Are Stoics Engaged Citizens? – An Invitation to Stoicon 2025

Stoicon, Modern Stoicism’s annual online gathering, takes place next Saturday, October 18! Please join us for a day of talks on Stoicism and engaged citizenship. You will learn what the ancient Stoics understood by citizenship and how we can apply Stoic principles to be good citizens today. We will have a variety of panels, presentations, and interviews from leading Stoic scholars and practitioners from around the world. Highlights include:

• What Can the Stoics Teach Us About Citizenship? – Mick Mulroy
• Seneca and Nero: The Ultimate Test – James Romm
• A Conversation with Brigid Delaney, hosted by Phil Yanov
• What Would a Stoic Say? Civil Discourse in an Age of Outrage – Diane Kalen-Sukra
• The Stoic Tradition of Engaged Citizenship – Lisa Hill
• Panel: Reason in Society – hosted by Brittany Polat, featuring William O. Stephens, Kelli Rudolph, Aldo Dinucci, and Jacob Klein
• Panel: Stoic Civic Engagement in Action – hosted by Gregory B. Sadler, featuring Meredith Alexander Kunz, Allie Nava, Leonidas Konstantakos, and Ross Paton
• Lightning talks: Dominic Byrne, Scott Corey, Cal Heath, Kristy Kaufmann, Sofia Koutlaki, Jamie Ryder, Rebecca Simmons, Benny Voncken, Alexander Zock

See the full schedule, learn more about presenters, and register for tickets here. All proceeds from this event go directly to funding Modern Stoicism’s mission of sharing information about Stoic living for the benefit of the general public.

How is Stoicism related to engaged citizenship?

Throughout history, Stoics from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius have contributed to their societies through engaged citizenship. Stoicism has also inspired some of the democratic principles we rely on today, particularly in the realm of justice and human rights. To give you a preview of what we’ll talk about at Stoicon, we’ve asked our speakers to respond to the following question:

How can Stoicism help us to be good citizens and cultivate a flourishing society in the 21st century?

Mick Mulroy: Stoicism has been a partner in the development of democracies since Ancient Greece—anchoring civic virtue, personal responsibility, and reasoned dialogue. Today, as democracies across the world are under threat from autocracy, Stoic principles can serve as a counter force. The health of any society depends on the character of its citizens, that character is how democracy will endure.

Diane Kalen-Sukra: Stoicism offers the civic disposition and skills we need in a noisy age: self-mastery, truthful speech, courage under pressure, and justice. It encourages us to focus on what is in our control, discipline destructive impulses, and anchor duty to the common good. Lived together, these habits renew the civic culture on which flourishing societies depend.

William O. Stephens: Stoicism makes better citizens by disciplining assent, extirpating anger and fear, and fixing attention on what is up to us: speaking truth, keeping promises, fulfilling our roles well, and acting for justice. It replaces the harmful passions with rational counterparts (eupatheiai), with caution in place of fear and goodwill in place of anger, so public action is steady and beneficial rather than reactive and inflammatory. Its cosmopolitan outlook widens concern from tribe to humankind, which supports fair institutions, evidence-based policy, civil discourse, and stewardship of our shared world.

Lisa Hill: Contrary to the stereotype, the Stoics encourage political activism so we can help as many people as possible; an important lesson in an age of civic withdrawal, particularly among the young. Further, the wise and good will seek to gain power in order to aid others. The Stoics taught by both words and deeds that we have a duty to resist tyrants and bad rulers.

Against a contemporary global backdrop of intensifying nationalism, Stoic cosmopolitanism asks us to respect and aid, not only intimates and compatriots, but also foreigners, strangers, minorities, women, members of out-groups and those of low social status.

Meredith Alexander Kunz: Our common humanity—the interrelatedness of all humans—is central to Stoicism, and it means that we have a responsibility to help each other and lift each other up. Kids are really important in this effort, because they have the potential to become good citizens, but they aren’t born understanding the Stoic virtues of practical wisdom, justice, courage, and self-control. As Stoics, we can work with young people to teach them how to build their character through the virtues and help them create a community of respect, fairness, caring, and mutual support through service projects—inviting kids to make a difference in their world, too.

Phil Yanov: Stoicism provides a framework for good citizenship by emphasizing our duty to the human community. By cultivating Justice, we are guided to act with fairness, compassion, and shared responsibility, recognizing that our individual well-being is interconnected with the well-being of others.

Allie Nava: Having previously been in involved for decades in non-partisan civics through an NGO and a presidential campaign, more recent deep dives into Stoicism tell me there is an opportunity to bring Stoic philosophy and thinking to political incubators. These are the training groups and institutes that recruit and train prospective local and national political candidates. There is ample room for ethics training in those arenas via exposure to Stoic philosophy, not as black-white training but rather as frameworks for thinking through challenges and duties and conflicting priorities and negotiation gridlock. To execute on the idea requires localized outreach to such organizations at the state or local level, so can appear a daunting task at first. One way to start would be with a pilot with 3-5 orgs/ states first and test. Use the test to learn and tweak, and if successful, then scale.

Ross Paton: Stoicism helps us to pause when we might otherwise act without thought. Day to day, this moves us from reacting to what comes at us, to responding with attention and care— a shift that strengthens the societal bond which connect us. We can all be part of the cosmopolis, we simply have to consciously make it so.

Stoicism offers a framework for staying on the right road together. Even when we feel rage toward other drivers, almost run out of fuel, or consider making a collective wrong turn. As Hierocles reminds us, we flourish as a society by widening our circle of concern—seeing others as fellow travellers. Stoicism helps us resist the mirage of self-interest, and instead commit to the quality of our shared journey for the greater good.

We look forward to seeing everyone at Stoicon on October 18!