There are few concepts as important in democratic politics as citizenship, and there are both many meanings of citizenship—including meanings that vary historically and across political space—and several ways of inquiring into the concept.¹ In concentrating on citizenship as an activity, the aim of this essay is to begin to articulate a major component of a model of what democratic politics, and in particular democratic political argument, is about. More specifically, this essay seeks to articulate a conception of citizenship as political agency in a representative democratic society that is both more realistic about the rough-and-tumble, part-time character of politics than much contemporary theorizing about democracy and citizenship acknowledges and yet does not capitulate to a picture of politics as nothing more than bargaining between interests and preferences and of citizens as virtually indistinguishable from passive, acquiescent subjects.² To do so, I turn to what at first glance might seem a surprising resource, some of Immanuel Kant's later work. The main text is the now-famous second part of Kant's The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), in which Kant treats the unselfish yet partisan sympathy—what he calls "enthusiasm"—of spectators in response to the French Revolution.³ I claim that Kant's spectators can, with some justifiable modification, be taken to model democratic citizens, in the first instance because how they think about highly visible political dramas is more important than those dramas themselves, and also because Kant's characterization of the affective, partial, but public thinking of spectators in response to the French Revolution captures some of the essential features of what democratic citizens do.

My reading of Kant goes against the grain of standard interpretations insofar as I argue that, in The Conflict of the Faculties's discussion of the French Revolution and republican politics, the moral law and the human reason that responds to it are conditioned by human subjectivity and, more particularly, subjective feeling. Kant requires that we heed the moral law before and apart from any other incentive, but the enthusiasm of political spectators—which Kant shares—in fact precedes and grounds the moral-political claims they make, rather than merely attaching to a pure moral ideal. At the same time, my interpretation differs from those of the many other contemporary thinkers who have turned to this text of Kant's, frequently in conjunction with the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), to find a political philosophy of judgment that forgoes the robust universalism of Kant's moral philosophy without lapsing into subjectivism. One powerful line of interpretation (best represented by Hannah Arendt) holds that Kant, in The Conflict of the Faculties, establishes a categorical separation between political actors and spectators and that it is only on condition of their disinterested nonparticipation that spectators perform their politically significant act of thoughtful understanding.⁴ On my reading, there is no such separation of actors and spectators, or of thinking and acting, and no disinterested nonparticipation on the part of spectators. On the contrary, Kant's spectators are involved affectively in the events to which they respond.