Gibbon’s work on the dying years of the Roman Empire — well, all 1480 of them, from the day Augustus took the reins of the empire to the day the Ottomans sacked Constantinople — is as much a work of complex social science and of political philosophy as it is a work of history. Of major interest, however, are his short sentences, masterfully inserted in the midst of expansive discussions on minutiae of the functioning of the Empire, such as this one:

“In the purer ages of the commonwealth, the use of arms was preserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws, which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain. But in proportion as the public freedom was lost in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade.”¹

Gibbon does not explicitly wax poetic about the commonwealth, but when he slides in a reference to the Roman Republic, he holds it in high esteem. The Roman Republic, in a way, worked on enlightened self-interest, but that did not preclude it from enjoying the benefits of a healthy dose of principle. The concept of Roman citizenship — as Cicero puts it, Civis Romanus Sum — is not something that is taken lightly, for it is an expansive concept that was meant, in the early years of the Republic at the very least, to suppose rights and duties. If Roman citizens enjoyed a litany of rights that were not available to non-citizens, they also had duties commiserate with their position and status in society. One such duty was the levy of a citizen army. To be a Roman citizen, one had to bear the cost and sacrifices necessary to protect those vaunted rights: there was something worth fighting for, Gibbon points out. The citizens had an existential share in the civitas, the civic association that formed the Roman state, and whilst they seemed to want to expand their share of the Italian peninsula and the larger Mediterranean world constantly, they were more wary of granting citizenship through jus soli, by virtue of birth on Roman soil. Even in democratic Athens — by all measures a licentious regime where the demos ruled, more than anything else, it was understood that active citizenship was integral to the functioning of the government: Pericles, in his funeral oration, remarked that “we [Athenians] are unique in the way we regard anyone who takes no part in public affairs: we do not call that a quiet life, we call it a useless life” (2:40).² Active citizenship and civic duty are essential for the polis to prosper, but the active citizenry is only valuable when it is limited, because it can just as easily devolve into the soft despotism and tyranny of the masses.

A limited concept of citizenship, or of having some citizens ‘more equal’ than others primarily comes from the insistence that within the bounds of the systems we currently have — liberal democracies are going nowhere, it seems, for the moment — there is still potential for slow, measured change in the right direction. If such changes are possible that retain a system of checks and balances through a modified electoral system but limit citizenship in the vein of ‘rule and being ruled’ to a smaller set of individuals: individuals who prove their moral character. Now exactly how this is going to happen is quite enigmatic, and is something I have not given much attention to, but I would assume that I would keep a level of national service that is non-obligatory but is necessary for citizenship; I do not think it would be sufficient. National service, broadly construed, could include high-level service in the armed forces, working as a civil servant, or in a high capacity for the state itself. It would reward those with the appropriate mixture of practical and theoretical wisdom, and a good education in the liberal arts in general. Without extensive experience in the studia humanitatis, I would argue, such an active citizenry would be prone to the false charms of a technocracy and of ends-justify-means politics, both of which are not permissible. Furthermore, without a solidly humanist education, the active citizens of the polis would not be able to appreciate the arts and culture, and instead of quoting Virgil and Dante and Milton, they would quote whichever technocratic fad would be ‘in’ at the time. Life would lose its charm, its magic, and the world would be disenchanted.

The concept of a limited citizenship fascinates me, if only because civic engagement is declining continuously. Politics — not of the partisan kind, mud slinging and name calling and group thinking sort, but rather of the sort that is dignified, based on principle and in search of the common good, and is aimed toward the whole of virtue — is the kind that can be made possible when the force of public opinion is taken away from the practice of politics. Yet, this has its pitfalls: a government without checks, balances, and nomoi can turn into a tyrannical regime if there are no safeguards for the one issue that Plato’s Republic almost unfailing avoids: the fallibility of man. By keeping a degree of electoral checks, such as the ones thought of in early Republican Rome with the system that is best represented by proportionate equality, there is a real opportunity for this to happen. However, the rule of the natural aristocracy cannot exist in a plutocracy — leisure does not guarantee an inculcation of humanistic mores and aspirations.