Contemporary democracy faces a paradox. Never before have so many possessed the formal status of citizenship, yet seldom has citizenship felt so hollow. While democratic theorists debate institutional reforms and behavioral scientists document civic decline, we lack a philosophical framework adequate to diagnose the deeper malaise afflicting political life.
This paper argues that Aristotle’s conception of citizenship as praxis—active participation in ruling and being ruled in turn—provides precisely such a diagnostic tool. For Aristotle, citizenship is not a status one possesses but an activity one performs. Measured against this standard, contemporary democracy reveals itself as a system of increasingly passive subjects who retain the name but not the substance of citizenship. Yet this Aristotelian diagnosis presents challenges. Aristotle’s requirement that citizens possess leisure (scholē) for political participation justified excluding women, workers, and enslaved persons from political life. Can we appropriate Aristotelian insights about active citizenship while rejecting his exclusionary framework?
This paper traces a path through this dilemma. After reconstructing Aristotle’s ideal of citizenship as political activity, I document the erosion of civic engagement in contemporary democracies and explore the dual costs—the truncation of human development and the corruption of political community. I then examine contemporary attempts to democratize Aristotelian insights, from deliberative democracy to participatory budgeting, asking whether we can create institutions that make genuine political participation possible for all citizens.
If Aristotle is right that humans are political animals who fulfill their nature through civic engagement, then the hollowing of citizenship represents not merely an institutional failure but an impediment to human flourishing. Recovery demands confronting the structural barriers that make meaningful citizenship impossible for most. Only by taking seriously both Aristotle’s insights and democracy’s promise of inclusion can we imagine institutions adequate to our political nature.
I. An Ideal of Active Citizenship
For Aristotle, the question “what is a citizen?” cannot be answered through legal categories or formal status. In Book III of the Politics, he offers a definition that cuts to the heart of political life: “The citizen in an unqualified sense is defined by no other thing so much as by sharing in decision and office” (1275a22-23). This seemingly simple formulation contains a radical claim—that citizenship is constituted not by what one is but by what one does. It is a matter of praxis, of active participation in the deliberative and judicial functions of the polis.
This understanding of citizenship as activity rather than status emerges from Aristotle’s broader philosophical anthropology. Human beings are politikon zoon—political animals whose nature is fulfilled not in isolation but through participation in a political community. Just as the hand separated from the body ceases to be a hand except in name (1253a20-22), so the human being removed from political life fails to actualize their essential capacities. The life of citizenship represents not merely one option among many but a constitutive element of human flourishing.
Central to Aristotle’s conception is the principle of “ruling and being ruled in turn” (archein kai archesthai). This reciprocal structure distinguishes political rule from other forms of authority—the despotic rule of master over slave, the royal rule of parent over child, or the managerial rule of household head over property. Political rule exists among those who are “equal and similar,” and its legitimacy derives precisely from this alternation: “when the state is framed upon the principle of equality and likeness, the citizens think that they ought to hold office by turns” (1279a8-10).
This principle reveals citizenship as inherently participatory and reciprocal. The citizen must possess both the virtue to rule well and the virtue to be ruled well—distinct excellences that nonetheless complement each other in the complete political life. As Aristotle notes, “the good citizen must possess the knowledge and the capacity both to be ruled and to rule, and this is the virtue of a citizen” (1277b13-15). The citizen who only knows how to rule becomes tyrannical; the one who only knows how to be ruled becomes slavish. True political life requires the cultivation of both capacities.
Yet Aristotle recognizes that such political participation demands certain prerequisites, most notably scholē—leisure. This concept, often misunderstood as mere free time, refers to freedom from necessary labor that allows for engagement in intrinsically valuable activities. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explains: “we do business in order that we may have leisure, and carry on war in order that we may have peace” (1177b4-5). Leisure represents not the absence of activity but the possibility of the highest human activities—philosophy, politics, and the cultivation of virtue.
The requirement of leisure leads Aristotle to his most troubling conclusions about who can be a citizen. Those who must work for their living—artisans, merchants, farmers—lack the time necessary for political participation and philosophical study. “It is impossible,” he argues, “to pursue the things of virtue when one lives the life of a vulgar person or a laborer” (1278a20-21). Combined with his arguments about natural slavery and the exclusion of women from political life, these restrictions reveal the deep tensions in Aristotle’s thought between his philosophical insights and the social prejudices of his time.
Contemporary appropriations of Aristotelian citizenship must therefore proceed carefully. We can accept his fundamental insight—that citizenship requires active participation in collective self-governance—while rejecting his exclusionary criteria. The question becomes: how do we democratize the Aristotelian ideal, making the goods of political participation available to all while maintaining its substantive content? This challenge requires us to examine how contemporary political life measures up to the participatory standard Aristotle establishes.
II. The Erosion of Citizenship in Modern Society
If we apply Aristotle’s conception of citizenship as a diagnostic tool to contemporary democratic societies, we discover a troubling picture. Modern citizenship increasingly resembles what Aristotle would barely recognize as citizenship at all—a passive legal status rather than an active political practice. This transformation manifests across multiple dimensions of civic life, each reinforcing the others in a cycle of democratic decline.
Consider first the most basic form of political participation in modern democracy: voting. While Aristotle’s citizens engaged in direct deliberation and decision-making, modern democratic theory has long accepted electoral participation as a reasonable substitute given the scale of contemporary nation-states. Yet even this minimal form of engagement shows signs of systematic decline. The United States ranks 31st among 50 democracies examined by Pew Research, with turnout falling below the OECD average, while local elections—where citizens might exercise the most direct influence—see even more dramatic participation declines.
More revealing than raw turnout numbers is the transformation in how citizens understand their political role. The French Revolution introduced a fateful distinction between “active” and “passive” citizens that would have puzzled Aristotle. Where he saw citizenship as essentially active—constituted by participation itself—modern democratic thought created space for a citizenship of rights without corresponding duties of engagement. Contemporary research identifies youth as “standby citizens”—informed but subdued, staying alert but participating minimally unless compelled by crisis. This represents a fundamental shift from citizenship as praxis to citizenship as potential, held in reserve.
The decline of civic associations documented in Robert Putnam’s influential work (see Bowling Alone) reveals another dimension of this transformation. Harvard research reveals aggregate membership losses across traditional organizations including labor unions, PTAs, League of Women Voters, and service clubs. More troubling than the raw numbers is the changing relationship between associational life and political engagement. Brookings Institution research reveals citizens increasingly view voluntary organizations as “refuge from (and alternative to)” formal political engagement rather than as schools for democratic participation. This reverses Tocqueville’s classic insight—itself deeply Aristotelian—that local civic life serves as training for broader political involvement.
The merger of citizenship with consumer identity represents perhaps the most profound transformation. Scholars document a shift from “citizenship concerned with excellence to citizens predominantly concerned with blameless consumerism”. The post-9/11 exhortation for Americans to fulfill their patriotic duty through shopping exemplifies this reduction of political agency to market choice. Where Aristotle saw citizenship as the realm of speech and deliberation about justice and the common good, contemporary citizens increasingly express preferences through consumption rather than collective decision-making.
Underlying these transformations is what we might call, extending Aristotle’s language, a crisis of scholē. Research on time poverty identifies dual-career pressures, extended commuting, and economic insecurity as barriers limiting capacity for sustained civic engagement. The bitter irony is that technological advances that promised increased leisure have instead produced what Juliet Schor calls “the overworked American”—citizens who possess formal political rights but lack the temporal and psychological resources to exercise them meaningfully.
This erosion of political knowledge compounds the problem. The Annenberg Public Policy Center found one in four Americans unable to name the three branches of the U.S. government during 2016, this has however shifted over the years, and in 2024 almost two thirds were able to do so. However, focusing on such civic knowledge gaps misses the deeper point. Aristotelian phronesis—practical wisdom—develops through participation in political judgment, not through memorization of institutional facts. The crisis is not that citizens lack information but that they lack opportunities to develop political judgment through actual practice of citizenship.
Modern democratic theory has largely accommodated itself to this transformation through what we might call the “minimalist” conception of democracy. Joseph Schumpeter’s influential redefinition of democracy as merely “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” explicitly abandons any notion of active citizenship. Citizens become consumers choosing among competing elites rather than participants in collective self-governance.
From an Aristotelian perspective, this represents not a realistic adjustment to modern conditions but a fundamental corruption of political life. A polis of passive citizens is no true polis at all, just as a hand severed from the body is no true hand. The question is whether this diagnosis points toward any possible remedy, or whether the conditions of modern life have made Aristotelian citizenship an impossible ideal.
III. The Dual Cost of Hollow Citizenship
The reduction of citizenship from active participation to passive status exacts a dual price, impoverishing both individual lives and collective political life. These costs, while empirically observable, are best understood through the Aristotelian framework that reveals their deeper significance for human flourishing and political community.
Individual Costs: The Truncation of Human Development
For Aristotle, political participation is not merely instrumental to other goods but partially constitutive of eudaimonia—human flourishing. The human being as politikon zoon actualizes essential capacities through civic engagement that cannot be fully developed in private life alone. When citizenship withers into passive status, these capacities atrophy.
Consider the development of practical wisdom (phronesis). Unlike theoretical wisdom (sophia), which concerns eternal truths, or technical skill (technē), which involves producing objects, practical wisdom develops through deliberation about human affairs in their full complexity and contingency. Political participation provides the paradigmatic arena for such deliberation, requiring citizens to judge particular cases, balance competing goods, and consider the common interest alongside private concerns. As Jane Mansbridge’s research demonstrates, citizens who engage in deliberative processes develop enhanced capacity for perspective-taking, recognition of complexity, and judgment under conditions of uncertainty.
The passive citizen, reduced to occasional voting or consumer choice, loses these developmental opportunities. Political judgment atrophies into brand preference; deliberation about justice reduces to calculation of private advantage. This represents not merely a different form of citizenship but a diminished form of human development.
The loss of political agency creates what we might call, following Aristotle’s discussion of slavery, a kind of “civic slavery”—not the brutal chattel slavery he controversially defended, but a subtler form where citizens possess formal freedom while lacking meaningful control over collective decisions shaping their lives. Research on political efficacy reveals that citizens who feel unable to influence political outcomes experience not just frustration but a form of learned helplessness extending to other life domains.
This connects to the erosion of what Aristotle calls political friendship (philia politikē). Unlike personal friendships based on pleasure or utility, political friendship emerges among citizens who share in a common project of self-governance. It requires neither personal intimacy nor complete agreement but rather mutual recognition as partners in a shared enterprise. The passive citizen, lacking genuine participation in governance, cannot develop such bonds. Contemporary research on social capital confirms that declining civic engagement correlates with reduced interpersonal trust and cooperation across difference.
Collective Costs: The Corruption of Political Community
The collective costs of hollow citizenship prove equally severe. Aristotle distinguishes between a true politeia (constitution) oriented toward the common good and its corrupted forms serving partial interests. This distinction depends crucially on active citizens capable of discerning and pursuing shared interests rather than merely aggregating private preferences.
When citizens cease to engage actively in governance, political life degenerates into what Aristotle would recognize as a form of oligarchy—rule by the few for their own benefit—regardless of formal democratic procedures. Sheldon Wolin’s analysis of “managed democracy” describes precisely this condition: formal democratic institutions persist while actual power concentrates among economic and political elites. Elections become what he calls “episodic moments” that legitimate elite rule rather than exercises in collective self-determination.
The degradation of political discourse follows inevitably. Aristotle emphasizes that political community exists through logos—reasoned speech about justice and the common good. When citizens lack regular opportunities for genuine deliberation, political speech degenerates into manipulation and demagoguery. Complex issues reduce to slogans; policy debates become theatrical performances; political opponents transform into existential enemies. Research on affective polarization shows Americans increasingly view the opposite party as threats rather than legitimate opposition, indicating the breakdown of political friendship essential to constitutional stability.
This polarization represents what Aristotle would recognize as the emergence of stasis—factional conflict threatening constitutional order. Without active citizens practicing the give-and-take of political deliberation, developing habits of compromise and mutual accommodation, democracy devolves into a zero-sum struggle between hostile camps. The formal mechanisms of democracy persist, but the civic culture necessary to animate them dissolves.
Most fundamentally, the hollowing of citizenship undermines political legitimacy itself. For Aristotle, legitimate political authority derives from the reciprocal structure of ruling and being ruled in turn among equals. When citizens become merely the ruled, never genuinely participating in rule, this reciprocity breaks down. Authority becomes imposition rather than collective self-determination, breeding resentment and resistance even when formally validated through elections.
Trust in government has fallen from nearly 80% in the 1960s to just 17% by 2019, reflecting not merely dissatisfaction with particular policies or politicians but a deeper crisis of political authority. Citizens who do not genuinely participate in governance have no reason to view its decisions as truly their own. The result is a vicious cycle: disengagement breeds alienation, which further reduces participation, deepening the crisis of legitimacy.
IV. The Challenge of Democratic Aristotelianism
The Aristotelian diagnosis reveals contemporary democracy caught in a profound tension. We have democratized the status of citizenship while allowing its practice to atrophy. Universal suffrage coexists with declining participation; formal political equality masks substantive political marginalization; the rhetoric of popular sovereignty obscures the reality of citizen passivity. The question is whether Aristotelian insights can point toward renewal without reproducing ancient exclusions.
This challenge has attracted significant attention from political theorists seeking to appropriate Aristotelian wisdom for democratic purposes. Martha Nussbaum’s “Aristotelian Social Democracy” pioneered efforts to combine virtue ethics with democratic institutions through her capabilities approach. By focusing on what institutions must provide for human flourishing rather than who naturally possesses virtue, Nussbaum democratizes Aristotelian insights while maintaining their substantive content about human development.
Alasdair MacIntyre offers a more radical appropriation, combining Aristotelian virtue ethics with Marxist critiques of capitalism. His distinction between practices (inherently valuable activities) and institutions (which can corrupt practices) suggests that genuine citizenship requires protection from both state bureaucracy and market pressures. Though critics worry about the exclusionary potential of his communitarianism, MacIntyre’s emphasis on local practices of self-governance resonates with Aristotelian insights about the conditions for political participation.
Benjamin Barber’s “Strong Democracy” explicitly invokes Aristotelian understanding of humans as political beings to critique “thin” liberal democracy. His proposals for neighborhood assemblies, civic education, and participatory institutions attempt to create modern equivalents of the ancient polis while acknowledging the realities of scale and pluralism in contemporary societies.
These theoretical efforts find empirical validation in various experiments with participatory governance. James Fishkin’s deliberative polling, implemented in over 50 countries, demonstrates that ordinary citizens can engage in sophisticated political judgment when provided appropriate institutional support. Participants consistently report high satisfaction with the deliberative experience, suggesting that the desire for meaningful political participation persists despite the dominance of passive citizenship.
Participatory budgeting experiments in thousands of municipalities worldwide show citizens capable of making complex allocation decisions while developing enhanced political efficacy. These initiatives embody the Aristotelian principle of ruling and being ruled in turn, giving citizens direct authority over public resources while requiring justification to their peers.
Yet these remain isolated experiments rather than systematic transformations. The deeper challenge lies in addressing the structural barriers that make Aristotelian citizenship impossible for most. Economic inequality creates differential capacity for participation, while time poverty prevents even formally equal citizens from engaging meaningfully. Without addressing these material prerequisites—the modern equivalent of Aristotelian scholē—calls for active citizenship risk becoming another form of exclusion.
The path forward requires institutional innovations that create genuine opportunities for political participation while acknowledging contemporary constraints. This might include:
- Deliberative forums with stipends, childcare, and scheduling accommodations to enable broad participation
- Rotation of citizen service modeled on jury duty but extended to policy deliberation
- Workplace democracy that develops participatory skills transferable to political life
- Civic education emphasizing practical judgment through engagement with real community problems
- Digital platforms designed for deliberation rather than mere preference aggregation
The goal is not to recreate the ancient polis—impossible and undesirable given its exclusions—but to realize its underlying insight: that human flourishing requires active participation in collective self-governance. This demands moving beyond both the minimalist democracy that reduces citizens to voters and the maximalist fantasy that ignores structural constraints on participation.
Conclusion: Toward a Recovery of Political Life
The Aristotelian lens reveals contemporary democracy’s predicament with uncomfortable clarity. We have created societies of formal citizens who increasingly lack the practice of citizenship, possessed of rights they rarely exercise meaningfully, connected to political communities that feel alien and unresponsive. This represents not merely a technical problem of institutional design but a fundamental distortion of political life that impoverishes both individuals and communities.
Yet the diagnosis also points toward remedy. If human beings are indeed political animals, as Aristotle insists, then the widespread alienation from politics reflects not natural apathy but frustrated nature. The success of deliberative experiments, the satisfaction participants report from genuine civic engagement, and the persistent (if often misdirected) hunger for political community all suggest that the desire for active citizenship persists beneath the surface of contemporary passivity.
Recovery requires more than exhortation or civic education, though both have their place. It demands structural transformation addressing the material and institutional barriers to participation. We must create what we might call “democratic scholē“—the conditions enabling all citizens to engage meaningfully in governance without reproducing ancient exclusions. This involves not just time and resources but institutional spaces for genuine deliberation and decision-making.
The Aristotelian tradition reminds us that politics at its best involves more than interest aggregation or conflict management. It offers the possibility of collective judgment, mutual recognition, and shared pursuit of common goods. That this vision seems utopian measures not its impossibility but how far we have fallen from genuine political life. The task is to imagine and create institutions that honor the Aristotelian insight while embracing democratic inclusion—to make citizens of us all, not in name only but in deed.