There is a sense in which all revivals are
backward-looking, and one may wonder
whether the attempt to revive the republican
ideal of citizenship looks so far back – to the
Greek polis, the Roman civitas, and the
Italian city-republics of the Middle Ages –
as to be irrelevant to life in the twenty-first
century. Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian
republicanism is a case in point. Jefferson
may have been right two hundred years ago
to praise the small farmer as the model of
the independent citizen who would rather
live frugally on land he and his family
worked than succumb to the luxury and
corruption of urban life (Jefferson, 1999:
549–50, 28). Such praise, however, seems
little more than nostalgia in today’s world of
global agribusiness and ‘e-commerce’.
What may be said, then, for the relevance of
republican citizenship today? What may be
said for it, moreover, in light of the biases
implicit in the republican ideal of the
property-owning, arms-bearing citizen?