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Caring Citizen — Tell Me More

Excerpts from Mark Kingwell's, 
'The World We Want - Virtue, Vice and the Good Citizen', 
Penguin, 2000.

"Citizenship is a way of meeting one of our deepest needs, the need to belong; it gives voice and structure to the yearning to be part of something larger than ourselves. page 5

"Citizenship is a way of making concrete the ethical commitments of care and respect, of realizing in action an obligation to aid fellow travellers - in short, of fostering justice between persons. page 5

"… the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens. page 8

'What we need is a new model of citizenship based on the act of participation itself, not on some quality or thought or right enjoyed by its possessor. This participatory citizenship doesn't simply demand action from existing citizens; it makes action at once the condition and task of citizenship. page 12

"Citizenship, if it means anything, means making our desire for justice active. It is not something we can do alone. page 19

"The idea of citizenship is not the only way we can pursue our commonalities and needs, not the only way to entertain our longings and dreams. But it is a crucial one; and, when linked to the deep insight that we owe a duty of justice to our fellow citizens, the concept of citizenship sheds its dark origins in the project of keeping people out and, reversing the field, becomes a matter of bringing people in - not loving them or liking them or even agreeing with them, much of the time, but making room for them to be at home too. page 22

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