ancient cities

Christian, heterosexual, male, White, and adult.
Does this mean the end of citizenship? Judging by
the seemingly inexorable rise of another figure of
being—the consumer—in the second half of the
twentieth century, it certainly appears as though
citizenship had come to some kind of an end.
Perhaps, just as Roman citizenship ceased to be a
functional institution at the moment of its declaration
of universality in AD 212, the twentieth century
had consummated the gradual expansion of
civil rights in the eighteenth, political rights in the
nineteenth, and social rights in the twentieth century,
as suggested by T. H. Marshall.
Yet, while we have witnessed the recasting of
the fundamental elements of citizenship (property,
warriorship, masculinity) and the emergence of a
counter figure, we have also observed the emergence
of a new figure of the citizen that was much
less constituted by what it possessed than by what
it ostensibly lacked: strangers, outsiders, and aliens
had become claimants to citizenship. Perhaps those
new historical narratives that are now being told
about citizenship indicate this transformation.
They make citizenship appear less a bastion of
property, warriorship, and masculinity, let alone
occidentality, and more about the struggles of
redistribution and recognition by those who had
been its strangers, outsiders, and aliens.
Substances of Citizenship
The substance of citizenship is the relationship
between rights and responsibilities and the virtues
that constitute that relationship. Each site (and
scale) and figure of citizenship configures a series
of rights and responsibilities appropriate to their
relational strengths. If the figure of citizenship is
dominant in a given site for landed property, warriorship,
and masculinity, then those who “lack”
these properties will become dominated. Their
claims to citizenship will address injustices to
which their dominated status gives rise. While not
a zero-sum game, substances of citizenship are
relationships that reflect dominant sites and figures
of citizenship. It would have been inconceivable
to imagine claiming rights for disabled
subjects or refugee abjects in either the Greek
polis or the Roman civitas. Similarly, it would be
inconceivable today to institute a parliament of
Citizenship
147
warriors. The relationships between and among
sites, scales, and figures of citizenship are not
zero-sum games either. It is flawed to think that
citizenship was once a city phenomenon and that
it was eclipsed by the state and then the nation,
and then perhaps the world. These sites articulate
through each other rather than eclipse each other.
They also stretch and permeate each other. Rather
than being nestled and concatenated, the sites of
citizenship are tentacular and amorphous and
bleed into each other. It is these intersections
between different sites (and scales) that produce
different figures and substances of citizenship.
Engin F. Isin
See also Athens, Greece; Social Exclusion; Stranger;
Urban Politics
Further Readings
Arendt, H. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Black, A. 1984. Guilds and Civil Society in European
Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the
Present. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gardner, J. F. 1993. Being a Roman Citizen. London:
Routledge.
Heather, P. J. 2006. The Fall of the Roman Empire: A
New History of Rome and the Barbarians. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Isin, E. F. 2002. Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Isin, E. F. and P. K. Wood. 1999. Citizenship and Identity.
London: Sage.
Manville, P. B. 1990. The Origins of Citizenship in
Ancient Athens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Marshall, T. H. [1949] 1992. Citizenship and Social
Class. London: Pluto Press.
Poggi, G. 1990. The State: Its Nature, Development, and
Prospects. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Smith, R. M. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of
Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Weber, M. [1921] 1958. The City. New York: The Free
Press.
Young, I. M. 1989. “Polity and Group Difference: A
Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship.” Ethics
99(January), 250–74.