Today, then, the core meaning of citizen- ship is membership with at least some rights of political participation in an independent republic that governs through some system of elected representatives parliamentary presidential, bicameral, unicamcral, or some other variation. Such citizenship is under stood to embrace not only various rights and privileges, including rights to participate politically, but also an ethos of at least some willingness to exercise thesc rights in ways that contributc to the common good. But the polity-wide asscmbly in which all citizens sit, deliberate and vote has effectively vanished from the modern world, as much or more than the hcrcditary aristocracies and monarchies that American French revolutionaries first assaulted.