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Two formulations of civic responsibility are advanced: participating in a way that does not improperly diminish the prospects for peace or the prospect that the inhabitants will come to terms and set up the necessary framework; and participating in a way that pays proper attention to the interests, wishes and opinions of all inhabitants in the country. This chapter addresses the questions that arise when these formulations are filled out in the context of cultural identity in a multicultural society. Aspects covered include compossibility, compleasance (that people strive to accommodate themselves to others), and cultural engagement.

Jeremy Waldron’s essay centres around Martha Nussbaum’s ideas on cosmopolitan education: Nussbaum argues that we should make ‘world citizenship, rather than democratic or national citizenship, the focus for civic education’. The essay provides just a few examples to illustrate the concrete particularity of the world community for which we are urged by Nussbaum to take responsibility, with the aim of refuting the view of those who condemn cosmopolitanism as an abstraction. The arguments for and against Nussbaum’s idea (universalism vs particularism) are presented, and one of the opposing views highlighted: that cosmopolitan moral education is not just an education in moral ideas; it is (or ought to be) an education in the particular ways in which people have inhabited the world (rather than the purely local aspects of their inhabiting particular territories). The different sections of the chapter look at how a society becomes multicultural, the infrastructure of cultural interaction, the identification of citizenship (citizenship in relation to civic responsibility, exclusivity, subjection), the language of citizenship, and its concrete reality and its cosmopolitan dimensions.

The central characteristic of responsibility as developed by Duff is the ‘triadic relational concept’ consisting of a relation between an agent A who is responsible for something X to somebody S and in virtue of being a member of a unit of responsibility, e.g., a neighbourhood or a state. This chapter rejects several justifications for Duff's theory of responsibility and justifies the triadic relational structure of responsibility in terms of self governance. Under this justification, individuals conduct their lives in different spheres. Each sphere is governed by a community that engages in an enterprise consisting of a thick set of norms and practices. It is important that it is primarily members of the community who ultimately determine the content of these norms and practices. By conforming to the dictates of the triadic relational structure one guards the rights of members (of the unit of responsibility) to govern themselves.

This chapter examines the history of gun ownership and gun control in the U.S. It explains that in colonial America and during the early republican period, citizens were required by the colonial governments to arm themselves and form citizen militias. The arming of citizens in turn gave birth to a new and strongly held vision of civic responsibility and the colonial governments recognized that guns in the wrong hands could present dangers to the larger imperialist project. Thus, the government started to regulate existing gun ownership and use. The colonial governments also used laws relating to guns to help structure and maintain and patriarchal social structures.

As in the previous chapter, this chapter seeks to uproot entrenched intellectual obstacles to participatory democracy, this time within political theory. Lay citizens without the guidance of experts are commonly viewed as handicapped by lack of knowledge, experience, and by being too numerous; even democratic theorists like Rousseau are modest about citizens’ ability to govern themselves without strict institutional constraints. Mainstream political science, exemplified by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, provides apparent empirical support for more rather than less expert and representative government by showing lay citizens as uninterested in greater participation or civic responsibility. Progressive intellectuals Wolin and Morone have also argued that once integrated into formal governmental institutions, popular participation becomes co-opted and counterproductive. To overcome these challenges, this chapter introduces the concept of rational disorganization, the idea that power-sharing collaboration between laypeople and officials on complex tasks, such as reaching a verdict, draws on public practical reason, allows for reflexivity about rules and procedures, and permits greater attention to individual cases. Rational disorganization explains how participatory democratic institutions like the jury empower and give responsibility to citizens without overburdening or bureaucratizing them.

This chapter examines the role of formal and informal leaders, including local public officials and heads of voluntary organizations, in small communities' efforts to adapt to changing social and economic conditions. It considers how residents confer respect on leaders and how leaders draw on this respect in performing their roles. Leaders discuss why they take on civic responsibilities, the gratifications and frustrations involved, and how these activities serve as stepping-stones for public office in larger venues. Although it is sometimes suggested that small towns lack interesting cultural amenities, local cultural leadership is particularly important, and figures prominently in communities' understanding of their distinctive history and identity. The chapter also shows that small towns are laboratories for social innovation, judging from leaders' descriptions of new technology, electronic communications, sustainable energy projects, and efforts to rebuild following natural disasters.

This chapter focuses on the women's benevolent institutions. They were in place in 1880 dispensing aid on a regular basis. By ministering the poor, benevolent ladies understood the degree of dependency that was created through increased industrialization and growth. Catholic women's religious orders were the first to build benevolent institutions in Galveston. Ursuline nuns accompanied Bishop John Mary Odin to Galveston and formed the Ursuline Academy and convent. They acted as nurses. They converted their convent to a military hospital during the Civil War. Galveston's middle- and upper-class women sought to capitalize on the wave of pride and donation to build institutions of their own — for children and old women. Lasker Home for Homeless Children and the Johanna Runge Free Kindergarten pulled women toward a greater sense of civic and community responsibility. These institutions were temporary shelters for children whose family was unable to offer an education.

Since the early nineteenth century, medical specialisation has been driven by two forces: by science, through analysis of physiological and pathological processes, with consequent division and subdivision of these into apparently separate parts; and by a more general culture which tends to compartmentalise civic responsibility, leaving major societal decisions to the operation of the market. The main reason why from 1948 to 1979 the NHS was more cost-effective than any other socially inclusive health care system was its retention of community generalists as gatekeepers to specialist care, and as familiar and trusted guardians and interpreters of patients' life stories. In the presently dominant culture of NHS management in England, developed from business experience and following an industrial model, this is not recognised. This leads to demoralisation of staff and confusion of patients.

Under the traditional view, the decision to privatize hinges exclusively on the question of who is most likely to make the just or correct decision: a public official or a private entity. This chapter challenges the traditional approach and argues that massive privatization as such has costs as it severs the link between decision-making processes and citizens, eroding the prospect of meaningful political engagement and civic shared responsibility.

Though we all depend upon democracy, each of us in our public and civic roles is motivated to act in ways that deplete its sustaining conditions. In this chapter, Archon Fung proposes that one part of the solution to this problem is a thicker professional and civic ethics. The argument has three components. The first is a basic account of democratic governance that advances procedural and output legitimacy. In order to produce legitimacy, however, democracy has five sociopolitical “underwriting” conditions: commitment to process over outcome, social coherence, a spirit of compromise, responsive government, and epistemic integrity. Finally, different kinds of actors—politicians, media professionals, and citizens—have powerful self-interested motives to pollute “the commons” of democracy. Each of these role-specific discussions develops a set of ethical commitments that actors should adopt to sustain democracy instead of undermining it.

Institutions shape how citizens think about the social problems they handle, repelling public awareness and involvement by performing tasks in ways that neutralize the citizen’s role. Democratic professionals seek to change this dynamic by building access points and infusing citizen agency at critical junctures throughout major public institutions. The kind of citizen–professional collaborations democratic professionals aim to foster directly address the kinds of counter-democratic tendencies that reinforce callousness and make social problems difficult to handle. The motivations of democratic professionals can be understood through the theory of participatory democracy, which draws attention to the hazards representative governments create by thinking and acting for citizens. Participatory democrats acknowledge the difficulties of fostering civic agency in modernity and attempt to theorize how citizens can occupy a more active role in contemporary political culture and take up a civic responsibility for the public goods and social harms produced by their institutions.

This chapter explains how John Davenport and his fellow leaders expected the heads of New Haven's households to teach civic responsibility and to regulate the behavior of those under their care. Davenport's vision for New Haven included a well-educated citizenry. As a member of the Hartlib Circle, he had engaged in discussions on the connection of educational reform as part of the overall effort to reform society. Davenport's interest in education did not end with the creation of the town grammar school. The economic struggles of New Haven thwarted his efforts to establish a Comenian-style university in the region. Davenport had been impressed with the Moravian's educational program when he first encountered the ideas in England, and had hoped to establish such a college in New Haven from the early days of the colony.

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, leadership of the counter–Radio Right censorship campaign passed to the Democratic National Committee (DNC). DNC Chairman John Bailey recruited operative Wayne Phillips to take charge of a team that would intimidate conservative broadcasters who either supported Barry Goldwater or attacked Lyndon Johnson during the 1964 election. By Phillips’s own estimations, the project was a remarkable success, garnering hundreds of hours of free airtime via Fairness Doctrine complaints. They were aided by a new front organization—secretly created by the DNC—called the National Council for Civic Responsibility. As a bonus, the campaign also generated a court challenge from journalist Fred Cook against conservative radio station owner John Norris. The resulting court case, Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. FCC, went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ultimately upheld the Fairness Doctrine.