Citizenship

The big picture of tension between the recurring idea of citizenship as a shared and active life, and the idea of citizenship as a passive status is that each conception of citizenship contains traps, either for the integrity of the political entity to which citizens might belong, or for the citizens themselves. It might seem that a fusion of passive status with the experience of active citizen engagement with the polity would be the ideal solution, but history is not on the side of that phenomenon as a realistic proposition. Indeed, Gibbon suggests that for the most part passive status as citizen yields nothing like active political engagement as citizen. Early on in his history of the decline of the Roman Empire, Gibbon acknowledges the value of the extension of Roman citizenship beyond the aristocrats and oligarchs of the mother city, observing that Virgil came from Mantua and Cicero from Arpinum (Gibbon, 1983, p. 30). Yet he also cites the emperor Caracalla's extending the coveted status of Roman citizenship, formerly reserved for free inhabitants of greater Rome, to free provincial peoples, as a means of fostering administrative efficiency, civil unity, and a larger tax base. But the effect over time was to "diffuse[] a reverence for the Roman name," such that the value of Roman citizenship "was continually diminished" (p. 32). Add to that what could be called the "extra-Roman" momentum of Christianity being preached to Roman, Greek, slave, and barbarian alike from the f

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is presumed to be a part) are asserted against the government under which that society operates in the French document. This is seen in repeated references to what society may do and may require of its government: "Society has the right to ask a public official for an accounting of his administration" (p. 1048). That implies an actively engaged citizenry as a collective stakeholder in the political behavior of the governing authority. What statements like these do not capture is the potential that a fully engaged citizenry has for instituting the tyranny of the majority--democracy at its worst, as Plato feared in The Republic. In the French case, the Reign of Terror evolved, distinguished in part by the myriad tests that were meant to determine which citizens were and were not satisfactorily enthusiastic about the new regime. The Terror fostered instability and a vacuum of incompetence into which Napoleon was able to step--and proceed (regress?) to the status of imperial despot and, more or less, conquer the world. A conception of citizenship as a passive experience undertaken as much by accident of geography and birth as through political consciousness and/or training can be discerned in Germany's decision in 1913 to structure

Category: Government - C