Civic Virtue, the American Founding, and Federalism

Abstract

The question of what kind of civic virtues citizens of the United States need in order to maintain the republic and to enable it to flourish, is one that was on the minds of the Framers themselves. They recognized that good government would depend upon the moral character and intellectual abilities of the citizens, on their having certain qualities of heart and mind. While institutional arrangements were employed to minimize reliance upon such character and abilities as much as possible, the Framers did not understand themselves to be eliminating those qualities, as an examination of The Federalist shows. Further, the institutional arrangements themselves were expected to contribute to the fostering of certain civic virtues. Yet it is not the case that such formal, structural provisions were expected to be sufficient on their own to engender good citizens. Rather, the Framers left the bulk of the responsibility of forming character to the states instead of the national government, where it was already being undertaken. Public education, in particular, is one means by which the states at the time of the Founding were seeking to cultivate good citizens for republican government in the United States.