Citizenship is hard in the 21st century. No, I’m not talking about the legal status that makes one officially an “American.” Exercising that kind of citizenship requires nothing more than breathing. Nor am I talking about blind patriotism or obedience to the law. The North Koreans are excellent citizens by that definition.
The citizenship I’m talking about is the hard work required of free peoples in a republic. It’s the essence of “self-government” or “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” And it’s not for the faint of heart. The ancient Greeks understood this. Liberty was understood differently among the ancients. A man — and it was exclusively male — was free insofar as he had access to public governance. In other words, a free man spent his time in the heart of the city arguing about laws, holding administrators accountable through trials, making decisions about war and peace, and so on. Benjamin Constant, a Swiss and French political thinker, called this “ancient liberty” in a well-known 1819 essay.
This kind of active citizenship was only possible because of two subjugated groups: women (de facto slaves) and slaves. These did the hard work of the domestic sphere and the realm of the body — cooking, cleaning, farming, business and child-rearing. That left the realm of the mind to the free man. Obviously, I don’t endorse this system. But it’s useful to recognize that the ancient Greeks thought liberty (understood as active citizenship) was a full-time job.
The Founding Fathers had similar republican — meaning the form of government, not the political party — notions about the hard work of citizenship, though their idea of liberty was marked by a distinctly liberal tone. The liberty of the private realm, including freedom of speech and religion, were just as important as active participation in public governance. Constant called this “modern liberty.” Indeed, in the Declaration of Independence, the whole purpose of government is to protect individual rights, and the government most likely to do that is republican. Of course, the founders often relied on the same groups as the Athenians to make such republican citizenship possible: women (de facto slaves) and slaves. Think Jefferson in Monticello. Someone else had to be harvesting the fields and raising the children and cooking the food while he wrote his ”Notes on the State of Virginia."
Fast forward to 2025. We still speak of citizenship and liberty and self-governance. But now we extend the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship to all because we believe that all humans are created equal. We are each expected to do both the duties of life and citizenship; we are each engaged in the realm of the mind and the body. Frankly, that makes republican citizenship much harder for you and me than it was for Pericles or Jefferson. Moreover, we insist upon both freedom in the modern sense (speech and religion, for example) and republican government. Constant argued that if forced to choose between the two, we will always choose modern liberty. And sometimes it seems the choice is made for us. We are simply too busy to give much mind to the public sphere. I feel that often as a working mother of four.
Yet without active citizenship, we cannot defend our individual rights. We are at terrible risk of losing it all — and perhaps feeling a shameful relief in the process.
You and I are called to do something both greater and harder than Pericles or Jefferson. In 1863, Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg. He said that 87 years previously, the founders had created a new nation “... conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The nation was then “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether ... any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Now it’s our turn to insist that the nation continue to endure.
Except this time it won’t require dying on a battlefield. It will require finding the energy and the passion to show up at your next city council meeting, to run for state legislator, to pick up trash on trails, to conserve natural resources, to volunteer for the PTA and to get to know your neighbors. The kind of citizenship required of free peoples is not for the timid or the weak.
But we must not be the generation that loses the war.