Socratic Citizenship

Socratic Citizenship
Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Total Pages : 388
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780691218175
ISBN-13 : 069121817X
Rating : 4/5 (75 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Socratic Citizenship by : Dana Villa

Download or read book Socratic Citizenship written by Dana Villa and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many critics bemoan the lack of civic engagement in America. Tocqueville's ''nation of joiners'' seems to have become a nation of alienated individuals, disinclined to fulfill the obligations of citizenship or the responsibilities of self-government. In response, the critics urge community involvement and renewed education in the civic virtues. But what kind of civic engagement do we want, and what sort of citizenship should we encourage? In Socratic Citizenship, Dana Villa takes issue with those who would reduce citizenship to community involvement or to political participation for its own sake. He argues that we need to place more value on a form of conscientious, moderately alienated citizenship invented by Socrates, one that is critical in orientation and dissident in practice. Taking Plato's Apology of Socrates as his starting point, Villa argues that Socrates was the first to show, in his words and deeds, how moral and intellectual integrity can go hand in hand, and how they can constitute importantly civic--and not just philosophical or moral--virtues. More specifically, Socrates urged that good citizens should value this sort of integrity more highly than such apparent virtues as patriotism, political participation, piety, and unwavering obedience to the law. Yet Socrates' radical redefinition of citizenship has had relatively little influence on Western political thought. Villa considers how the Socratic idea of the thinking citizen is treated by five of the most influential political thinkers of the past two centuries--John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. In doing so, he not only deepens our understanding of these thinkers' work and of modern ideas of citizenship, he also shows how the fragile Socratic idea of citizenship has been lost through a persistent devaluation of independent thought and action in public life. Engaging current debates among political and social theorists, this insightful book shows how we must reconceive the idea of good citizenship if we are to begin to address the shaky fundamentals of civic culture in America today.


Socratic Citizenship Related Books

Socratic Citizenship
Language: en
Pages: 388
Authors: Dana Villa
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-09-01 - Publisher: Princeton University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Many critics bemoan the lack of civic engagement in America. Tocqueville's ''nation of joiners'' seems to have become a nation of alienated individuals, disincl
Challenging Citizenship
Language: en
Pages: 354
Authors: Sor-hoon Tan
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-03-02 - Publisher: Routledge

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Over the last ten years citizenship has become an area of interdisciplinary research and teaching in its own right. This book highlights that globalization pose
Citizen and Self in Ancient Greece
Language: en
Pages: 499
Authors: Vincent Farenga
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2006-05-29 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This 2006 study examines how the ancient Greeks decided questions of justice as a key to understanding the intersection of our moral and political lives. Combin
Citizenship and Multiculturalism in Western Liberal Democracies
Language: en
Pages: 207
Authors: David Edward Tabachnick
Categories: Political Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-03-16 - Publisher: Lexington Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume explores some of the tensions and pressures of citizenship in Western liberal democracies. Citizenship has adopted many guises in the Western contex
The Ethics of Citizenship in the 21st Century
Language: en
Pages: 185
Authors: David Thunder
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-03-08 - Publisher: Springer

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection of essays offers thoughtful discussions of major challenges confronting the theory and practice of citizenship in a globalized, socially fragmen