Two other features of this educative dimension are noteworthy. Both pertain to ‘the moral part of the instruction’ afforded by participation in public affairs. The first is that this participation leads individuals to Tocqueville’s doctrine of ‘self-interest properly understood’. For reasons Mill set out, active citizenship widens individuals’ horizons and deepens their sense of how their lives are involved with others’, including the lives of people who are unknown to them. In this way participation works to overcome individualism as Tocqueville understood it:
‘a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the
mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little
society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself’([1835–40] 1969: 506). Republican citizenship works to overcome this pernicious formof individualism by fostering the individual’s sense of himself or herself as a part of, rather than apart from, the public. It is also important to notice how participation encourages public-spirited citizenship. The legal dimension of citizenship inclines us to think of citizenship in categorical
terms: either one is a citizen of a certain polity or one is not. From the ethical perspective,
however, one can be more or less of a citizen – a ‘real’ citizen, a citizen ‘in name only’, or something in between. Mill’s insight is that real citizenship can be cultivated by encouraging those who are citizens in name only to join in public life. From modest beginnings in occasional activities that require one to ‘weigh interests not his own’ and to look beyond ‘his private partialities’, political participation can transform the nominal citizen into one who, ‘made to feel himself one of the public’, is moved to act by the desire to promote the common good. Participation in public life thus seems to be a pathway to, as well as a defining feature of, republican citizenship.