Rhetoric, Civic Consciousness, and Civic Conscience: The Invention of Citizenship in Classical Greece

Abstract

The orthodox liberal conception of society and politics has proven incapable in this country of sustaining a system of social relations in which individualistic and communitarian impulses are balanced, and in which personal freedoms and community controls are not seen as being mutually antagonistic. William Sullivan looks to the classical notion of citizenship for a vision of life that is simultaneously political and moral. The “classical notion” he promotes has its roots in theAthenian conception of citizenship both as aform of consciousness and as a call to duty. Thisform of consciousness grows out of an awareness that we are communal beings and that members of a community can influence the course of both civic and natural events. It ultimately embraces the ideas that social knowledge is fluid and tentative, that multiple viewpoints can claim legitimacy, and that resolutions of social conflicts are achieved through persuasion. Thus, the essential. act of citizenship is “doing rhetoric,” and its most fundamental duties are to participate in governance, to listen and respond to others, to acknowledge our own fallibility, and to advocate for our own views as we participate in civic life.