Most readers have not agreed with Mark Twain in liking Joan of Arc best of all his novels, particularly because his hand is almost invisible in it. He presents the story as a translation by “Jean Francois Alden” of the remembrances of “Sieur Louis de Conte.” He did not think readers would take a work by “Mark Twain” seriously. Only the initials S. L. C. indicate the connection between the actual and the presumed author. Twain considered Joan to be “the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.” She was a woman—and a general. She genuinely believed that she was acting on the basis of commands from God. In relating her story, Twain nevertheless shows that nothing human, and certainly no government and no ruler, is entitled to divine honors or right.

Rogers Smith's Civic Ideals is a grand project and an impressive achievement. As one expects from Smith's work, it combines scholarship and moral seriousness, and the effort to relate theory to practice, the present to the past. Notable for Smith's command of the details of policy – court decisions, statutes, and administrative history – Civic Ideals is also an invitation to rethink the nature of the United States as a political society, an inquiry into our political identity and purpose.

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.