The nature of citizenship is, as Aristotle already observed, an often disputed question. A citizen in a democracy may not count as one in an oligarchy (Aristotle 1995: 1275a21). Controversy persists regarding the content, scope, and depth of citizenship (Faulks 2000). Should citizenship primarily be determined in terms of rights or also in that of duties? What is the extent of citizenship? Who should be excluded and who included? And how thick should our identity as citizen be? Does it demand a strong form of fellow feeling or specific competences? What does it mean to be a good citizen?
Despite disagreement, two “classical” ideals of citizenship can be distinguished that greatly influenced our main traditions of political thought: the ideal of Roman law with its emphasis on equality under law, and the Athenian ideal with its stress on the importance of political activity. A citizen, according to the second ideal, is one who “both rules and is ruled” (Pocock 1998: 32). A similar...
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Tinnevelt, R. (2011). Citizenship. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_64
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