To what can we trace the idea of "civic responsibility"?
Upvote:1
It was the Romans who came up with the idea of "citizenship." (civus) From there, it was a short step to "civic responsibility." http://www.learningtogive.org/papers/paper11.html
Upvote:2
Thanks for the question. "Civic responsibility" is bound up with the concept of the separation of society (the mass of persons) from the state (the armed body of men, monopolised by the bourgeoisie). (Gramsci).
The separation of individual subjectivities from the state apparatus, as if they should be connected, arises in the French revolution with the development of the state as an institution justified by the "mass participation" of newly created subjects with rights. Prior to the French revolution, the body of the nation existed merely as the passive object of the attention of the absolute monarch. After the revolution the subjectivity, the capacity for individual action by the monarch became possessed by the entire body of society, and the state became the passive object of the body of subjectivities of the nation.
In other words: before civic responsibility—the state acted on pre-society through bureaucracy, after civic responsibility the society enacts the state as a parliament representing society's interest.
(Similar processes are visible in the slow British revolution towards general parliamentary representation, the Dutch revolution towards mass social participation, and the US revolution—all early bourgeois revolutions show a measure of this change.)
Attempts to describe early relationships as "civic responsibility" will be anachronistic, our version of civic responsibility is thoroughly mired in modernity, the nation state, and the problem of the state adequately representing the general interest. There was no nation for the Quaestor, no "common man," of modernity as a subjectivity in a power relationship.
The earliest this can be pushed is into the period of the individuation of moral conscience in Europe—ie, protestant and anti-protestant reforms. And the Dutch revolution remarkably begins in this period, and the English begins at the height of controversy over personal moral responsibility.
Sources for theory:
Can't strongly suggest Gramsci enough here
Foucault would also be worth your while
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