent principles of rights and justice. This paper is a study of the operationalizing of Sittlichkeit in Indonesian education for citizenship under the New Order implementation of the state ideology. It is intended to show the collectivist as well as the pluralist potential of normative settlements produced by 'perspectival dialogism', and consequently the importance of owning the derivation of the politics of identity from liberalism, when pluralism is the desired outcome .