Tension of citizenship
- New york Rinehart & Company 1957
- 260p.
An examination of the concepts and values clustered around the term "citizenship," and of their condition in American social beliefs, reveals a critical inability on the part of tra ditional social philosophies to express and defend our herit age of privacy and freedom for individual citizens in mod ern conditions.
The argument developed in support of this thesis is worked out along the following lines. Chapter I attempts, by cursory examination of various but usual ways in which the word "citizen" is used, to show that in his citizenship the Western democrat is committed to a diversity of some times conflicting values. Yet, it is argued, he cannot resolve these conflicts by abandoning one or more of the values which occasion them.