Ideas they inherited from the past strongly influenced America's Founders. Paradoxically, then, we must begin the tale of good citizenship in America by using this chapter to take a quick look elsewhere, into the background to American political thought. We do not need to search there for new evidence of revolutionary intentions but to touch base with a vocabulary familiar to literate Europeans several centuries ago. That vocabulary was especially important to the Founders because, whenever political crises erupt, people will communicate with one another, and perhaps act together, via whatever terms are available to them.

Our starting point is this: Early Americans did not invent an entirely novel understanding of citizenship. Rather, they came on the historical stage at a moment when Western talk about public affairs permitted them to think about their situation in ways that were partly old and partly new. More specifically, when the Founders decided to break away from Great Britain, they knew they would have to construct in America an alternative to the “old order” of empires, monarchies, nobility, established churches, guilds, corporations, and other feudal relics that reigned in England and other European countries. To that end, they looked for instruction to what Europeans, including themselves, already knew about governments that had existed in various forms and disparate eras.

Thus on behalf of their fateful project, men such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and their colleagues ransacked the store of political wisdom that had accumulated over centuries.