Economic Vitality and Civic Vitality

Abstract

When Liberal Education held an editorial conference last year to plan for a special invitational issue on the civic purposes of liberal learning, one of the desired topics was economics and citizenship. If one peruses the table of contents, it is evident that the editors were unsuccessful in finding such a paper. I Though one or more may exist, it seems more likely that a paper addressing the topic of the relationship between citizenship and economics in the 20th century needs to do some ground breaking. This paper is a beginning and probably does not reach pay dirt. However, it is hoped that even a small furrow holds promise on which to build future thoughts. The economics profession has a rich history of political economists, such as John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and Karl Marx, interested in the relationship between economic vitality, citizens, and society. However, for students of economics in the latter part of the 20th century, there is virtually nothing in the literature which speaks directly to citizenship. On the other hand, during the past 30 years a growing body of scholars in public administration, political science, and economics has contributed to developing theories about public choice, sometimes also called rational or collective choice. These scholars are concerned with the characteristics of goods, especially those generally produced by governments, and deem particularly important the institutional arrangements used to determine and deliver these goods.2 Two assumptions appear common to their work: