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2 Citizenship as Civic Duty Citizenship is core to the idea of democratic society. Indeed, the present age is one that considers citizenship as something of cardinal significance (Heater 1999:1). Even though the idea of citizenship has become very complex, in a way reflecting the complexities of total human organization in contemporary times, two basic strands of these conceptions have become virtually hegemonic in the literature. These are the liberal and the civic republican traditions. Generally, while the one puts emphasizes on rights, the other accents duties; while the first is less demanding of the individual, the second is very demanding of the individual in his/her relationship with the state/community. These disputations are often very strong, particularly in their enactment in actual public life, thereby acquitting Aristotle (1948:1274), who wrote in Politics that, ‘the nature of citizenship … is a question which is often disputed’ (ibid.:45). Here, we concentrate on the civic republican variant of citizenship, which underwrites the idea of civic service. The civic republican conception of citizenship has a more venerable lineage than the liberal conception, particularly because many of the significant thinkers on the subject of citizenship adhere to this mode (ibid.:44). This veneration goes back to the Greek city-states. Even though Sparta and Athens were archetypal polarities in terms of political principles – stern authoritarianism and free democracy – instructively, both were similar in their conception of what constitutes citizenship. Riesenberg (1992:8) correctly describes Spartan citizenship as ‘an intensification of the Athenian notion of public service’ (Heater 1999:44–5). Though Athenians participated freely and readily in their own governance and the Spartans were more geared towards selfless devotion by citizen-soldiers, both were significant in their citizens’ commitment to civic duties (ibid.:45). The civic republican mode of citizenship posits a legal and ethical dimension of citizenship. As Dagger (2002:149) articulates it: Statism, Youth and Civic Imagination 14 Citizenship may be a matter of legal status that confers various privileges and immunities on the citizen, in other words, but it must be more than that. ‘Real’ or ‘true’ citizenship requires commitment to the common good and active participation in public affairs. It requires civic virtue. While this mode does not deny the legal status of citizenship, it emphasizes that although this is a necessarily condition of citizenship, it is insufficient for ‘real’ or ‘true’ citizenship. What makes citizenship ‘full’, ‘true’ and ‘real’, therefore, is the ethical dimension, which draws from the Greek and Roman heritage of civitas and polis, where citizens were not only entitled to participate in civic affairs, but were expected to do so (ibid.:149). The need to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizens, the standards that are built into the conception of citizenship , are therefore regarded as a function of this ethical strain, and not the legal condition. The public nature of this strand of citizenship manifests in two basic ways: public spirit and civic involvement. Consequently, a citizen in this context is one who places the public interest above his personal interests by discharging his public responsibilities and one who is also committed to the public good through civic involvement (ibid.:150). Alexis de Tocqueville suggests that anyone whose citizenship manifests in the two basic ways above is also likely to become a better, more virtuous person in other respects. This immediately points to two further dimensions of the civic republican notion, which are the integrative and the educative. In the integrative dimension, as Rousseau advances, private interests are set aside and the only interest that matters is the interest of the individual as member of the public. The individual integrates his various roles into the role of ‘citizen as member of the public’ and s/he also integrates her/himself into the community (ibid.:150–1). In the educative dimension, the active citizen educates and is educated about drawing out abilities that might remain untapped or unfulfilled and which will prove valuable even in other respects of the citizens’ lives (cf. ibid.:151). Heater (1999) provides a succinct typology of the purpose, style, quality, role and process of forming the citizen under the civic republican tradition (see Table 1). In this typology, the purpose of citizenship is to connect the individual with the state in a symbiotic relationship that creates a just and stable republican polity in which the individual enjoys freedom (we will return to this in linking duties and rights in this conception). Freedom is possible for the individual only in...

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