Socratic Citizenship. By Dana Villa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 370p. $65.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Abstract

The publication of Dana Villa's Socratic Citizenship coincides accidentally with recent events that have shaken and solidified American society. Yet the issues his book addresses are directly relevant to how a democratic society confronts such challenges. Villa investigates various forms of democratic citizenship and argues for a kind of civic activity that has been dangerously obscured within modern debates about democracy. Particularly within periods of regime stress, liberalism's good citizen who votes, pays taxes, and plays by the rules seems underequipped to meet the commitments the times require. The framework of the communitarians or the civic republicans wherein one discovers the value of “a shared commitment to something bigger than one's self… [endorsing a] life of community or civic engagement” (p. x) seems more helpful. Villa's concern is that this view of citizenship too easily enlists the community's members in projects of collective affirmation, while ignoring the importance of a critical rationality that asks skeptical questions about the content and the moral consequences of a politics driven by a “newly rediscovered sense of political membership” (p. x). In response, he rediscovers the possibility of a form of citizenship that places “intellectual doubt at the heart of moral reflection,” demanding not commitment but conscientiousness (p. xii). It is this form of citizenship that seems most compatible with moral individualism, and thus with the basic premises of democracy. He plausibly finds the origin of this kind of citizenship in the practices of Socrates as they are portrayed within the early Platonic dialogues, Apology,Crito, and Gorgias.