Book Review

Canada and the United States

Perhaps in an earlier period of civic life—most likely during the Progressive period, when an informed citizenry was the American ideal—good citizenship would have demanded the reading of Michael Schudson's excellent book. But not, as Schudson makes clear, in our television age when newspaper reading is steadily declining and only a third of Americans consider keeping up with political affairs to be an important objective. Yet Americans beyond the academy of specialists would profit from reading this comprehensive effort to understand just what good citizenship means and has meant for Americans from the colonial period to the millennium. For Schudson, citizenship goes beyond the familiar legal definitions of who is or who is not a citizen and whether citizenship guarantees the right to vote. Moreover, active partisanship is not the only benchmark of good citizenship. Interested in a Habermasian public sphere that trenches beyond political behavior and attitudes, Schudson takes this for his arena in a book about the practices, ideals, and obligations that have comprised civic America throughout its history.

1

Schudson is original and convincing on the press as a part of public culture, and, unlike most historians, who seem to consider inclusion of any contemporary comparisons as journalistic simplicities, he spends a good deal of time probing our current understandings of citizenship. Although his analysis is largely a synthesis of previous scholarship, he is innovative, perceptive, and—especially on today's culture—controversial.

. . .