Abstract
Everybody has an opinion. Each of us has a point of view on at least one issue of public concern. Around election time, and at most other times too, we somehow reach our individual conclusions on topics of the day, big and small. Most of us find frequent opportunities to express those opinions as well. This is obviously just as it should be in a democracy, especially one that so highly values free speech. We share and test our ideas through “the eternal arguing that is the essence of American democracy.”1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Robert W. Bennett, Talking It Through: Puzzles of American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 34.
John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, ed. Thomas Reardon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 56.
Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 71, ed. E. H. Scott (Buffalo: William S. Hein & Co., 2002), 393.
Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9. As used in this book, the word “citizen” refers generally to an inhabitant of the United States. This usage encompasses not only people who have the status of legal citizenship by virtue of birth or naturalization, but also others residing here legally or even otherwise.
Dr. Michael Hartoonian, Panel Discussion on Civics Education at the American Bar Association Symposium II: “Public Understanding of Perceptions of the American Justice System,” Albany Law Review 62 (1999): 1451, 1456;
see Jamin B. Raskin, “No Enclaves of Totalitarianism: The Triumph and Unrealized Promise of the Tinker Decision,” American University Law Review 58 (2009): 1193, 1198, which states, “The citizen occupies the highest office in the land …”
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Colonel Yancey (January 6, 1816), quoted in Martin H. Redish and Abbie Marie Mollen, “Understanding Post’s and Meiklejohn’s Mistakes: The Central Role of Adversary Democracy in the Theory of Free Expression,” Northwestern University Law Review 103 (2009): 1303, 1305.
Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 63–64.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (New York: Random House, 1988), 194.
Yves R. Simon, Philosophy of Democratic Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 78.
Algernon D. Black, The Young Citizens: The Story of the Encampment for Citizenship (New York: Ungar Publishing Company, 1962), 5–6.
Judith Barad, “Stewart and Socrates: Speaking Truth to Power,” in The Daily Show and Philosophy, ed. Jason Holt (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 76.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 246.
Alex S. Jones, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1.
A similar distinction has been suggested in an analysis of the Supreme Court’s approach to the First Amendment protection of speech on “matters of public concern.” The distinction first identifies a “normative conception of public concern,” which is about “matters that are substantively relevant to the processes of democratic self-governance.” This is contrasted with a “descriptive conception of public concern,” which simply addresses “issues that happen actually to interest the ‘public,’” even though the matters may “seem trivial and irrelevant to democratic self-governance.” Robert C. Post, “The Constitutional Concept of Public Discourse: Outrageous Opinion, Democratic Deliberation, and Hustler Magazine v. Falwell,” Harvard Law Review 103 (1990): 667–674.
Morris P. Fiorina et al., The New American Democracy, 6th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2009), 9–11.
See Andrew Rehfeld, “Representation Rethought: On Trustees, Delegates, and Gyroscopes in the Study of Political Representation and Democracy,” American Political Science Review 103 (2) (2009): 214–215, observing that the relation between citizens and their representatives in a democracy is commonly “framed by the terms ‘trustees’ and ‘delegates,’ denoting whether political representatives—in their capacities as lawmakers—act as they believe is best for the nation versus acting as their electoral constituents desire.”
Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady, The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 5–6.
Copyright information
© 2013 Kenneth A. Manaster
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Manaster, K.A. (2013). The Citizen’s Task. In: The American Legal System and Civic Engagement. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342331_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342331_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46623-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-34233-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)