SERVE CITIZENS, NOT CUSTOMERS
Civic Virtue and Democratic Citizenship
We noted earlier a distinction between a legal definition of citizenship
and what we might call an ethical definition of citizenship—citizenship as
concerned with the nature of one’s membership in a political community,
including such issues as the rights and responsibilities of citizens. We will
focus here on ethical interpretations of citizenship, however, even here there
are questions about (1) how a “theory” of citizenship might be formulated,
(2) how modern society has shaped and—we would say—restricted the role
of the citizen, and (3) whether there is a rationale and hope for building more
active citizen involvement in the governance process. In this section, we will
briefly examine each of these topics.