The belief that participation in public life is neither as extensive nor as intensive as it
ought to be is largely responsible for the recent revival of interest in both citizenship and republicanism. The complaint is not so much that civic life in the advanced democracies has declined dramatically from some golden age as that it has failed to realize the promise of republican citizenship. This complaint, for instance, animated the work of Hannah Arendt in the middle of the twentieth century. Technology has eased the burdens of labor and freed people to act as citizens in the public realm, she argued in The Human Condition (1958), yet we turn
away from public life and toward private consumption. We want governments to provide for the welfare of the citizenry, she declared in On Revolution, but we ‘deny the very existence of public happiness and public freedom’ as we ‘insist that politics is a burden …’ (1965: 273). We are, in short, squandering an opportunity to achieve what the republicans of ancient Greece and Rome
thought impossible – a polity in which the freedom of republican self-government is available not only to the well-to-do few but to almost the entire people. Similar concerns lie behind the republican revival of the last quarter-century or so. In this case, neo-republicans tend to place
the blame on one, or both, of two theories they regard as pernicious. One of these is liberalism; the other is the tendency to reduce politics to the market place.