What are the seed beds of civic virtue? There are a variety of aspects of liberal society that can be seen as inculcating civic virtues, including the market, civic associations and the family. Theorists of the 'New Right' often praise the market as a school of civic virtue. Many Thatcher and Reagan reforms of the 1980s aimed to extend the scope of markets in people's lives through free trade, deregulation, tax cuts, the weakening of trade unions and the reducing of welfare benefits, in part in order to teach people the virtues of initiative and self-reliance.

Much of the recent right wing attack on the welfare state has been formulated precisely in terms of citizenship. The welfare state was said to promote passivity amongst the poor, creating a culture of dependency that reduces citizens to passive dependants under bureaucratic tutelage. The market, by contrast, encourages people to be self-supporting. The New Right believes that being self-supporting is not only an important civic virtue in itself, but also a precondition for being accepted as a full member of society. By failing to meet the obligation to support themselves, the long-term unemployed are made a source of shame for society as well as themselves.