Few political theorists today try to show how the principles of theory should guide our judgments of policy. Theorists think that their job is done when they have explained the principles, or (more commonly) when they have interpreted the principles of other theorists. The connection between the principles and the policies of governments is left for citizens themselves to make. Yet making that connection—exercising political judgment—is an essential part of citizenship, and should have a prominent place in the education of citizens.

Political theorists have not always neglected the making of judgments about particular policies. The disdain of the particular that marks much contemporary theorizing was not shared by the great theorists of the past. The tradition of theory begins (or at least the curriculum traditionally begins) with the greatest case study of all—Socrates' trial. Although later theorists usually settled for less exalted examples, they continued to see their vocation as calling for comment on the actual policies of rulers and their rivals. Recall Aristotle's letters to Alexander, Augustine's criticism of the Donatists, Machiavelli's commentary on the corruption of Florentine rulers, Hobbes' analysis of the Long Parliament, Locke's advice to the Board of Trade, or Rousseau's critique of the government of Poland.

Citizenship is not one of the issues political scientists hotly contest. Yet perhaps we have failed to recognize the profoundly controversial issues involved in citizenship. One of the most difficult for the modern citizen is, of course, whether the classical ideal of “high citizenship” remains a possibility. But the ideal of ruling and being ruled will not be my concern here. Rather, my concern will focus on the fact that citizenship has historically been a very exclusive social category. Many groups have struggled to attain the status of citizen. In the United States to be poor, black, or female, has for the most part meant automatic disenfranchisement. Citizenship, then, concerns the question of one's position in the community of which one is a part. It is, of course, not the only determinant by far and is itself dependent on other factors. Yet given these considerations, teaching about citizenship must raise the ethical issues which, if made as prominent as they deserve to be, would indeed make citizenship the subject of controversy.

In this short essay, I can address only one aspect of these issues—that which centers on the relation of gender to citizenship. Although today many of us attempt to speak about citizenship in gender-neutral language, the connections of citizenship with manliness, established so long ago, still influence both thinking about citizenship and the conduct of rulers and ruled. Thus, the familiar gender gap on issues of peace and war should be seen as a symptom of deeper issues about politics, problems with a history traceable over several thousand years of Western history, problems defined by the overlay of citizenship, manliness, and military capacity.

Citizenship is not terra incognita for political science, but it is not home ground either. Citizenship is more art than science, more practice than theory, and in the education of citizens, political science is subject to two obvious limitations.

In the first place, the basic character of citizens is formed before they become students of political science and even before they are taught civics by the schools. The first principles by which they perceive the world and relate to others already have been shaped by the family, by the laws and by early education generally. In that sense, political science influences citizens most profoundly when it teaches their teachers, although in a more superficial way political science can and does instruct citizens themselves.

Second, as Aristotle taught us, civic virtue is not identical with human goodness, and citizenship is a questionable excellence. The art of citizenship is specific to and limited by the regime in which the citizen is to practice it. In the ordinary sense of the term, a good citizen accepts the laws and “works within the system,” and even if we argue that citizens should pursue ends which are universal and by nature, citizenship requires them to do so in ways which are adapted to a particular people, place and time.

The teaching of citizenship might seem inappropriate for a political scientist. Such teaching is normative, it might be said, but political science is empirical. And, it might be added, citizenship is a parochial concern for the good of one's own country, whereas political science is based on a universal love of truth. These objections will have to be made more precise, even recast; but insofar as they suggest that good citizen and good political scientist may not be the same thing, they are perfectly reasonable.

The distinction between empirical and normative, or fact and value (which cannot be explored theoretically here), means that a political scientist, as political scientist, cannot tell citizens whether citizenship is a good thing, or say that political science is a good thing and ought to be welcomed or tolerated by citizens. A political scientist might perhaps remark empirically, or half-empirically, that love of one's country animates the citizens as citizen and love of truth inspires the political scientist as political scientist. But instead of leading to conflict between citizens and political scientists and hence to a problem for political scientists, who must be both, this observation is made to yield a queer harmony between the two. It is thought that since political scientists cannot pronounce upon the worth of citizenship, they do not get in the way of citizens. Their work is neutral to that of citizens. Love of truth does not interfere with love of country because all loves, being “values,” are incommensurable. Thus, the methodology of the fact-value distinction provides a lefthanded endorsement of (at least democratic) citizenship.

The objective of liberal education is, surely, to help students develop the skills, capacities, perceptions, and imagination to enable them to enrich and enhance not only their own lives, but the life of the community as well. Educating for citizenship, thus broadly defined, is an endeavor shared by political scientists with colleagues in related fields, in the arts, the sciences, and the humanities. Citizenship as subject matter, however, has fallen within our purview. Put differently, as educators all of us consider, in a diffuse sort of way, the relationship between our teaching on the one hand and the polity on the other. Those of us who are political scientists must consciously concern ourselves with matters that fall under the rubric of citizenship. Notwithstanding the high purposes of the Academy as a whole, citizenship has for all practical purposes been defined in terms of the political, and political science has been charged with providing an academic experience that should inform and inspire the citizen experience. A tension, therefore, may be said to exist between political science's competency to teach about and its more general responsibility to educate for citizenship. The writers here address the question of how we can best teach about citizenship, ply our trade as it were, in ways that educate for citizenship.

First, it would be useful to remind ourselves how we typically teach about citizenship. That some subfields of the discipline lend themselves more readily than others to the enterprise is not at issue. Whatever the emphasis in a wide variety of courses, our students should leave our tutelages with an understanding of citizenship as a status, a cluster of activities, a concept, and a value. More tellingly, most of us would like to think that we expose our students to frames of reference and modes of analysis that encourage them to make and act upon informed, critical, and sophisticated judgments about political phenomena and public affairs.