The dominant liberal conception of political community can be probed in a variety of ways. In this chapter I shall focus on what I call the republican challenge, which maintains it is insufficiently demanding. Republicans, in my sense, argue for an ideal of political community which requires the citizens of a polity to be united in some substantial way by the good of citizenship. To fulfil this republican ideal of political community, it would not be enough for the members of a polity to recognize each other as fellow citizens and identify with their common institutions as a result of endorsing the same principles of justice. For in its most powerful version, the republican challenge maintains that a fully-fledged ideal of political community requires citizens to acknowledge and act upon special obligations to one another that are independent of justice (at least as liberalism, in its dominant form, conceives of justice). I shall examine the nature of this republican challenge and some potential liberal responses to it. I do not assume that republicanism, as I construe it, is inconsistent with liberalism in my broad sense (see Introduction). Indeed it is part of the purpose of this chapter to argue that it is not.

The good of citizenship

Republicans suppose that members of a fully-fledged political community must be united in some substantial way by the good of citizenship. But what is citizenship and in what does the good of citizenship consist?