Civic virtue

Civic virtue is the cultivation of habits of personal living that are important for the success of the individual, the family, and the community, or other group of people. The identification of the character traits that constitute civic virtue has been a major concern of political philosophy.

The inculcation of civic virtue has historically been a matter of chief concern for political philosophers under republican forms of government. Logically so, since to the extent that final decisions on public matters are made by a monarch, that monarch's virtues or lack of virtues have a great impact; but when a broader class of people make up the decision makers, their virtues or vices become matters of greater import. Aristocratic oligarchies also can develop traditions of public lists of virtues they believe appropriate in the governing class, but these virtues differ significantly from the virtues generally identified under the heading of civic virtue, stressing martial courage over commercial honesty.

In the classical culture of Western Europe and those places that follow its political tradition, concern for civic virtue starts with the oldest republics of which we have extensive records: Athens and Rome. Attempting to define the virtues needed to successfully govern the Athenian polis was a matter of significant concern for Socrates and Plato; a difference in civic vision ultimately were one of the factors that led to the trial of Socrates and his conflict with the Athenian democracy. Rome, even more than Greece, produced a number of moralistic philosophers such as Cicero, and moralistic historians such as Tacitus and Livy. Many of these figures were either involved in the power struggles that were taking place in the late Roman Republic, or wrote elegies to the liberty that was lost during the transition to the Roman Empire. They tended to place the blame for this loss on the perceived lack of civic virtue on the part of their close contemporaries, contrasting them with exemplars of virtue drawn from Roman history, or even from non-Roman barbarians.