From Virtues to Values: Conceptions of Australian Citizenship

Abstract

In her study of the Australian Liberals, Judith Brett (2003) points to a deep conceptual shift that has taken place in the meaning of citizenship, and political culture more generally, over the past century. Where today citizenship is generally conceived in individualistic and passive terms and as connected with a series of rights and entitlements owed to us by the state, in the first half of the twentieth century the prevailing understanding of citizenship was active, communal and tied up with notions of service, obligation and duty. The earlier conception on which Australian Liberals drew was, according to Brett, ‘as much moral as political […] The good citizen was not just someone who fulfilled their political rights and obligations, the good citizen was also a good person and their fulfilment of their citizenship obligations was but an aspect of this goodness’ (Brett, 2003, 58). Moreover, morality here should not be equated with adherence to a set of values, as is so much of the contemporary discourse on citizenship, but with virtue — the cultivation of certain qualities of character that enhance the life of the community. Whereas values, Brett suggests, ‘[imply] attitudes and opinions held by the self and detachable from it; “virtues” are constitutive of the self, part of its very character or very nature, and immune from the relativising morality inherent in the concept of value’ (Brett, 2003, 9–10).