Diagnosing the Body Politic

Complaining about the civic health of the United States has become a virtual industry in itself. Scholars and journalists spend an enormous amount of time describing the symptoms of political and social decline. They claim that Americans vote less, hate politics and government more, and have less sense of community than ever before. Public discourse has descended to a level that allows sleaze maven Jerry Springer (a former politician of course) and his ilk to flourish, leaving little room for serious public discussion. Meanwhile, the rich get richer and more powerful while the poor get poorer and cannot do anything about it. If Americans of different political stripes can agree on anything today, it is that public life is getting worse.

In The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life, sociologist Michael Schudson argues that this diagnosis is rash. We need to take the patient’s full history before we can safely conclude that things truly are getting worse. Doing so, he insists, places contemporary American public life in a clearer context, one that suggests it is not manifestly in decline. Schudson claims that most present day civic jeremiads rely on an outdated model of good citizenship. They assume that a responsible citizen is one who is consistently engaged with all the issues that face society and is capable of addressing these concerns in a rational, competent fashion. They also assume that at some point in our past, this form of citizenship prevailed. The Good Citizen persuasively shows that this ideal world never existed and that this model of good citizenship is just one of several that have prevailed over the course of American history.

Schudson’s argument is daring, persuasive, and refreshing. He draws a vast range of scholarship into a 300-page account of the shifting standards of good citizenship. As with any synthesis, there is room to snipe where complex debates have to be condensed into a few pages. And historians may chafe at the structure of the argument, which necessarily underplays continuities because it emphasizes change. But Schudson makes a compelling case. Definitions of “good citizenship” are indeed historically contingent. The Good Citizen is synthetic scholarship designed to influence public debate of the sort so many historians call for but so few have produced. It deserves both the careful consideration of scholars and the wide audience it seeks.

Schudson’s history begins with the 1690 publication of the first newspaper in British North America, Benjamin Harris’s Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. The event itself was not all that significant—the paper lasted only one issue before the authorities shut it down because of politically controversial comments. But it marked the “opening of an American public sphere” (p. 12). Throughout the book Schudson relies on Jürgen Habermas’s conceptualization of the public sphere as the arena between the state and civil society where citizens engage in discussions about shared concerns to form public opinion. Taverns, coffeehouses, town squares, private associations, and especially newspapers and other media—any settings or forums that foster these exchanges—can constitute the public sphere. It has been, in Schudson’s apt phrase, “the playing field for citizenship” (p. 12) and his book is in fact a history of the American public sphere and of the changing prescriptions for good behavior within it.

In the colonial era, acceptable public conduct for most men (women with a few exceptions were excluded from formal political life) meant accepting the rule of the most respected members of the community. Although regional differences remained strong, the outlines of a shared “politics of assent” began to emerge across colonial boundaries as the eighteenth century progressed. It featured a strong faith in the idea of a moral consensus and deference to a small, closed circle of leaders. The classic expression of the former was the New England town meeting. The strongest example of the latter was political submission to gentlemen in colonial Virginia.

A good citizen in this context did...