Citizenship and Culture

The status of concepts in intellectual history is a fraught question. Too often, despite our best intentions, we attempt to impose a conceptual uniformity onto particular historical vocabularies and circumstances for the sake of appeasing our own modern worries and preconceptions. This is particularly striking in the history of citizenship, where we have too readily imported modern, normative and 'secular' conceptions of the purpose of political life into pre-modern arguments. In reality most discussion of citizenship in the Christian West involved some form of negotiation between 'pagan' conceptions of civic virtue and Christian critiques of those conceptions from the time of Augustine onwards. Our tendency to view the 'Augustinian' picture of citizenship as a surrogate for an imagined medieval providentialism - one which supposedly denied the possibility of meaningful human self-development in the 'earthly city'- has hampered our understanding of early-modern civic cultures.