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Civic republicanism and active citizenship

By Bernard Crick - posted Tuesday, 22 May 2007


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.

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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.

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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.

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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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