Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History

"Rogers Smith argues that at the heart of American political culture, since even before the founding, there have been two warring ideals. One is the ideal of an egalitarian society, where everyone who arrives on our shores has relatively equal citizenship rights. According to this ideal, when those rights are denied it is an exception rather than the rule. This view of America is rooted in its founding rhetoric encompassed in the Declaration of Independence’s famous phrase, “all men are created equal”. There is also an opposing ideal that American political culture has as its basis civic inequality. In his view America offers “ascriptive citizenship”, which means that access to rights, power and privileges are determined by race, gender, ethnicity and religion. Smith is responding to a classic question of race and the law scholarship. Is American law egalitarian at its core, or does American law impose a racial hierarchy? Smith sees both strains deeply embedded in American legal history. One can’t characterise American law as encompassing one of them without recognising the other. The main objective of the book is to demonstrate the tension between these warring ideals and show how it is reflected in law. Smith is not as explicit as he might be on that score. One of the basic questions in “race and the law” scholarship asks is: What is the relationship between law and society? Do social attitudes affect the content of law, thus making law either more racist or more egalitarian as attitudes change? Is law affecting social attitudes? Is there some more complicated relationship between the two? These are contested questions for scholars; many people have argued about that topic during the past 30 years. I think Smith is agnostic about these questions. His book shows law in concert with social attitudes but doesn’t really offer an explicit answer to the question of causality."