Imperial Citizenship

The distinction between republican and imperial citizenship has long provided a critical lens for understanding political transformation. In The Ancient City (1864), Fustel de Coulanges describes how republican citizenship—rooted in ritual, religion, and shared civic obligations—gradually hollowed out into an empty, procedural form of imperial citizenship. What vanishes in this transition is the dense moral economy that once bound citizens to one another through practices of self-rule. In its place arises a thin loyalty based not on civic virtue but on the security and rights promised by imperial authority. Although Coulanges writes about antiquity, a similar shift is evident today in the United States, where republican ideals of civic virtue have given way to liberal norms of self-interest.

Your democracy, sir

For Coulanges, ancient political institutions grew out of domestic religious practices centered on the family hearth and ancestral tomb. These sites tied families to land, lineage, and divine sanction. Early patriotism expressed not an abstract attachment to laws but a sacred bond with the soil inhabited by ancestral spirits. Citizenship was therefore an existential loyalty: losing one’s city meant losing gods, identity, and the moral universe that structured life. From these intimate attachments emerged civic virtue, a disposition toward the common good shaped by shared ritual and memory.

Imperial citizenship represents a radically different moral economy. It is not grounded in self-rule but in legal membership within an expansive imperial order. Instead of demanding virtue, it promises rights and security in return for obedience. As Coulanges notes, citizens of the empire “no longer loved their country for its religion and its gods; they loved it only for its laws… and for the rights and security which it afforded.” Belonging becomes transactional rather than formative, producing subjects rather than active citizens.

Lewis Mumford’s The City in History (1961) provides a modern analogue to this ancient process of civic decay. For Mumford, the classical polis and medieval commune nurtured republican possibilities because they were relatively small, bounded, and morally formative. Such cities cultivated the habits of deliberation and mutual responsibility essential to self-governance. But as the city expanded into vast metropolitan and megalopolitan forms, it lost this civic function. The modern metropolis becomes a “container of power” subordinated to remote bureaucratic, military, and economic hierarchies. Instead of cultivating active citizens, it produces passive subjects acclimated to regimentation, spectacle, and centralized authority. In spatial terms, Mumford identifies the same transformation Coulanges describes in moral terms: the city shifts from a school of civic virtue to an imperial apparatus that manages populations.

This transformation reflects a deeper shift from a civic to a liberal conception of freedom. The civic tradition—from Aristotle to Jefferson—locates freedom in the capacity of citizens to deliberate about shared purposes in relatively cohesive, self-sufficient communities. As Michael Sandel observes, such freedom requires material stability, cultural commonality, and shared practices that sustain public-spirited judgment. The contemporary United States, however, is a vast, pluralistic, continental society deeply enmeshed in global economic networks. These conditions erode the foundations of civic freedom. In this environment, the liberal conception of freedom has become dominant. Liberal freedom emphasizes the individual’s right to pursue private happiness and elevates self-interest into a political principle. In its original Greek sense, however, this is an idiotic form of freedom—concerned with private life at the expense of the public realm. Liberal freedom is economic rather than civic: it replaces the virtues of citizens with the virtues of capitalists. Benjamin Franklin celebrated them as the traits of industrious individuals. Max Weber traced these virtues to the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Yet these qualities do little to sustain democratic deliberation. The shift from civic to liberal freedom thus signals a fundamental reorganization of the moral economy of citizenship.

Education reveals this shift most clearly. Republican theories of freedom understand education as the cultivation of the virtues required for self-government: judgment, fairness, and civic courage. The liberal model instead prioritizes technical skill, professional specialization, and entrepreneurial capacity. This prepares individuals not for democratic participation but for competition within a global economic order. Liberal education thereby becomes a form of imperial miseducation, training subjects for self-advancement within hierarchies rather than for collective self-rule. In this context, brand loyalty replaces civic loyalty; partisanship becomes political consumerism oriented toward oligarchic institutions.

Digital media and surveillance capitalism accelerate the erosion of civic culture. Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle” describes a world in which authentic social relations are displaced by mediated images and commodified representations. Politics becomes a spectacle consumed by passive audiences, while political figures function as brands. Surveillance capitalism intensifies this spectacle by converting citizens into “users” within privately owned digital infrastructures. These platforms fragment the public sphere into individualized streams of information, making shared deliberation increasingly difficult. The so-called “smart city,” where cameras are ubiquitous and public services are digitized, replaces the polis: a system of surveillance that promises security and convenience undermines civic agency through continuous data extraction and behavioral management.

Understanding the shift from republican to imperial citizenship clarifies the erosion of democratic culture in the United States. As economic, technological, and geopolitical forces reshape civic life, the institutions and practices that sustain self-rule decay. What remains is a “thin” form of belonging secured by rights, consumption, and security rather than a “strong” sense of shared purposes or obligations. Coulanges’s account of ancient political decline, amplified by Mumford’s analysis of the city’s metamorphosis into an imperial megastructure, offers a powerful framework for interpreting the present moment: one in which citizenship increasingly resembles an imperial contract between elites and managed populations, rather than a republican vocation grounded in collective self-governance.