working men and women to choose between advancing their careers and caring for their children."

The appeal to citizenship and community can serve to cut across conventional classifications, in which case it has a salutary effect on political debate; but it can also serve to shore them up and to conceal their inadequacies. The language of citizenship, as it is used today, simultaneously clarifies and obscures political issues. There can be no question of its current popularity, however. Books like Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, and Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart have made the civic tradition one of the main topics of political conversation. "Civic virtue" lends itself all to easily, in fact, to the purposes of public exhortation. Thus the president of Yale, Benno C. Schmidt, urges graduating seniors to "rebel" against the "corruption and selfishness that have been such a feature of our public life" in recent years. The "republic of virtue," according to Schmidt, remains a viable ideal, the most important legacy of the "Renaissance tradition of civic humanism." The founding fathers "saw the maintenance of a republic of virtue as the overriding goal of statecraft," and the ideal still informs the "public commitments of many good people," even though it is "beset by doubt and difficulty." Such statements tell us less about the concept of virtue than about the fear of social fragmentation, competitive individualism, and self-seeking that underlies attempts to revive it.

If "republicanism" is to serve as something more than a catchword, the term will have to be used with precision and with an understanding of its historical context. Recent scholarship makes it possible to trace a tenuous line of intellectual descent that began with the Athenian polis and the Roman republic, faded out during the Middle Ages, reappeared in the Florentine Renaissance, was picked up again by James Harrington and his followers in England and by Montesquieu and Rousseau in France, and came down to the founders of the American republic largely by way

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