Civic virtue

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

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Jacques-Louis David's 1784 painting The Oath of the Horatii, illustrating a dramatic moment from Livy's history of Rome, embodies eighteenth century ideas about civic virtue.

The idea of civic virtue in the Western world

The inculcation of civic virtue has historically been a matter of chief concern for political philosophers under republican forms of government. This makes sense, since to the extent that final decisions on public matters are made by a monarch, it is the monarch's virtues or lack thereof that have great impact. Conversely, when a broader class of people are 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 ancient Greece and Rome

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 was one of the factors that led to the trial of Socrates and his conflict with the Athenian democracy. The Politics of Aristotle viewed citizenship as consisting, not of political rights, but rather of political duties. Citizens were expected to put their private lives and interests aside and serve the state in accordance with duties defined by law.

Rome, even more than Greece, produced a number of moralistic philosophers such as Cicero, and moralistic historians such as Tacitus, Sallust, Plutarch and Livy. Many of these figures were either personally involved in the power struggles that took 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.

In the republican revolutions of the eighteenth century

Civic virtue also became a matter of public interest and discussion during the eighteenth century, in part because of the American Revolutionary War. An anecdote first published in 1906 makes Benjamin Franklin answer a woman who asked him, "Well, Doctor, what have we got — a Republic or a Monarchy?"

"A Republic, if you can keep it." ([1])

The current use for this quotation is to bolster with Franklin's authority the opinion that republics require the cultivation of specific political beliefs, interests, and habits among their citizens, and that if those habits are not cultivated, they are in danger of falling back into some sort of authoritarian rule, such as a monarchy.

The American historian Gordon S. Wood called it a universal eighteenth century assumption that, while no form of government was more beautiful than a republic, monarchies had various advantages: the pomp and circumstances surrounding them cultivated a sense that the rulers were in fact superior to the ruled and entitled to their obedience, and maintained order by their presence. By contrast, in a republic, the rulers were the servants of the public, and there could therefore be no sustained coercion from them. Laws had to be obeyed for the sake of conscience, rather than fear of the ruler's wrath. In a monarchy, people might be restrained by force to submit their own interests to their government's. In a republic, by contrast, people must be persuaded to submit their own interests to the government, and this voluntary submission constituted the eighteenth century's notion of civic virtue. In the absence of such persuasion, the authority of the government would collapse, and tyranny or anarchy were imminent.

Authority for this ideal was found once more among the classical, and especially the Roman, political authors and historians. But since the Roman writers wrote during a time when the Roman republican ideal was fading away, its forms but not its spirit or substance being preserved in the Roman Empire, the eighteenth century American and French revolutionaries read them with a spirit to determine how the Roman republic failed, and how to avoid repeating that failure. In his Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Antient Republicks, the English Whig historian Edward Wortley Montagu sought to describe "the principal causes of that degeneracy of manners, which reduc'd those once brave and free people into the most abject slavery." Following this reading of Roman ideals, the American revolutionary Charles Lee envisioned a Spartan, egalitarian society where every man was a soldier and master of his own land, and where people were "instructed from early infancy to deem themselves property of the State. . . . (and) were ever ready to sacrifice their concerns to her interests." The agrarianism of Thomas Jefferson represents a similar belief system; Jefferson believed that the ideal republic was composed of independent, rural agriculturalists rather than urban tradesmen.

These widely held ideals led American revolutionaries to found institutions such as the Society of the Cincinnati, named after the Roman farmer and dictator Cincinnatus, who according to Livy left his farm to lead the army of the Roman republic during a crisis, and voluntarily returned to his plow once the crisis had passed. About Cincinnatus, Livy writes:

Operae pretium est audire qui omnia prae diuitiis humana spernunt neque honori magno locum neque uirtuti putant esse, nisi ubi effuse afluant opes.. . .

(It is worth while for those who disdain all human things for money, and who suppose that there is no room either for great honor or virtue, except where wealth is found, to listen to his story.)

— Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, book III.

This society and these ideals indicate the deep impresion that was left on the republican revolutionaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the moralistic Roman historians.

In later times

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The cover of an Eclectic First Reader book.

A number of institutions and organizations promote the idea of civic virtue in the older democracies. Among such organizations is the boy scouts, whose US oath reflects a goal to foster habits aimed at serving a larger community:

On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight.

Institutions that might be said to encourage civic virtue include the school, particularly with social studies courses, and the prison, namely in its rehabilitative function.

Other, later phenomena associated with the concept of civic virtue include McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, a series of primary school textbooks whose compiler, William Holmes McGuffey, deliberately sought out patriotic and religious sentiments to instil these values in the children who read them. William Bennett, a Reagan administration cabinet member turned conservative commentator, produced The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories in 1993, another anthology of literary materials that might be considered an attempt to update McGuffey's concept.

Comparable ideas in non-Western societies

While China has never been a democratic republic, the public ethics of Confucianism, which specify cultural virtues and traditions which governors and bureaucrats are expected to uphold, can be compared to the Western idea of civic virtue.

References

Parker, Harold T. The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries (Univ. Chicago, 1937)
Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Univ. North Carolina Press 1969, repr. Horton 1975) ISBN 0-393-00644-1