History’s Standards of Good Citizenship

Abstract

To meaningfully assess the concept of citizenship in the age of the Internet, we need some idea of what citizenship has meant historically. That is, we need answers to the questions that have occupied the attention of philosophers, political scholars, and social scientists for thousands of years: What is citizenship? What constitutes a citizen? What do good citizens do? What do good citizens believe? These questions are wracked by tensions between ideas of individual entitlement and attachment to a particular community (Kymlicka and Norman, 1994) and a persistent mismatch between democratic theory and modern practices (Mueller, 1999). This section will attempt to outline a manageable set of propositions—useful for auditing conceptions of citizenship.