Toward an Ethic of Citizenship: From Elective Government to a Culture of Democracy

Citizenship is defined as that secular ethic that defines membership and participation in the political community and provides the cooperative context for political competition. This definition is used to develop a model for the political construction of the next evolutionary stage of citizenship in an elective government that has achieved a rudimentary level of representation. The model consists of two major dimensions-the homeostatic and hermeneutic-and citizenship is the nexus of their intersection. The homeostatic dimension mediates the tension between the individual and community; the hermeneutic dimension involves shaping the evolutionary path into the future through the interpretation of the culture-history of our past into the context of the present. Citizenship is also considered in terms of its individual and collective attributes. The development of citizenship along these lines is seen as leading to the creation of a culture of democracy. The model of citizenship is used to provide the context for the development of the idea of representation as the highest obligation of citizenship and to provide a critique of election. Since education is critical for the development of citizenship, the model is also applied to the system of education. Finally, the state of Minnesota is used as an example of how the model can be translated into practice. The main theme running throughout the work is the idea that citizenship can be politically developed as the mediating mechanism necessary to establish social and ecological balance.