Boundaries, Birthright, and Belonging: Aristotle on the Distribution of Citizenship

Abstract

Far from being dismissed as irrelevant or anachronistic, Aristotle looms large in contemporary discussions of citizenship.1 Natural law theorists, communitarians, neo-republicans and even many liberals have appealed to Aristotle as a way of thickening up the moral content of contemporary public life and underwriting a more participatory “civic republican” variant of citizenship.2 Yet these and other contemporary appropriations tend to focus on only one strand of Aristotle’s discussion of citizenship in the Politics. Assuming that someone is already a citizen in the modern, juridical sense, what additional moral duties and participatory contributions ought we to expect from them?3 But this is to ignore the closely related taxonomical question of who is, or ideally ought to be, entitled to citizenship in the first place. Put differently, the question of what citizens are expected to do may be inseparable from the issue of who these citizens are or, in many cases, are not. Despite this connection, strikingly little has been said about the implications of Aristotelian citizenship for those who find themselves located outside of the political community. Does the Aristotelian view suggest that the boundaries of the political community ought to be more or less permeable than the modern liberal or contractual understanding? And how might Aristotle’s seemingly restrictive and illiberal view of citizenship draw attention to the moral lacuna of contemporary liberal theories, which have Boundaries, Birthright, and Belonging: Aristotle on the Distribution of Citizenship