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By Paris Tsakalidis in Sentiment & Democracy —

From Citizen to Idiot — The Evolution of Responsibility

Plato and Aristotle symbolizing the citizen versus the idiot in the origins of constitutional duty.
From Plato to Aristotle, the journey from the idiot to the citizen defines the moral foundation of the constitution.

From Plato’s Cave to the Modern Constitution

“He who lives without the polis is either a beast or a god.”
— Aristotle, Politics
🏛️
Part I — The Past: From Plato to Rousseau

The Birth and Burden of Citizenship

In today’s political language, rights dominate. But for the Greeks and their philosophical descendants, the more demanding word was duty—the responsibility of citizens to take part in τὰ κοινά (ta koina), “the common affairs.”
From Plato’s moral idealism to Aristotle’s civic realism and onward to Rousseau’s social contract, a single thread endures: freedom exists only where citizens accept responsibility for it.

🏛 1. Plato and Aristotle — The Moral Meaning of the Polis

Greek political thought begins with Plato’s question: What is justice? In The Republic, he constructs the first comprehensive theory of political order—one that mirrors the human soul. Each part of the soul corresponds to a class in the city:

  • Reason → Rulers,
  • Spirit → Guardians,
  • Appetite → Producers.

When each fulfills its proper role in harmony, justice arises. (Plato, Republic IV, 433a–434c)

For Plato, politics is not about power but about the education of the soul. The ruler must be a philosopher—one who ascends from the cave of appearances to the Form of the Good. Only then can he govern with truth rather than opinion.

“Until philosophers rule as kings… cities will have no rest from evils.” (Republic 473c–d)

Plato’s Republic imagines unity through hierarchy: the city functions like the ordered soul, and freedom means obedience to reason. His later Laws softens this absolutism, favoring rule by law and civic virtue over rule by philosopher-kings. Yet across both works lies a moral constant: the health of the state depends on the virtue of its citizens.
(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Plato’s Political Philosophy)

Aristotle, Plato’s student, transforms this vision from metaphysical to practical. Where Plato designs the ideal state, Aristotle studies the attainable one.
In the Politics, he defines man as a ζῷον πολιτικόν (zoon politikon)—a political animal whose fulfillment arises only through participation in the polis.

“He who has the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration of any state is a citizen of that state.” (Politics III 1275b) (MIT Classics Archive)

Citizenship, for Aristotle, is not a title but a function: to rule and be ruled in turn.
Those who abstain from ta koina become ἰδιώται (idiōtai)—private persons withdrawn from public life, the etymological root of idiot.
(Fiveable study guide)

For Aristotle, the aim of the polis is εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonía)—flourishing through virtue (aretē). Ethics and politics are inseparable. Tyranny begins when citizens lose the courage or leisure to deliberate. The tyrant, he notes, survives by impoverishing and dividing the people:

“The tyrant is always taking measures against the good; he is at war with the noble.” (Politics V 1312b) (LSE Public Review)

In short, Plato sought justice through harmony; Aristotle sought it through participation. Plato’s order is vertical—truth descends from the wise; Aristotle’s is horizontal—reason circulates among citizens. Together they forged the Greek conviction that virtue, reason, and civic engagement are the foundation of freedom.

⚖️ 2. Rome and the Afterlife of Civic Duty

The Roman Republic inherited this Greek ethic and recast it in legal form. Civitas meant both belonging and obligation. Cicero insisted that the res publica exists only when bound by justice and virtue:

“The commonwealth is the property of the people only when it is based upon justice.” (De Re Publica I.39)

For Romans, the citizen owed officium—duty—to the res publica. Service to the public good was an act of self-respect, not submission. (Hoover Institution essay on Cicero)

Christianity transformed this legal-civic duty into a moral one. Conscience became a form of citizenship before God. The command to obey divine rather than human law sowed the seeds of future resistance theory—later visible in Aquinas, Luther, and Locke. The moralization of duty replaced fear with responsibility of conscience.

🕊 3. Civic Humanism and the Early Modern Revolt of Conscience

The Renaissance revived the classical ideal of virtù civile—civic virtue. Machiavelli, in the Discorsi sopra Tito Livio, warns that republics perish when citizens prefer comfort to liberty. Virtue, for him, means active vigilance: corruption begins when people delegate freedom to rulers and cease defending their institutions.
(Internet Archive – Discourses on Livy)

By the seventeenth century, European thought faced a crisis of order. Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) portrayed humans in a brutal state of nature, escaping chaos only by submitting to a sovereign power. John Locke (Two Treatises of Government, 1689) rebalanced the equation: governments derive legitimacy from consent, not fear; when they violate natural rights, citizens regain the right—indeed, the duty—to resist. (IEP article on social contract)

Thus the civic duty of the Greeks re-emerges in Protestant and Enlightenment garb: obedience is conditional; virtue is active.

📜 4. Rousseau and the General Will

In Du Contrat Social (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau unites moral freedom with political order. He opens with the immortal paradox:

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” (SparkNotes summary)

Rousseau’s “chains” are not purely coercive; they are the social bonds of legitimacy. A citizen obeys the general will—la volonté générale—which expresses the common good that each would will if guided by reason and civic virtue. (Britannica on Social Contract – Rousseau)
Freedom thus becomes self-legislation: one is free only when obeying a law one has prescribed to oneself as a member of the collective.

Rousseau closes the ancient circle: the Greek polis and the Roman res publica return as the modern state. Yet he warns that institutions are lifeless without civic virtue:

“Laws are strong only when citizens are strong.”

His notion of the general will transforms Greek participation into modern consent, grounding democracy not in majority rule but in a shared moral purpose.

🔱 5. From Virtue to Constitution

By the eighteenth century, philosophy had matured into constitutional design. The civic ideals of virtue and participation would soon be codified in written charters—the American and later the Greek constitutions. But the ancient warning endures: no parchment can save a passive people. Law may preserve liberty; only citizens can animate it.
(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Civic Virtue

✍️ Transitional Note to Part II

By the time liberty was inscribed in constitutions, its philosophical DNA was already two millennia old. The next chapter of the story—From Constitution to Accountability—will follow how the American and Greek charters tried to translate that ancient moral duty into legal form: the right, and the obligation, to resist tyranny.

🗳️
Part II — The Present: From Constitution to Accountability

Freedom as a System of Responsibility

If Part I traced how philosophy defined the citizen, Part II explores how constitutions tried to preserve him. From Philadelphia to Athens, the architects of modern democracy sought to give legal form to the ancient lesson: freedom survives only when the citizen acts.

🇺🇸 1. The American Experiment — Liberty by Design

When the framers gathered in 1787, they were steeped in classical republicanism. Madison read Polybius; Jefferson admired Cicero and Aristotle; John Adams cited Plato’s Laws in A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787). (Founders Online – Adams, Defence)
Their challenge was to translate virtue into structure: how to make a republic endure without relying on saints.

Checks as Civic Realism

The Constitution’s famous system of checks and balances institutionalized distrust as a form of virtue. Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51:

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
(Library of Congress)
Where Aristotle saw balance among classes, Madison built it among institutions. The logic was the same: power must deliberate with itself.

Virtue and the People

The founders, however, never believed that institutions alone could guarantee liberty. Adams warned:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
(National Archives)

To them, civic virtue was the unseen infrastructure. Jefferson’s design for public education aimed to create “an aristocracy of virtue and talent.” (Monticello.org)
The Federalist Papers repeatedly evoke the same tension that Aristotle had described two millennia earlier: the state must rely on citizens capable of self-rule, yet self-rule cannot exist without the state that educates and disciplines them.

⚖️ 2. The Right to Resist — America’s Revolutionary Ethic

Before it was a constitution, the United States was a rebellion. The Declaration of Independence (1776) codified Locke’s principle that citizens may overthrow a government violating natural rights:

“Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”
(U.S. National Archives)

Here, resistance became the birth certificate of the republic. Yet this right was not meant for anarchy; it was grounded in civic duty. Jefferson later warned that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” but only when guided by reason. In Aristotelian terms, the revolution was justified because the British monarchy had ceased to serve the koinon sympheron—the common good.

By 1789, the framers’ task was to prevent tyranny within democracy itself. The Bill of Rights enshrined the people’s means of vigilance—speech, assembly, press, petition, and the right to bear arms—echoing the Greek belief that participation is the essence of freedom.
(Bill of Rights – U.S. Archives)

Civic Institutions as Moral Discipline

The American design embedded Aristotle’s mean between Plato’s philosophical rule and pure populism. Congress embodied deliberation, the presidency prudence, the judiciary judgment. No branch, like no virtue, suffices alone. The preamble’s “We the People” thus becomes the modern polis—a moral community expressed through constitutional form.

If America made rebellion the foundation of legitimacy, modern Greece made resistance its constitutional duty.
Article 120 §4 of the Greek Constitution (1975, as revised) states:

“Observance of the Constitution is entrusted to the patriotism of the Greeks, who have the right and the duty to resist by any means against anyone attempting to abolish it.”
(Hellenic Parliament official translation)

This clause—heir to both Aristotle and Rousseau—enshrines what philosophers once called the “right of resistance” (jus resistendi). It is not a privilege but a legalized form of civic virtue.

Historical Roots

Greece’s inclusion of this article was not theoretical. It was written in the aftermath of the Colonels’ dictatorship (1967–1974), when passive obedience had allowed tyranny to metastasize. The drafters, haunted by the memory of censorship and exile, embedded in law the moral that every citizen must act when democracy is endangered. The echo of ancient Athens is unmistakable: to abstain is to conspire by silence.

Aristotle’s own Politics already contained the principle: citizens are guardians of the constitution (politeia). Rousseau supplied its modern phrasing: the people are sovereign, and sovereignty cannot be alienated. The Greek Constitution unites both strands in Article 120—transforming moral duty into civic law.

⚙️ 4. Between the Two Revolutions — Europe’s Constitutional Awakening

Between Philadelphia and Athens lie two centuries of experiments in balancing freedom with stability.

  • The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) proclaimed that “resistance to oppression” is an inalienable right. (Conseil Constitutionnel)
  • The Weimar Constitution (1919) introduced civic education as a state function, though the failure of citizens to defend it led to catastrophe.
  • Post-war Europe, scarred by fascism, wrote the same warning into its democratic charters: Article 20(4) of Germany’s Basic Law guarantees the right to resist any attempt to abolish the constitutional order. (Bundestag.de)

Each of these clauses reflects the Greek conception of patriotism as civic engagement rather than nationalism. Patriotism, in the constitutional sense, is not loyalty to a government but to the moral order of the republic.

🕯 5. The Modern Citizen — From Republic to Democracy to Technocracy

Despite these institutional safeguards, the danger Aristotle foresaw persists: the citizen, lulled by comfort, becomes passive. The tyrannies of fear have given way to the tyrannies of apathy. Where the ancient idiōtēs withdrew from the assembly, the modern one withdraws into screens and cynicism.

From Participation to Consumption

Political scientist Robert Putnam warned in Bowling Alone (2000) that civic engagement in the United States had collapsed since the mid-20th century. The same trend marks Europe. Voter turnout, party membership, and volunteerism decline while opinion replaces action.
(Putnam, Bowling Alone – Simon & Schuster)

The Greek term idiōtēs regains its original sting: the private person who has abandoned the public realm. Rousseau’s warning echoes across centuries:

“The people, once accustomed to masters, are no longer fit for freedom.”

Digital Republics and the New Agora

Technology has re-created a kind of electronic agora yet without accountability. The public sphere expands but deliberation contracts. Plato’s cave has become a feed; the shadows are brighter, but they remain shadows.
Modern democracies therefore face a paradox Aristotle would have recognized: citizens have infinite means to express opinion but diminishing will to exercise judgment.

🧠 6. Responsibility and Constitutional Resilience

Both the American and Greek constitutions hinge on an ethical precondition: citizens must practice judgment. Hannah Arendt, writing after totalitarianism, observed that “the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” The task is not rebellion itself but maintenance—the daily defense of law through participation.
(Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment – Schocken Books, 2003)

Modern constitutionalism therefore performs two functions:

  1. It constrains power through law and separation.
  2. It educates virtue through institutions—press, courts, schools—that teach citizens to think politically.

When either collapses, tyranny or decay follows. The framers called this the republican dilemma: how to design a state strong enough to govern yet dependent on a virtuous populace. Every generation must resolve it anew.

🔄 7. The Right to Resist Revisited — From Violence to Vigilance

In Aristotle’s time, resistance meant revolution; today it means constitutional vigilance. Article 120 in Greece and Article 20(4) in Germany do not romanticize insurrection—they codify responsibility. Their true weapon is participation: voting, protest, public reason, transparency.

The American equivalent lies not in amendment but in practice: the First Amendment’s protection of speech and press forms a continuous mechanism of correction. These provisions are modern echoes of the Athenian ekklesia—the assembly of citizens judging the rulers they created.

🌍 8. The Global Civic Crisis

Despite these legacies, the 21st century shows signs of civic exhaustion. Democratic backsliding, misinformation, and populist polarization indicate that constitutions alone cannot sustain virtue. Institutions resemble Plato’s shadows—formal but hollow—when citizens outsource thought to parties or algorithms.

The World Values Survey (2024) finds declining faith in democracy among younger generations, including in Greece and the United States. (WVS Data) The challenge is no longer tyranny by force but the erosion of meaning—a return to what Tocqueville called “soft despotism,” in which citizens “console themselves with being well governed.”
(Tocqueville, Democracy in America II.4.6)

Thus the constitutional duty to resist has migrated inward: it is now the struggle against apathy.

🧭 9.A Core Thesis for Part I

From Plato’s cave to Rousseau’s contract, Western political thought traces a continuous moral geometry:

EpochThinkersCentral IdeaDefinition of Freedom
Classical GreecePlato → AristotleVirtue as foundation of orderParticipation in truth and deliberation
RomeCiceroDuty and justice as civic lawService to res publica
ChristianityChurch Fathers → AquinasConscience higher than rulerObedience bounded by moral law
Renaissance & HumanismMachiavelliRepublics survive by citizen vigilanceGuarding liberty through engagement
EnlightenmentHobbes → Locke → RousseauConsent legitimizes authoritySelf-rule through common will

🧭 9.B Synthesis — From Moral Law to Constitutional Form

ClassicalModernPrinciple Reinterpreted
Aristotle – Virtue through participationMadison – Checks through structurePower must deliberate with itself
Cicero – Duty to res publicaJefferson – Right of rebellionJustice legitimizes rule
Rousseau – General willGreek Const. Art. 120 – Duty to resistSovereignty belongs to citizens
Platonic truth – The Good above expediencyConstitutional preamble – The people above governmentEthics institutionalized

Modern democracies thus codify what the ancients intuited: law alone is insufficient; citizens are the living constitution. The parchment endures only if conscience does.

🏁 10. Conclusion — The Eternal Return of the Citizen

From Plato’s cave to the Greek parliament, from the Athenian ekklesia to the American Congress, one rhythm repeats: the struggle to transform moral insight into civic structure. The ancients feared tyranny by kings; the moderns face tyranny by crowds and complacency. In both, the cure is the same—citizens who act.

Freedom is not inherited; it is performed. Constitutions are instruments, not guarantees. The idiōtēs has changed costume but not nature: he is the citizen who has rights but no will, opinions but no courage. Against him, every clause of every constitution still whispers the same command first spoken in the Athenian agora:

“Engage—or be ruled.”

Questions Readers Often Ask

What did Plato and Aristotle teach about the duties of citizens?

Plato and Aristotle saw citizenship as a moral practice, not a legal title. To be a citizen meant to deliberate, judge, and act for the common good—uniting personal virtue with the shared life of the polis.

How does the American Constitution express the citizen’s responsibility?

The American Constitution institutionalizes virtue through structure. Its checks and balances assume that freedom endures only when citizens remain engaged, thoughtful, and vigilant in guarding the public good.

Why does the Greek Constitution include a duty to resist tyranny?

Article 120 declares that citizens have both the right and the duty to defend democracy. Written after the 1967–74 dictatorship, it transforms Rousseau’s ideal of civic will into legal responsibility.

What are the duties and responsibilities of citizens today?

Citizens today must practice informed participation—voting, reasoning, and holding institutions accountable. In a digital age, responsibility means resisting apathy and acting where algorithms or parties cannot.

Are citizens innocent or guilty when democracy declines?

When citizens withdraw from public life, they share responsibility for decline. Rousseau warned that liberty dies when people prefer comfort to engagement; silence, too, can be a form of consent.

📚 Selected Primary and Scholarly Sources

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