The author examines two models for citizenship: one motivated by self-interest and the other driven by concern for the public good. "The public-spirited model," he says, "requires that citizens with private interests also possess and modulate an understanding of and concern for the public good." Ralph Ketcham is professor emeritus of history, public affairs, and political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.

In a recent seminar at an American university, a participant from Vietnam was asked to respond to political scientist Robert Dahl's view of democracy: that it be routinely responsive to the people, who "are free to develop and use peaceful means to criticize, pressure, and replace leadership." In Dahl's analysis, leaders are obliged to pay attention and respond to the varied voices and needs of the people, expressed not only through representative institutions, but through all the other peaceful ways—petitions, demonstrations, lobbying, advocating, etc.—available in a free and liberal society.

Political scientist John Mueller contributes to the discussion by explaining that the responsibilities of citizenship are minimal. "Democracy is really quite easy—any dimwit can do it. ... People do not need to be good or noble, but merely to calculate their best interests, and if so moved, to express them." Generally apathetic and self-interested, democratic citizens need only to be able to assess reality and calculate their advantage to do their duty. The desire to pursue ideals, seek the public good, or otherwise be noble is, luckily, as unnecessary as it is largely absent from human motivation.

So how does the Vietnamese student respond? Does he see this concept of democracy and citizenship, often extolled as operational in the United States and other "mature" democracies, as a model for his country? "Absolutely not," he says, explaining his response in terms that echo a richer, stronger conception of citizenship and an understanding of democracy well beyond the procedural emphasis in the model of which he wanted no part. The idea of citizenship he had in mind was more public-spirited, resting on a different assessment of human capacity to think and act with public concerns deliberately in view. It also supposed that democratic government might work more in the "good and noble" ways disdained by the idea that democracy "is really quite easy," and thus requires simply the self-interested access of all in some conflict-of-interest or politics-of-identity model.

The more public-spirited model of citizenship required going far beyond the various self-interested activities of voting, organizing, lobbying, demonstrating, and joining parties and special interest groups. Such activities are to be expected of members of a free society and, of course, are not to be prohibited. They express what British political theorist Harold Laski (1893-1950) called "the inexpugnable variety of human wills; ... a multiplicity of wills which have no common purpose." The "latent causes" of this variety of wills, leading to "factions," U.S. President James Madison (1751-1836) observed, "are . . . sown in the nature of man, and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society." Thus, diverse people in a free society would be encouraged in self-expression, creativity, and the pursuit of happiness and prosperity. There would be political benefit, as well, from the various interests (the more, the better) being compelled to interact and compromise with each other in ways that would prevent a tyrannical dominance by any one faction, or even coalition of factions: the blessings of a free, inclusive, varied, open, equitable society.

To the Vietnamese student, and to Madison as well, though, this was not wrong or to be prohibited or even discouraged, but rather was incomplete, and it was not really citizenship or meaningful government by consent at all. Citizenship required most fundamentally what 18th-century civic republican thinking understood as the only essential political virtue: that participants in government, leaders or commoners, at national or local levels, have the public good at least partially in mind, rather than seeking only partial, factional, or selfish ends. To be citizens, members of the polity required in some degree this public perspective beyond the self- or group-interested one, beyond the right to pursue private interests, which as dwellers in a free society, they, of course, possessed as well.

THE CITIZEN'S "DOUBLE OFFICE"

The public interest, in a way, rested on interest in the public, the capacity of every citizen, as Fukuzawa Yukichi instructed his countrymen in Meiji era Japan (1868-1911) as the nation sought to understand western democracy, to hold "a double office." Of course, as good subjects of the realm had always been obliged to do, the "new citizen" would obey the laws and follow the customs of the land, but as citizens they also held an office as participants in government. This required, Fukuzawa told his students at Keio University, that they develop a "spirit of independence," attend to public affairs, and take part as discussants, voters, organizers, and officials in the nation's public business. Thus they should "plan ... an undertaking for the benefit of the nation, write about and circulate your ideas to the public... and be eager to work for your country." Above all, they should "acquire good judgment" to fulfill their office as citizen. Though it would be nearly a century before much of the Japanese polity would seek to embody these precepts, Fukuzawa clearly had in mind an office of citizenship far richer than the "minimal citizenship" called for in the conflict-of-interest model becoming dominant in the West.

American statesman Benjamin Franklin had much the same conception in mind when he told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, as it considered a proposal to "restrain the right of suffrage to freeholders," that the key factor to keep in mind on qualification to vote was "the virtue and public spirit of our common people." Thus he was skeptical of the freehold restraint because many non-freeholders might possess virtue and public spirit. Non-property holding sons of farmers, soldiers who had fought patriotically in the American Revolution, and artisans and tradesmen would, as examples, all likely be responsible voters and citizens. Another delegate explained "that every man having evidence of attachment to and permanent common interest with the society ought to share in all its rights and privileges." Wealth and property ownership were poor markers for this essential quality, he noted. Furthermore, the experience of taking part in government, especially at the local level, would likely enlarge the public spirit of the common people and thus be a sort of training in becoming good citizens. Franklin disliked, he said, "every thing that tended to debase the spirit of the common people," as he thought denying them suffrage would do. (Note, too, that none of Fukuzawa's or Franklin's criteria would exclude women, slaves, blacks, 18-year-olds, or Anglo-Americans, all generally denied suffrage and full citizenship in 18th-century America, once those categories would be understood as possessing the qualities of intelligence, reason, and political capacity, denied in them in 18th-century understanding. Full citizenship would necessarily apply, under the republican ideology of Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other founders of the United States, as anthropological and cultural understandings of race, class, and gender progressed in later centuries. Every extension of the franchise over the next two centuries to blacks, women, former slaves, 18-year-olds (and in Britain to Catholics) occurred when those categories, formerly held not to have the requisite political intelligence and maturity, were (finally) understood to possess those capacities.)

Attention to these essential qualities of citizenship undergirded, of course, a rationale for democratic government quite different from that sustained in the minimal, conflict-of-interest model. It attended to both of the leading ideals of the American Declaration of Independence (1776): that all were created equal and endowed with unalienable rights and that governments derived "their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed." The Declaration of Independence further stated as the first "injury and usurpation" of the king of Great Britain that "he has refused his Assent to Laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good." That is, an essential part of a self-governing polity was that citizens must somehow be able to give their consent, express their thoughtful agreement to validate the acts of government, and that in justice no authority could stand between that consent and the enactment of laws "wholesome and necessary for the public good." Without this active and constructive participation, citizens would be regarded, as Pericles had explained more than two millennia earlier in Athens, "not as unambitious but as useless." Any dimwit, that is, cannot do it; Athenians "are able to judge and instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action [mere clashing factions?], we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all."

To sustain this high ideal of citizenship it would be necessary to attend to many aspects of life if self-government were to be good government. How can this be? First, the polity must be free of foreign domination or domestic oppression; hence the energy for hundreds of revolutions against tyranny across time and around the world. But even if "successful" in defeating one tyrant (English Puritans and Cromwell in 1649; Russian communists and Lenin in 1917-1921; Ho Chi Minh in 1953 and 1975; in another way, even American arms versus Saddam Hussein in 2003, etc.), the problem remains of achieving good self-rule. American diplomat George Kennan noted in 1993 that of the many "disservices" of the Soviet regime to Russian society, one of the worst was "the fact that it left, as it departed, a people so poorly qualified [note that word] to displace it with anything better." The huge attention to and literature on this difficult and portentous question has been at the heart of discussions of citizenship, civil society, and good government at least since the time of Pericles and Aristotle, and including, especially in the United States, from Franklin's worries in 1787, to writer Alexis de Tocqueville's qualms about majority rule in the 1830s, to post-Darwinian arguments by social scientists that all government was simply self-interested groups struggling for power, and to contemporary concerns about the existence or creation of "social capital." So again, what habits, what state of mind, what institutions might nourish the "virtue and public spirit" vital to the citizenry of aspiring, "transitional," and mature democracies alike?

EDUCATION FOR CITIZENSHIP

Proponents of good government from Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and Erasmus to John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann, John Dewey, and Vaclav Havel have been teachers, writers, and philosophers of education, intent on assuring that those who governed would be prepared for that demanding, public-spirited, and morally attuned task. All argue, as well, that rule by those not-so-qualified leads to bad government, whatever the number of people ruling. Aristotle's classic analysis that government by one, a few, or the many could be good as in monarchy, aristocracy, or constitutional polity, or it could be bad as in tyranny, oligarchy, or democracy (mob rule under sway of demagogues in his meaning). The distinction is not how many rule, but how well they rule. In a way, the problem becomes much more complicated, but no less important, when the number ruling is enlarged from one or a few to, as in a democracy, the largest number, all the citizens.

Thomas Jefferson, an author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president, proposed in 1776 that in the newly independent, self-governing state of Virginia there should be general (even universal) education, so that all "would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government." American educator Horace Mann made the same point in 1848 when he argued that all should be taxed to support public schools, "because the general prevalence of ignorance, superstition, and vice, will breed Goth and Vandal at home, more fatal [in a democracy] to the public well-being than any Goth or Vandal from abroad." John Dewey's long career in the first half of the 20th century, linking democracy and education and seeking to transform American schools into "laboratories of democracy" where students would practice and "learn by doing" the attitudes and skills of democratic government, extended the same intention: Self-government, at any level, would work well and yield good results (in the public interest) only if the practitioners, from abroad or native-born, were educated (educed; drawn forth) to that responsibility.

Thus a system of schools and universities, public and/or private, with courses of study deliberately attuned to the encouragement of responsible citizenship and public-spirited leadership, is essential to good democratic government. Indeed, in some Asian societies, particularly, this equation has seemed so central that it has been thought necessary to defer democratic practices, people taking part in government, until all have been trained to literacy and attuned to questions of government by public discussion. Then it made sense that they be given the franchise; they would be qualified citizens rather than obedient subjects as had traditionally been their role. South Korea, Malaysia, and even China have exhibited this priority in their approaches to self-government, as did Japan in its first considerations of democracy.

THE RESPONSIBLE CITIZEN

At the conclusion of a study of the thought and career of Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, Paul Berman in 1997 noted Havel's observation that even with much talk about human rights, laws, constitutions, and nongovernmental organizations, many countries "yet fail to achieve very much democracy. And why was that?" "It is because," Berman draws from Havel, "democracy requires a certain kind of citizen. It requires citizens who feel responsible for something more than their own well-feathered little corner; citizens who want to participate in society's affairs, who insist on it; citizens with backbones; citizens who hold their ideas of democracy at the deepest level" (what Pericles meant when he termed inactive citizens "useless"). The "certain kind of citizen" required for good democratic government is morally grounded in personal character and in concern for the public good, which leads to virtuous, public-spirited conduct at all levels of social discourse, including family, local affairs, national responsibility, and worldwide concern for peace and justice.

If this seems an impossible idealistic conception, unsuited to human nature, it may not be any more unrealistic than supposing that everything works out for the best when diverse and inclusive self-interests are simply allowed to clash in a conflict-of-interest, minimal citizenship model of public life. Furthermore, the public-spirited model requires that citizens with private interests also possess and modulate an understanding of and concern for the public good. This model also assumes that some self-interest is an indelible part of human life and will always exist in some degree in human conduct, but that this is a quality to be restrained or disciplined, not celebrated, in private as well as public life. It accepts further that some human beings accomplish this restraint and modulation better than others (examples of this diversity, of course, abound in the histories of all people), and that social habits, religion, cultural values, and education can have a significant effect on how this works in any given society. A combination of the influences of family values, social capital, media practices, schools, and political leadership can impact the quality of public life in any nation—and the beneficent impact, in terms of public spirit, can be felt microcosmically at any time or any place whenever a citizen develops and acts upon that spirit.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.