Civic Identity

Ancient Roots

Civic identity is grounded in the idea of the Greek polis, or city-state. In democratic Athenian culture, citizens had formal and informal privileges and obligations to serve the polis. Civic virtue included expectations for full cultural and political involvement and focused on public duties and public behavior. In Politics, Aristotle ties citizenship with the power to participate in deliberating court cases and public policy matters involved in governing the city. Accordingly, Athenian democracy was direct democracy; every citizen effectively could vote on every decision. Because citizenship extended only to males born to Athenian citizens—a privileged minority that excluded Athenian-born women, children, all slaves, and foreign-born residents—the polis already included a complex set of civic identity issues. Citizenship questions of formal and functional involvement in public deliberation, qualifications for inclusion, and criteria for exclusion remain central to civic identity today.

Republican Rome broadened the scope of civic identity in two ways: representation and negotiation. Rome was a representative republic governed by a senate and an assembly to which members were elected by respective social classes. The Roman Republic liberated civic identity from citizenship-by-birth, expanding citizenship categories to include freed slaves, foreign-born residents, and people of conquered nations. Rome provided additional avenues through which people could earn citizenship through distinguished service or, in certain cases, by purchasing their own citizenship. A significant range of Roman subjects could aspire to a civic identity distinct from the status into which they were born; more people could be actively involved in framing civic identity.

Citizens’ power to deliberate—to participate in judicial and legislative affairs—waned with the rise [Page 81]of Imperial Rome and would not see a widespread resurgence until the end of the Middle Ages. But basic categories and coordinates for civic identity were established in theory and practice, grounded in terms that expected people and groups to participate in the formation and enactment of civic identities that made them active participants in civic life.

Modern Developments

The wholesale implementation of the printing press revolutionized civic identity by democratizing literacy. Many elite ancients were literate, but few common people could read or write. In the early modern period, schooling common people became a means to explore, develop, and configure civic identity for a much broader range of people. As Walter J. Ong explains in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, the introduction of fixed type radically reconfigured human consciousness, especially by incorporating ordinary people within the literate population. Although the process took hundreds of years, the cultural and political impact of literacy moved civic identity out of the world of ideas and into the world of common human experience.

...