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Civic Virtue: Interested and Disinterested Citizens
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20137 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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2 / 1992 |
7,170 Words |
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Katherine Auspitz
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The idea of "civic Virtue" is by no means utopian. Good citizens are not "selfless"; rather, they act from a sense of self-interest properly understood. Civic participation and the concomitant encounters with fellow citizens discipline their self-assertion. I will present a "republican tradition" persuaded that political liberty fosters enlightened self-interest ad a sympathetic understanding of the interests of others. I'll show how the heroic Renaissance ideal of civic Virtue was enlarged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to include conduct of which most citizens might be imagined capable.
Classically, republicans have held that politics demands thought and commitment and confronts citizens with the power of opposing arguments, the obduracy of opposing passions. They believed that resignation eventually suggested compromise and moderation; and such an experience of citizenship made individuals better able to discern at once their own and the public interest.
I acknowledge that historians too often conjure up such "traditions" as suit their polemical purposes, making philosophers, posthumously and with no recourse, precursors of movements that would have horrified them. Nonetheless, I think the project I describe--setting out the moral and social bases of self-government--has been understood by those who advanced it over the centuries as a common and continuing effort.
To summarize historically. Machiavelli celebrated Virtu during the Renaissance as a rare and heroic but not unattainable classical ideal. Later, in the Enlightenment, philosophers expected civic Virtue to arise as the predictable, though not the inevitable or unintended, consequence of living in a properly constituted state. Finally, in the nineteenth century, democrats and prudent conservatives came to regard civic Virtue not only as a worthy goal, but as an urgent practical necessity. I believe it to be an urgent practical necessity still.
To summarize conceptually. In each of these periods, writers supported their exhortations to civic Virtue with a professedly realist political analysis which agreed on these three points:
1. that self-mastery was a worthier and also a more feasible ideal than self-denial;
2. that the sense of self appropriate to citizens can develop only among
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