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believe that great citizenship has been killed just yet. We do believe, however, that it has been crowded out—by the market on one side and by the state on the other. Nowadays, too many people think of their responsibilities of citizenship as limited mainly to basic compliance with the law, or perhaps jury duty or voting—and, of course, only half of us even vote.
    The market is the first force that has led to the shriveling of citizenship. The classic case is the Wal-Mart effect. A town has a Main Street of small businesses and mom-and-pop shops. The shopkeepers and their customers have relationships that are not just about economic transactions but are set in a context of family, neighborhood, people, and place. Then Wal-Mart comes to town. It offers lower prices. It offers convenience. Because of its scale and might in the marketplace, it can compensate its workers stingily and drive out competition.
    The presence of Wal-Mart leads the townspeople to think of themselves primarily as consumers, and to shed other aspects of their identities, like being neighbors or parishioners or friends. As consumers first, they gravitate to the place with the lowest prices. Wal-Mart thrives. The small businesses struggle and lay off workers. They cut back on their sponsorship of tee ball, their support of the food bank. As the mom-and-pops give way to the big box, and commutes become necessary, lives become more frenetic and stressful. People see each other less often. The sense of mutual obligation that townsfolk once shared starts to evaporate. Microhabits of caring and sociability fall away. In this tableau of libertarian citizenship, market forces triumph and everyone gets better deals—yet everyone is now in many senses poorer.
    Two things have happened in such a scene, which, by the way, is not about Wal-Mart alone but about an ideology that treats everything—including people—like costs to be reduced. When we see ourselves as consumers above all, we start thinking of citizenship as grumpy customerhood—as suspicious, skeptical, “what’s-in-it-for-me” consumerism. Globalization and pressures on the middle class accelerate these effects. Throw in the scarcity mindset and anxieties of the Great Recession and the harm compounds. The insidious marketization of life distorts—indeed, corrupts—our politics and our civic lives.
    Meanwhile, on another front, the state has encroached increasingly into arenas of civic action, reducing the space that people have to show up for one another. What used to be the sort of thing you or I might just do because it needed doing, we now see as someone else’s job. What used to be left to common sense is now prescribed by law. What used to be undertaken by self-organizing citizens is now too often delegated to the state. Elinor Ostrom’s classic Governing the Commons depicts these dynamics in societies around the world.
    But for direct evidence we need examine only our own schools. Somewhere between the one-room schoolhouse of the 19th century and the assembly-line high school of the 20th, Americans came to accept the tacit notion that the walls of the school are to keep kids in and others out. As public education has become more bureaucratized and rule-bound, and the actual work of teaching more test-driven, it’s become easier for parents to drop their children off and check out of the process of education. At the same time, it’s become harder for parents—or, for that matter, neighbors or grandparents or mentors—to enter the classroom and become a truly integrated part of the schooling experience, let alone to improve the actual quality of the school.
    A norm now prevails in most public schools that education is the job of professional educators. Rules have arisen to support that norm. There were probably good reasons for such rules, and certainly teachers are professionals to be respected. But one unintended consequence of all this is that the state gives us permission to treat