obligation to pay taxes, serve in the military, or sit on juries. Some theorists argue that truly virtuous citizens should put community interests ahead of personal interests. A less extreme version of this view holds that while citizens may go about their own business and pursue their own interests, they must continue to pay attention to their government, following the news to keep a critical eye on their elected officials. Participating in its decisions is the price of maintaining their own liberty and, by extension, the liberty of the whole. Should citizens abdicate this role by tuning out of public life, the safeguards of democracy can disappear, to be replaced with the trappings of authoritarian government. There is nothing automatic about democracy. If left unattended by nonvigilant citizens, the freedoms of democracy can be lost to an all-powerful state, and citizens can become transformed into subjects of the government they failed to keep in check.
Do subjects enjoy any advantages that citizens don’t have?
This Western notion of citizenship as conferring both rights and responsibilities first became popular in the 1700s, as Europeans emerged from the Middle Ages and began to reject notions that rulers were put on Earth by God to be obeyed unconditionally. Two British philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, led the new way of thinking about subjecthood and citizenship. Governments are born not because God ordains them, but because life without government is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” in Hobbes’s words, and “inconvenient” in Locke’s. The foundation of government is reason, not faith, and reason leads people to consent to being governed because they are better off that way.
People have freedom and rights before government exists, declared Locke. When they decide they are better off with government than without it, they enter into a social contract, giving up some of those rights in exchange for the protection of the rest of their rights by a government established by the majority. If that government fails to protect their rights, it has broken the contract, and the people are free to form a new government or not, as they please. But the key element here is that for authority to be legitimate, citizens must consent to it. Note, however, that nowhere did Locke suggest that all people ought to participate in politics, or that people are necessarily equal. In fact, he was concerned mostly with the preservation of private property, suggesting that only property owners would have cause to be bothered with government because only they have something concrete to lose. Still, the political narratives of classical liberalism that emerged from the Enlightenment emphasized individual rights and non authoritarianism.
social contract the notion that society is based on an agreement between government and the governed, in which people agree to give up some rights in exchange for the protection of others
classical liberalism a political ideology dating from the seventeenth century emphasizing individual rights over the power of the state
Meanwhile, as philosophers in Europe were beginning to explore the idea of individual rights and democratic governance, there had long been democratic stirrings on the founders’ home continent. The Iroquois Confederacy was an alliance of five (and eventually six) East Coast Native American nations whose constitution, the “Great Law of Peace,” impressed such American leaders as Benjamin Franklin with its suggestions of federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, and consensus-building. Although historians are not sure that these ideas had any direct influence on the founders’ thinking about American governance, they were clearly part of the stew of ideas that the founders could dip into, and some scholars make the case that their influence was significant.10
In Your Own Words
Compare how power is distributed between citizens and government in different economic and political systems.
Democracy in America: Limited participation to limit the impact of a volatile, self-interested citizenry
For our purposes, the most important thing about these ideas about politics is that they were prevalent at the same time the American founders were thinking about how to build a new government. Locke particularly influenced the writings of James Madison, a major author of our Constitution. The founders wanted to base their new government on popular consent, but they did not want to go too far. Madison, as we will see, was particularly worried about a system that was too democratic.
The Dangers of Democracy
Enthusiastic popular participation under the government established by the Articles of Confederation—the document that tied the colonies together before the Constitution was drafted—almost ended the new government before it began. Like Locke, Madison thought government had a duty to protect property, and if people who didn’t have property could get involved in politics, they might not care about protecting the property of others. Worse, they might form “factions,” groups pursuing their own self-interests rather than the public interest, and even try to get some of that property for themselves. So Madison rejected notions of “pure democracy,” in which all citizens would have direct power to control government, and opted instead for what he called a “republic.”
A republic, according to Madison, differs from a democracy mainly in that it employs representation and can work in a large state. Most theorists agree that democracy is impossible in practice if there are a lot of citizens and all have to be heard from. But we do not march to Washington or phone our legislator every time we want to register a political preference. Instead, we choose representatives—members of the House of Representatives, senators, and the president—to represent our views for us. Madison thought this would be a safer system than direct participation (all of us crowding into town halls or the Capitol) because public passions would be cooled off by the process. You might be furious about health care costs when you vote for your senator, but he or she will represent your views with less anger. The founders hoped the representatives would be older, wealthier, and wiser than the average American and that they would be better able to make cool and rational decisions.
republic a government in which decisions are made through representatives of the people
Citizens Stepping Up Americans may be individualists, but that doesn’t mean they don’t pitch in to help others in need—at least some of the time. When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, chef José Andrés jumped into action via his organization World Central Kitchen to provide meals to people across the islands who had lost power, or even their homes.
The Evolution of American Citizenship
Unlike the founders, certainly, but even unlike most of the people currently running this country (who are, let’s face it, kind of old), people born in this century are almost all digital natives. They have been born in an era in which not only are most people hooked up to electronic media, but they also live their lives partly in cyberspace as well as in “real space.” For many of us, the lives we live are almost entirely mediated—that is, most of our relationships, our education, our news, our travel, our sustenance, our purchases, our daily activities, our job seeking, and our very sense of ourselves are influenced by, experienced through, or shared via electronic media.
digital native an individual born after the advent of digital technology who is proficient in and dependent on its use
Essentially we are conducting our lives through channels that, like that water pipe we talked about earlier, may be made of lead, may be rusty, or may
