A variant
of republicanism indicating active, participatory, patriotic citizenship
as well as the ethos and educational ideal that goes with it. The term
was coined in the context of the embattled Weimar Republic and its genesis
is deeply marked by the traditions of German historical scholarship.
It was first used by the historian Hans Baron to describe an upsurge
of patriotic republicanism as a response to foreign aggression and despotism,
informed by the revival of classical models in Renaissance Florence.
This movement is also taken as a decisive turning point away from medieval
ways and towards liberating modernity.
The term
civic humanism has gained wide circulation and influence since its reception
into English-language historical writing. Its diffusion is closely connected
with the ‘contextualist school’ in the history of ideas.
Its original, historically circumscribed meaning was extended to indicate
a political language or discourse extending from classical origins to
epochal manifestations -- ‘moments’ -- in the ‘Atlantic
republican tradition’. Reinterpretation of parts of the historical
record of seventeenth century England and pre-revolutionary America
with a view to civic humanism provided a significant counterweight to
the hitherto predominant Whig or Lockean-Liberal paradigm of constitutional
development.
No longer
necessarily tied to the interpretation of particular historical periods
the term became part of the vocabulary of communitarianism and more
generally of ideological opposition to liberalism understood as acquisitive
individualism. It remained nonetheless important for the value of civic
humanism as a paradigm of politics and civil society that it not be
considered a mere ideological abstraction but that it be believed to
have roots in the lived experience of the English-speaking polities.
Beyond this relatively circumscribed usage the concept has entered the
language and is used rather loosely and mostly with positive connotations
to refer to public-spirited citizenship with varying degrees of exactitude.
In terms
of sober historical scholarship the greatest value of the concept has
been that of a heuristic device leading to important corrections of
received ideas. It is itself now subject to serious criticism.
1. A Variant
of Republicanism
Civic
humanism is generally taken as an equivalent or as a particular variant
of republicanism, meaning a conception of politics in which government
is in principle the common business of the citizens. The city provides
the environment -- a public space -- for human fulfillment. If, on the
one hand, the republic is contrasted to personal or authoritarian government
it also differs from the liberal model in which the constitution provides
a formal frame that embraces citizens of diverse moral character and
with varied individual pursuits. The republic rests rather on the virtues
of its citizens and is oriented toward the common good. The virtues
of citizenship are in turn developed and enhanced by being exercised
in upholding republican political and legal institutions and making
them work by being involved in their operation. Republican life is then
thought to be formative of the public spirit on which it rests. Republican
freedom depends on constant civic activity. The polity is taken to cohere
by means of the common acceptance of standards of justice that are more
than procedural rules. The purpose of the commonwealth is not so much
peace and ensuring the rights of individuals, as the realization of
human potentiality, which is taken to be essentially political. The
republic is the necessary medium of self-realization, not merely the
condition of possibility of private endeavors. Indeed, a certain amount
of conflict, properly contained, adds to the liveliness and vigor of
the republic. There is a link furthermore between the freedom of the
citizen and the independence of the republic. Citizen armies and the
right to bear arms are therefore common postulates of republican theory.
Civic humanism
is linked in principle to a classical educational program that goes
beyond the formative capacity of participatory citizenship itself and
involves the conscious revival of ancient ideals. How true this is of
the educational practice of late Atlantic epigones of the republican
tradition is a different matter. Republican candor, simplicity of manner,
opposition to ostentation, luxury and lucre, are common, though not
universal republican themes. Some theorists also dwell on the millenarian
aspirations associated with republican ideals responding to the fragility
of the republic and the need to provide against its corruption and decay
with the passage of time.
2. A Historiographical
Term
Unlike
historical terms such as ‘the polis’ or ‘Christendom’
that were familiar to the contemporaries of the realities so described,
‘civic humanism’ is a historiographical term like the ‘Middle
Ages’ that emerged as a heuristic category in an ex post facto
reconstruction of the past.
The concept
was first used to characterize a cluster of historical phenomena of
Renaissance Florence. It was then extended to mark a republican tradition
or political language reaching back to classical antiquity. It finally
came to indicate a political ideal opposed to both classical liberal
and authoritarian views of politics.
Its adoption
by historians of ideas is linked with particular ways of doing history,
first in the context of German historicist Geisteswissenschaften, then
in connection with the methods developed by the ‘Cambridge School’,
centered on the reconstruction of political discourses, exemplified
by John Pocock and Quentin Skinner. It is by means of the latter reception
that civic humanism entered the discussion about the intellectual origins
of political currents in civil war England and pre-revolutionary America.
This, in turn, occasioned the introduction of the term into the debate
on the nature and quality of contemporary public life where it became
closely associated with the advocacy of communitarianism.
3. The
German Matrix: Geisteswissenschaft, Modernity, and Liberty
In its
original German form Bürgerhumanismus first appeared in a book
review by Hans Baron as early as 1925. In his subsequent work Baron
used the term to describe the fusion of two distinct ideological currents
of Florentine thought: apolitical ‘Petrarchan’ humanism
on the one hand, and the Guelf tradition of patriotic resistance by
the Florentine city-state to imperial domination on the other. The ‘rebirth’
of ancient letters and wisdom marked a revolutionary change of the European
mind, but it remained limited to the contemplative pleasure and edification
of quietist poets and scholars until it merged with the assertive defense
of sovereign independence of the increasingly rich, powerful, and confident
merchant cities of Italy. The fusion was effected, according to Baron,
as a response to a crisis, as a reaction of the intellectual and political
leadership of Florence to the aggressive expansionism of the despots
of Milan. The resulting exaltation of liberty combined patriotic self-defense
with the upholding of a republican way of life that departed from medieval
ways by asserting worldly (diesseitig) values and embracing the active
life in a manner evocative of the republics of antiquity. According
to Baron's thesis, in the face of military danger the patterns of society,
economy, and politics came to cohere in a culture, i.e. in a way of
life infused by an educational ideal. The main champions of this were
the great Chancellors of the Republic, Colluccio Salutati and especially
Leonardo Bruni, top civil servants and public intellectuals combined,
who restored the practical pertinence of classical learning in the process
of establishing the terms of a new consensus.
Beyond
seeking to identify the character of a particular time and place, Baron
studied the political culture of Renaissance Florence as an instance
of a transhistorically exemplary mode of communal existence pertinent,
not least, to his own times. Florentine civic humanism represented for
him, furthermore, a decisive turning point in history. For him it was
an epochal event that, by looking backward to antiquity pointed forward
to modernity, which he embraced wholeheartedly, without the misgivings
of a Jacob Burckhardt or a Max Weber, as a liberating, civilizing, progressive
process. The advent of civic humanism marked for Baron the victory of
secular economic, social, and political ideals versus the asceticism,
religious obscurantism, and hierarchy of the Middle Ages. Civic humanism
provided the vital vehicle for the translation of the exalted ancient
idea of citizenship to the modern age. The humanist defense of republican
liberty against monarchical tyranny announced for him the beginnings
of modern democratic thought, elevated by an educational ideal of classical
inspiration, and accompanied by a renewed cultural creativity. It was
thus the harbinger of the unequivocally positive trends in European
civilization. The value of such achievements appeared all the more compelling
since they were not theoretical postulates derived from abstract speculation
but represented historically realized exempla.
Baron's
reconstruction of civic humanism was not only directed against other-worldly
values and notions of medieval deference, but also against different
modes of construing modern autonomy. He sought in particular to revise
Burckhardt's reading of Renaissance individualism as morally ambiguous,
manifested not in the form of able and accomplished humanists who were
present in the courts of tyrants and in the Papal administration, as
much as in republican states such as Venice and Florence. Baron was
no less opposed to the claims advanced by Ernst Kantorowicz and others
about the modernity of the autocratic state of Frederic II, that were
so difficult to square with a liberal and optimistically progressive
view of history. That other reading of early modernity yielded antecedents
not of enlightened ‘western-oriented’ democratic citizenship,
but of ‘Nietschean’ antibourgeois individualism, in tune
with antidemocratic ideological tendencies in German culture of the
Weimar period, including the ‘high’ culture of the circle
of Stephan George, and very much at odds with Baron's political convictions.
What was at issue here, beyond the characterization of a historical
period, was the definition and evaluation of modernity itself.
Baron wished
to see the autonomous humanity he perceived emerging in quatrocento
Florence integrated within a constitutional frame and anchored by patriotic
attachment to the community. Baron's vast and only partly realized program
to establish the Italian humanist tradition as a major source of modernity
was deliberately juxtaposed to yet another tendency in German scholarship
that sought the roots of modernity and modernization in Protestantism.
Baron's emphasis on Florence was meant to counterbalance the ‘northern’
perspective of scholars such as Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and Baron's
own mentor Ernst Troeltsch who, in their different ways, linked Protestantism
and capitalism and saw the soul-searching subjectivity of Calvinist
inspiration as a decisive moment in the genesis of modern individualism.
Baron's historical project was inscribed in his advocacy of constitutional
democracy on the West European and American model opposed to romantic
nativist-Germanic notions for the Weimar republic. This orientation
was affected for him, however, by the German intellectual tradition,
for the exemplary polities were conceived not as formal frames of individual
pursuits, but on the pattern of human autonomy woven into Sittlichkeit,
the moral-cultural substance of German idealism. If this nexus of public
solidarity be translated as civil society it should be evident why Baron's
thesis should appeal to English-speaking communitarians. Yet, naturally,
nuances change with every transfer.
Civic humanism
is an inevitably rough and approximate rendition of Bürgerhumanismus.
‘Bürger’, the first component of the term, connotes
not only citizenship, but also a bourgeois social condition and outlook,
as well as an urban context for the realization of the good life. ‘Humanismus’
in turn echoes the German reception of the heritage of classical antiquity.
The ‘second’ humanism after that of the classical world
itself involved the process of national renewal after the onslaught
of Napoleon by means of an education that hinged on the Classics and
aimed at -- the equally untranslatable -- ‘Bildung’ (formation
and education) promoted by figures such as Wilhelm v. Humboldt. After
the debacle of World War I and what was perceived as a flattening and
instrumental reductionism of education in Germany, there was a nostalgic
yearning for a ‘third humanism’, most eloquently articulated
by Baron's near-contemporary Werner Jaeger. Though Baron did not share
Jaeger's elitist outlook, they were of one mind regarding the authoritative
value of the Classics.
Baron's
principled opposition to German nationalism and its threat to the republican
order was itself deeply affected by archetypes of the German intellectual
tradition. An important and recurring theme is the awakening of patriotic
citizenship, heightened by the lessons drawn from a classical education,
in response to the aggression of a foreign despot. The subtitle of Baron's
Crisis is telling in this regard: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty
in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny. As Riccardo Fubini has pointed
out, although Baron stated that his book was inspired by the struggle
of the western democracies against Hitlerian tyranny, the pattern was
already set well before the coming to power of the Nazis, preformed
by the inflections of German idealism. In this scheme the Visconti of
Milan are implicitly a prefiguration of Bonaparte.
Baron's
thesis has been criticized for neglecting political, institutional,
and social history, in favor of identifying a pattern of consciousness
as the decisive character of the political and historical phenomenon
under study. It is true that Baron weaves together a way of life, an
educational ideal, and the power of the state as an encompassing culture,
that can be reconstructed as such in terms of Geistesgeschichte, the
history of the spirit, by selecting from the evidence the materials
needed for its purposes.
4. Reception
in America: An Ideological Counterweight to Liberal Individualism
The psychological
motivation for Baron's emphasis on the integration of the individual
in the politically structured community may perhaps be connected to
his situation as an assimilated Jew in Weimar Germany. Driven into exile
when Hitler came to power he was destined to experience the challenge
of integration in a new country that was not insignificantly perhaps,
a republic at war with tyranny: the United States.
It was
with the publication of The Crisis of the Early Renaissance in 1955
that civic humanism entered the vocabulary of English-speaking historiography.
Its reception was influenced, however, by the work of another émigré,
the distinguished and well-connected historian Felix Gilbert. If Baron
had viewed civic humanism as an ethico-political response to events,
Gilbert chose to regard it as a conceptual framework to be studied against
‘traditional political assumptions’. In this light civic
humanism or ‘classical republicanism’ appeared as an ideology,
not in the classical Marxist sense of an epiphenomenon of a putatively
more real social reality, but as a discourse that circumscribes, if
it does not determine, the field of possible meaning. According to Gilbert's
perspective the language of civic humanism was not only a means of expression
but also an instrument of power of the elites (such as the group that
met in the Rucellai gardens) who articulated it.
Gilbert
departed from Baron's thesis in another significant respect: For Baron
the pursuit of wealth and the entrepreneurial spirit of Renaissance
merchants was an essential component of the epochal turn towards the
active life and, as he writes on the first page of the Crisis, linked
to the rise of a bourgeois society, Gilbert emphasized instead the opposition
between acquisitiveness and patriotism, calling attention to the calls
to sacrifice and self-denial in favor of the common good frequently
found in republican texts.
The reconstruction
of Florentine republicanism stressing the ideal of a republic of frugal,
public-minded citizens in danger of being corrupted by luxury and the
pursuit of private gain, a theme that could be traced back to ancient,
especially Roman, authors, provided an attractive inspiration for a
revisionist view of American history. Bernard Bailyn developed an image
of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), based
on the classical republican rhetoric to be found in the political pamphlets
and controversialist literature of the time leading up to the American
founding. This recovered republicanism could counterbalance the canonical
view, most clearly and forcefully expressed in Louis Hartz's Liberal
Tradition in America (1955), of an American consensus of Lockean derivation,
centered on the defense of property rights and animated by liberal individualism,
an outlook so much taken for granted in Americans' understanding of
themselves as to have become the unexamined nexus of American life.
The republican model provided an important corrective to the dominant
orthodoxy and a great impetus to historical research.
Bailyn
himself did not accept the term ‘civic humanism’ as adequate
to the American reality, nor did he overestimate the importance of a
republicanism in the American Revolution and its aftermath although
still present, according to him, in the ferment of the colonial period.
His student, Gordon Wood, on the other hand, developed in The Creation
of the American Republic (1969) a conceptual model that presented the
Constitution as the turning away from republican ideals in a reactionary
consolidation of interests under the sign of John Locke. In so doing
Wood provided an ideological platform from which to criticize the American
constituted order and the culture that underpins it that had the rhetorical
and psychological advantage of being able to claim that it was pragmatically
grounded in the lived experience of the American past, unlike alien
and dogmatic Marxism.
This frame
of argument found a ready audience at a time when there was considerable
discontent with American society and its institutions. The argument
itself and its reception were no doubt influenced by Hannah Arendt's
restatement of the Aristotelian ideal of participatory citizenship.
Arendt's defense of the vita activa as a life of public engagement opposed
to a life that reduces the pursuit of happiness to individual, selfish,
and for the most part acquisitive private undertakings, involves more
than the coming to fruition of a potentiality in principle intrinsic
to man in the context of the polis that we find in Aristotle. The public
engagement advocated by Arendt involves rather man's willed self-enactment
in the public arena. Freedom and humanity are accomplished by action
in the public eye, transcending labor to which man is compelled by necessity.
If civic
humanism in the context of revisionist American history rejects the
bourgeois matrix that was an essential part of Baron's thesis, it embraces
his progressivism and indeed carries it to lengths he would not have
envisaged. The Renaissance, and with it civic humanism, appears as a
decisive turning point, asserting the positive values of modernity,
in a teleological historical process of which American democracy, or
its promised fulfillment, is cast as the culmination. In a process in
the course of which, it is said, “humanity has fumbled through
the centuries toward truth and freedom in modern science and democracy,
American style” (W. McNeil, History for Citizens), Florentine
republicanism prepares and prefigures the achievement of the American
Revolution. At the same time a ‘republican tradition’ provides
the foundation for a ‘loyal opposition’ to the American
polity as it actually operates, appealing, as it were, to its better
self. In a later book, with a characteristically triumphalist subtitle,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution, How a Revolution Transformed
a Monarchical Society Into a Democratic One Unlike Any That Had Ever
Existed (1992), Gordon Wood asserted that all over the ‘Atlantic
world’ during the eighteenth century eager egalitarian citizens,
pressing into the avant-garde of history, deliberately abolished monarchies
and set up republics. Wood's postulate of a sweeping Zeitgeist apparently
dismisses the developments of unquestionably Atlantic constitutional
monarchies, in Scandinavia and the Netherlands for instance, if not
in Britain and Canada that to some observers would seem to have emerged
as model democracies.
5. The
‘Atlantic Republican Tradition’
In his
influential book The Machiavellian Moment: Political Thought and the
Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), J.G.A. Pocock sought to trace
the origins of modern republicanism in a manner that was sensitive to
the authority of the ancients and their revivals. His reconstruction
of ‘the Atlantic tradition’ does not depend on philological
filiation, i.e. on showing that an author had read and was influenced
by certain passages of an earlier author, but on identifying thematic
affinities. Republicanism is “not a program, but a language”,
available to be picked up, selectively and thematically at decisive
‘moments’. Pocock emphasizes both the enabling and the limiting,
the evocative as much as the expressive capacity of language. “Men
cannot do what they have no means of saying they have done, and what
they do must be what they say and conceive that it is”. (JIH 3,
1972, 118). The eponymous moment of the book is ‘Machiavellian’
both insofar as it takes Renaissance civic humanism as an exemplary
manifestation of republican and patriotic collective sentiment and insofar
as it can be considered the response to a crisis amounting to what Machiavelli
would call an occasione, a moment of disorder that gives scope to the
formative activity of a new beginning.
This exercise
requires, of course, an interpretation, already adumbrated by Baron,
of Machiavelli as thoroughly republican, not primarily interested in
the workings of power, but in exalting the satisfactions of active citizenship.
By the same token Machiavelli's best known book, The Prince, must be
treated as a momentary aberration belonging to a transitory phase. This
view of a ‘defanged’ Machiavelli has found a surprisingly
wide echo in popular writing. It is nonetheless possible, indeed necessary,
to show that Machiavelli was consistently republican, but with a view
to power and glory, and apt to justify the growing power of the modern
state. Burkhardt's notion of the Renaissance “state as a work
of art” correctly places Machiavellian statecraft on the side
of modern artifice rather than ancient Aristotelian nature.
The problem
of Florentine republicanism according to Pocock was to fit the idea
of an Aristotelian polis within the framework of a Christian understanding
of time. One answer to the experience of disorder was the explicitly
millenarian exaltation of Savonarola. In Pocock's view, civic humanism
provided a secular alternative in the form of a revived Aristotelian
‘science of virtue’ as the means of overcoming the republic's
temporal finitude. Doubts have been raised both with regard to the philosophical
depth of the supposed Aristotelianism of the Florentine humanists and
the strength of metastatic aspirations as part of their program. With
regard to the former, Quentin Skinner, the other significant English
political theorist and historian to promote the recovery of civic humanism
in a contextualist mode, has come to stress increasingly its Roman rather
than Hellenic antecedents. This is not just a matter of identifying
sources. Skinner's revised position means rather that in his view, civic
humanism advocated active citizenship as a means to liberty from foreign
and domestic domination, rather than as a self-fulfilling human end.
The theme
of republican virtue as an aspiration to shore up the commonwealth against
the ravages of time and corruption is taken up again by Pocock with
regard to the English puritan revolution and its aftermath. According
to him, a ‘Machiavellian’ civic humanist language, imbued
with ‘classical republicanism’, was available when it became
necessary to come to terms with the vacuum of legitimacy created by
revolution and regicide. That language then developed into the discourse
of the ‘country’ opposition to the ‘court’ party.
It became the instrument of a political class resting on independent
land-ownership that sought to defend itself against financial speculation
and the advance of government patronage. Such patronage was also bound
to determine the loyalties of a standing army. It therefore appeared
necessary, in order to assure full citizenship, i.e. participation in
public decisions as a matter of autonomous right, rather than as a grant
or privilege conceded (hence in principle retractable) by the sovereign
to a subject, that the citizens have a right to bear arms and organize
militias.
This English
republicanism then appears revolutionary in one obvious sense, but also
profoundly conservative, defending the landed ‘parliamentary’
interest, in the name of citizen virtue, against encroachments by a
central government and the nefarious influence of the ‘modernizing’
dynamics of trade and finance capitalism, reviled as corruption. Ironically,
in Pocock's adaptation of Baron's thesis, applied to Anglo-Saxon materials,
virtue is opposed to property, and it is the urban, bourgeois entrepreneurs
and the chancery of the modernizing state, the very creators of civic
humanism in Baron's mind, that are on the wrong side of the fence.
Pocock
tells us that this civic humanist vocabulary, developed in England,
was in turn available to the American colonists as they sought to articulate
their protest and in the course of events to proclaim and justify their
independence from the crown. In America furthermore, where, unlike England,
a lasting republic did emerge, the language of republicanism acquired
greater significance. Not all Americans were schooled in this tradition,
but there was no alternative tradition in which to be schooled. In conjunction
with the puritan ethos it continued to influence American life beyond
independence, affecting the way Americans viewed the frontier, corruption,
and the perpetuity of the republic. We find echoes of it in Jefferson's
ideal of an agrarian republic and in the resistance to Hamiltonian ideas
in favor of a strong central government, a central bank, and other aspects
of a commercial empire, not to speak of the mistrust of standing armies
and the constitutionally sanctioned right to bear arms. Pocock therefore
sees republicanism affecting American attitudes and mores well beyond
the framing of the constitution that was the terminus ad quem for Gordon
Wood.
6. An Ideological
Household Word
It is
clear why such a synthesis would be attractive to communitarian critics
of possessive individualism and liberal capitalism. At the same time
civic humanism has become a kind of shorthand for a variety of phenomena,
not without some confusion. The tone is sometimes critical, as when
civic humanism is presented as a reductive pedagogical ideal relative
to a full fledged religious education, or found wanting by lecturers
at the Objectivist Center. But the undertone is generally positive,
whether the term is used to characterize the way in which public schools
in Virginia are said to be embedded in the life and values of their
community, or the spirit animating ‘person centered’ community
development work on the Zambezi, the alleged purpose of educating prison
detainees in Illinois or the flourishing of the arts under the patronage
of seventeenth century Wallachian princes. The Portuguese poet Camoes
is said to have embraced an original form of civic humanism, condemning
imperial expansion in his Lusiads. Civic humanism flourished in early
modern German cities as well as in Italy. The Scottish Enlightenment
was affected by it, and so were the aesthetics of Shaftsbury. We read
of a visual aesthetics of eighteenth century civic humanism. Adam Smith
himself had a dash of civic humanism. Hegel had to come to grips with
it. Filipino intellectuals protesting Spanish rule in the nineteenth
century developed principles of civic humanism. Henry Adams can be rescued
from being considered reactionary by pointing to the struggle of liberalism
and civic humanism in his breast. Rorty's pragmatism promises to pull
together what modern epistemology has torn asunder, private and public,
subject and object, knowledge and reality, in a reenactment of the synthesis
supposedly achieved by Bruni, overcoming the alienation of obsession
with a civitas dei separate from the here and now. American capitalism
gets both defended and condemned in civic humanism's name. American
philanthropy embodies it, as a weapon against tyranny. It is threatened
by a post-ecological world and will be restored to health by neo-Marxist
empowering education. The list could go on.
Such widespread
and promiscuous usage shows that a notion unknown to the English language
until 1955 has become something of a household word. Having emerged
in the context of historical scholarship it has become part of the larger
debate on the broad ideological parameters of public policy in modern
societies and in the United States in particular. Conversely it is obvious
that civic humanism and republicanism would be most liable to be attacked
by critics from a liberal or Marxist point of view.
7. A Concept
Revisited
As a matter
of history it now seems clear that Baron's thesis made too much of the
divide between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, and that there was
a venerable tradition of civic liberty in medieval communes. The larger
question here is that of world-historical periodization, and whether
we are entitled to continue to believe in the dawn of a world that will,
despite temporary setbacks, eventually be bathed in the light of enlightened
freedom.
It has
also become evident that civic humanism owes much to the reaction of
the Florentine upper classes to popular uprisings in the fourteenth
century and is as much an ideology of social control as it is a language
of liberation from medieval hierarchies. More generally it is clear
that there was a great deal of difference between the celebratory rhetoric
of humanists in the pay of the republic and the social and political
realities of Renaissance Florence. This concerns not least the aggressive
policy of conquest and domination pursued by Florence that was as much
or more the cause of the Milanese wars as was Visconti expansionism.
In American
history, despite valuable corrections to a historical outline too easily
taken for granted, Locke is having an inevitable comeback as the major
influence, along with the Protestant religious heritage, on the formation
of American values. It is just as clear that the founders, for all their
classical learning -- or rather because of it -- were wary of the instability
and strife of ancient republics and therefore inclined to regard them
as exemplary only with severe qualifications.
The polemical
juxtaposition of civic humanist and liberal individualist paradigms
of public consciousness has tended to accentuate differences and to
reduce the rich complexity of the historical and social reality that
they seek to capture to caricatures set up for the purpose of being
shot down. There is furthermore a real danger that the ideological force
civic humanism has acquired as a buzzword may overwhelm the historical
foundations on which the concept rests. This is particularly critical
for a term that draws a great deal of its strength from its claim to
be rooted in lived historical antecedents.
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Copyright
© 2002 by
Athanasios Moulakis