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Civic republicanism and active citizenship

By Bernard Crick - posted Tuesday, 22 May 2007


You could call this a “secular sermon”. I will preach on and around four texts. They illustrate that in today’s society that while, of course, you and I want to be good citizens, for others to be good citizens, and particularly for young people to be very good citizens, yet surveys, common observation and the content of the media all show that many or most of our fellow citizens are losing the desire, the will, the means and even the time to be active, participant citizens.

Some commentators now gravely discuss whether apathy is not a good indicator of contentment. Some politicians privately agree with them preferring to “let sleeping dogs lie”. But, as written in my secular Book of Proverbs, “Do or you will be done by”. A bare 51 per cent of my fellow Brits, even of my fellow Scots, were engaged enough to vote in the 2005 General Election: even to choose the best of a bad job. And sadly only four out of ten 18-25-year-olds voted.

Sir Alistair Graham, former UK Commissioner for Standards in Public Life, published a widely reported survey earlier this year showing that less than a quarter of us trust government ministers to tell the truth. Ministers are 15th in the pecking order of trust in the professions, hovering just below estate agents. “Lack of trust”, he said, “leads to public cynicism and disengagement in the political system … damaging to the very fabric of our democracy.”

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That may have been a survey question too far for he has not been reappointed! Yet such disrespect for politicians is also widespread in Europe, the USA and Australia.

Too few of us are willing to stir our stumps to be active citizens and to work at the very least for a better society. We leave professional politicians to do that for us and hope they leave us alone to get on with, what is oddly called, the quiet and private life of competitive individualism.

The ten, 11 or 12-hour working day of the Victorian poor is now normal for all classes. Sometimes this is voluntary, yet more often we are caught up in a machine that appears to be out of control, but is in fact encouraged by government.

Yet there is a graver question of political neglect. We could now be facing an inability of either politicians or the general public to reach agreements fast and effectively enough to prevent great impending environmental disasters that threaten progress or even the stability of human civilisation.

So I offer no excuse for going back to basics, to remind us that from out of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds have evolved two great and civilising cultural inventions: natural science and the ideas and practices of free citizenship. Both have the capacity to prevent disasters, but neither can be taken for granted. Both need continual activity and now not just institutional repair but the rejuvenation of their spirit.

So the first text of this political philosopher’s sermon is from the Periclean oration as related by the historian Thucydides in Athens in the 5th century BC:

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Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. … Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics - this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.

Now modern historians (whose vocation is to tell the truth) suggest that Pericles was in fact a populist demagogue, telling people what they wanted to hear but (like Mr Blair) sometimes falling a wee bit short of practicing what he preached. But consider the ideas Pericles invoked in his audience: it says a lot for their level of understanding and aspirations so long ago - what I call political literacy. His oratory was about more than maximising life chances for continual material advancement and spasmodic domestic bliss.

His argument is at the heart of what modern scholars have come to call “civic republicanism”. Civic republicanism signified both a value and a theory. The value was freedom itself specifically free public debate, among other things, as the very essence of free citizenship. The theory was that states are stronger when their actions are understood and actively supported by free citizens. Active citizenship is a duty, not simply a right, (a good if mild reflection of this view is the Australian belief in compulsory voting and a more worrying one in the right to bear arms in the US constitution of 1787).

Free and open debate hold a state together not, as Plato had believed, agreement on a common core of true and transcendent values.

Some leaders and leader writers in Australia and the UK worry themselves and us silly about the alleged dangers of multiculturalism. They argue there is a need for an over-riding, as it were transcendent, common core of values, which they then call, somewhat parochially, Australian or British. But the father of political thinking, Aristotle, said in his book The Politics (and here comes my second text) that Plato was mistaken in his teaching about justice and an ideal, transcendent unity. On the contrary, it was the case that:

… there is a point at which a polis [a political society] by advancing in unity, will cease to be a polis: there is another point, short of that at which it may still remain a polis, but will none the less come near to losing its essence, and will thus be a worse polis. It is as if you were to turn harmony into mere unison, or to reduce a theme to a single beat. The truth is that the polis is an aggregate of many members.

Aristotle implied that even a small city state contained an aggregation, a diversity, of values and interests among its citizens. Yes, I have not forgotten that the citizen class itself back then was a minority - women, slaves, debtors and foreign residents had no political rights. But the unique path and practices of free citizenship had been thought out and set down. In modern times the franchise could be gradually broadened into something like democracy.

The Roman word res-publica implied that things that are public must be of public concern: active citizens should and could manage the state, not kings nor aristocratic oligarchies alone or single political parties. Citizens treat each other as equals. The public culture of politics is quite different from the private, secretive decision-making and politicking in autocracies.

Republicanism did not necessarily imply democracy - democracy was seen as a necessary element in mixed government, not the overriding principle. Property, education or extraordinary public service were the basic qualifications for citizenship, but even ancient and early modern republics were more participative in spirit than most modern so-called democracies enshrining individualistic, market liberalism.

The much maligned Niccolo Machiavelli stated a theory of civic republicanism in his Discourses. A state is stronger if it can trust a patriotic citizen class with arms. Bearing and providing arms for war and the mutual trust needed was often the qualification for citizenship.

The vexed right to bear arms in the US constitution had its roots in old republican theory and practice. So freedom in a state, said Machiavelli, meant tolerating social conflict between classes. But conflict if well managed, if handled by political compromises, can be a source of strength and gives liveliness to political debate.

For a republic to sustain itself and flourish, citizens must have civic spirit, what he called virtu, and if this virtu declines - or has never been present - whether by indolence, corruption, decadence or fear, there can be no republic only autocracy.

Virtu is a nice and curious word, roughly translated as “civic spirit”, but a spirit of an intensity that few of us now feel. For it also implied courage. Courage is involved in political life, sometimes physical courage even. Pericles said “the secret of liberty is courage”. They’ll take it away from you if you don’t defend it. The secret of liberty is not just “eternal vigilance but eternal activity as well”.

Machiavelli’s realistic restatement of an admittedly idealised picture of the Roman republic became immensely influential. These ideas of a free and forceful citizenry helped animate the Dutch Republic in its struggles against Spain, Protestant Sweden in the Thirty Years War, England and Scotland in the civil wars, the American and then the Spanish colonies in revolt, and also the French Revolution.

Civic republicanism was strong in the early United States. Jeffersonian democracy was a cult of active citizenship which made virtues of simplicity of manners, plain-speaking, candour and high literacy - an ability to turn one’s hand to anything practical as well as to read deeply and think restlessly for the common good. These virtues were to be universalised by personal example - the ideal image of the common man. This image is not, to put it mildly, in the ascendant at the moment, but it is far from dead and buried.

This leads to the third text of this half-learned sermon. The French writer Benjamin Constant in an essay, written in 1820, on The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns:

The aim of the ancients was the sharing of social power among citizens of the same fatherland: this is what they called liberty. The aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of liberty in private pleasures; and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures.

Well now in 1820 we have reached the present day rather early. The concept and the critique of “the consumer society” arose long before we named this somewhat degrading and somewhat pleasing cultural change. Since Constant, all Western societies and many others have gained a democratic franchise. But what has been done with it: or what have new elites done to the new peoples? After the mass emancipatory movements too many of the beneficiaries have lapsed back into the condition that Constant described as modern liberty: happy just to enjoy the guarantee that the state gives to personal safety and private pleasures.

Scholars call this the liberal theory of the state. And yet key indicators suggest that people are not entirely happy with this social contract or apolitical new deal; so it is hardly surprising that those surveys tell us that most politicians are more distrusted than even estate agents and journalists.

We have to rebuild from the bottom up. Membership of political parties is important but more important are the practical schools of political skills and confidence: local government and community groups, civil society itself. And is not education, starting at school, important? So my fourth text is the 1998 English report, Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools:

We aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country both nationally and locally: for people to think of themselves as active citizens, willing, able and equipped to have an influence in public life and with the critical capacities to weigh evidence before speaking and acting.

The advisory committee were not told by their chairman and principle draftsman (myself) that they had signed up to civic republicanism and, in effect, repudiated the strict individualistic liberal theory of the state. I didn’t want to provoke them.

The practices of active citizenship can be learnt in schools in many practical, participative activities done both at school and in the community. Discussion of real issues should be promoted as a way of arousing interest in what may otherwise seem to be remote and boring institutions.

Teachers should not just teach rights. The civic republic tradition always saw rights and duties as reciprocal. Certainly people should have legal rights even if they have no sense of civic duty. But there is a moral imperative that rights should inspire duties, just as we have a duty to respect the rights of others.

So liberal theory can be seen as demanding “good citizenship”, invoking “the rule of law”, good behaviour, individual rights and at its best moral virtues of care and concern for others, beginning with neighbours and hopefully reaching out to strangers. But it may stop short of demanding “active citizenship” or civic republicanism”, when we combine together effectively, whether locally, nationally or globally, to change or resist change. Such is true citizenship.

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The article is a version of a recent public lecture at the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Science, University of Sydney on April 30, 2007.



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About the Author

Sir Bernard Crick is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory of Birkbeck College, London, author of In Defence of Politics and George Orwell: a Life, and he chaired the committee that brought citizenship learning into the school curriculum in England.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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