My general theme is what I will be calling “civic honor.” I want to explore the role of honor, and its negative counterpart, shame, in the civic life of democracies. The account begins with an insight that I learned from the anthropologist Frank Henderson Stewart: Honor is fundamentally about rights to respect. To honor a person is to treat her as entitled to respect. If you recognize yourself as honorable, you will have self-respect, paying yourself the respect that is your due. The character of the respect due, how one displays that respect, and what gains and loses you these rights to respect: all these are culturally variable. But the structure of honor—rights to respect assigned by social norms or conventions, an honor code—is, I think, a human universal. That is why we can talk about honor pretty much everywhere. And why it is available, perhaps surprisingly, to shape our democratic life.