The concept of the citizen represents the social and engaged individual in the political community. This is true not only of the ancient discourse on virtue and the republican ideas of participation in the Renaissance, but also of the debates of the Enlightenment. The question of the “good citizen” and his necessary qualities is thus a traditional topic in political theory. It is not limited to the controversy over whether human nature is primarily “benevolent” or “egoistic” but also touches on the question of the skills and competencies necessary for citizens in a given community. For Montesquieu, for example, political virtue was only necessary in a republic, where the individual had to be subordinate to the political community, while in a monarchy, he declared honour to be the guiding principle. For him, honour, unlike virtue, was based on an internalized class consciousness. He explicitly linked it to a purchasable but non-commercial nobility, thereby recognizing the pursuit of profit as a driver of human action and, at the same time, rejecting the republican overestimation of human virtue because, for him, social incentives were sufficient to give a dynamic society a stable, system-preserving structure (Krause 2018).