However admirable such discussions and proposals are, something is missing. The words "city," and "civic" suggest what it is. So far I have said nothing about citizenship, and neither, for the most part, have the politics and policies I have just mentioned.

This is very odd, since we are supposed to be, and to some degree are, a self-governing republic. This is the type of political regime where the citizenry carries the greatest burden of governing. They must choose who is to govern them, judge their performance, and directly participate in a variety of ways in the process of government itself. The question of citizenship is even more apparent once we recognize that, if our policies and politics are unsatisfactory, this must be in part because something is lacking in the citizenry. The qualities that citizens of a self-governing or democratic republic need are thus a matter of the first importance.

Here then is a fundamental problem. We must talk about the qualities that citizens need if we are to do much about the state of our cities because, to the degree that their state is a consequence of national and local policies, significant change in policy must almost certainly come from significant change in the citizenry. But--and this deepens the problem--we seem to lack the intellectual resources to think about democratic citizenship.

In what follows I will try to provide some of these intellectual resources. To look just a bit ahead, it should come as no surprise, given the link between city and citizenship, that crucial to my account of citizenship in a self-governing republic will be the links between the character of the citizenry and the character of local political life. Local political life is crucial to the fostering of a self-governing citizenry and thus to the overall shape of the politics and the policies we pursue. But, before taking up these matters, I want to spell out something of the poverty of our intellectual resources on the question of citizenship.