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in civic institutions, and at the rise of working women. His argument has not been well
received by feminists, who view him as blaming women for a much broader problem.
It might then be argued that civic and feminist critiques of late-modern American
(and liberal) politics share an interesting, obvious, yet seldom noted convergence. Both
the disengaged liberal-democratic citizen of civic analysis, and the ideal-typical male of
contemporary feminist analysis, have a proclivity for selfish, self-interested, self-
aggrandizing, and self-centered behavior, and both display a remarkably similar
indifference toward others. The civicrat’s model “bad citizen,” it might be argued, is also
the embodiment of what feminists see as wrong with modern “manhood.”
But feminist and civic critiques have not been seen as complementary. In civic
discourse, the remedy for bad citizenship has been an appeal to republican ideals. For
feminists, however, the remedy for the excesses of modern masculinity is not a revival of
republicanism. Indeed, feminists have been no less hostile to republicanism than to liberal
individualism, primarily because the ideals of republicanism hearken back to a political
past in which women were largely excluded from public life. If modern ‘men’ make bad
citizens, the characteristics of republican citizenship hardly offered equal and equally
efficacious public space for women. And if republicanism is to be the corrective for the
defects of liberal citizenship, civicrats should know that feminist reticence to embrace the
civic imperative goes well beyond abstract notions about commitment to the public good.
On the other hand, feminist solutions to these crises seem inadequate to republican
thinkers as well. Feminism seems to embody a commitment to a “party” position,
advancing the concerns of women, that seems fundamentally at odds with the more
general concern of republicans to be committed to the public good. At every turn,
Convention