Republican political theory teaches that to be free is to share in governing a political community that controls its own fate. Self-government in this sense requires political communities that control their destinies, and citizens who identify sufficiently with those communities to think and act with a view to the common good. Cultivating in citizens the virtue, independence, and shared understandings such civic engagement requires is a central aim of republican politics. To abandon the formative ambition is thus to abandon the project of liberty as the republican tradition conceives it.
