I’m just back from Washington College in Chestertown, MD (a classic liberal arts college), where I taught social studies teachers a little about liberalism and classic republicanism–a standard topic in political theory. I presented liberalism as the combination of the following five ideas:<\/p>\n
1. “Individualism,” meaning (specifically) that each and every government institution must make every individual better off than he or she would be otherwise, or else it is oppressive.<\/p>\n
2. Politics is a necessary evil, the price of living in a community.<\/p>\n
3. The private realm can be clearly distinguished from the public realm, and only the latter may be regulated.<\/p>\n
4. The state should not make people good, nor do we need good people to have a good government. A decent polity can instead be preserved through checks-and-balances and other constitutional mechanisms.<\/p>\n
5. The government should be neutral with respect to various ways of life, unless those ways of life involve one person violating the rights of another.<\/p>\n
Civic republicanism is then a particular criticism of liberalism that says:<\/p>\n
1. Political communities have intrinsic value, and are not merely “cooperative venture[s] for mutual advantage? (John Rawls).<\/p>\n
2. Politics is desirable and advantageous, because it’s the only place where people can exhibit certain excellences, such as public spiritedness, eloquence, and patriotism.<\/p>\n
3. The so-called private realm is often a legitimate public concern. For example, the state should support educational institutions that (to some degree) shape private opinions and beliefs.<\/p>\n
4. A good government can only exist where citizens are fairly virtuous; and promoting virtues is an appopriate role for the state.<\/p>\n
5. The government should favor certain ways of life over others. Above all, the state should honor lives of public service and civic engagement.<\/p>\n
Although almost everyone feels some affinity for both sets of propositions, it’s much harder to make civic republicanism plausible for an American audience than to persuade them of liberalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m just back from Washington College in Chestertown, MD (a classic liberal arts college), where I taught social studies teachers a little about liberalism and classic republicanism–a standard topic in political theory. I presented liberalism as the combination of the following five ideas: 1. “Individualism,” meaning (specifically) that each and every government institution must make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advocating-civic-education"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}