Citizen

Plato's account of citizenship is not presented as such — he does not offer a formal definition — but it emerges from his analysis of the city and the soul together. The ideal city of the Republic divides its members into three classes defined by soul-type and the education appropriate to it: philosophers trained in mathematics and dialectic to rule, auxiliaries trained in martial virtue to defend, and craftsmen and farmers who provide material needs. Each class has its proper function, and citizenship in any full sense belongs only to those whose souls have been shaped to rule. The question of who counts as a citizen is, for Plato, inseparable from the question of what kind of character the city can and should produce.

What makes this account distinctive is the priority of education over birth or legal status. The class a person belongs to in the ideal city is determined not by parentage but by natural aptitude and its cultivation — so much so that a child of guardians may be reassigned to the productive class if examination reveals an unsuitable nature, and a craftsman's child may be elevated if examination reveals a philosophic soul. Citizenship is a matter of what one has become, not of where one was born. The elaborate educational program of the Republic — music, gymnastics, mathematics, and finally dialectic — exists precisely to produce the characters that genuine political participation requires. To be a citizen in the full Platonic sense is to be someone whose reason governs their appetites, whose judgment is oriented toward the good of the whole.

The Laws, written later and addressed to a second-best city, is more practical and less utopian, but the same logic applies. Citizens of Magnesia will be landowners with leisure for political and military duties; craftsmen and traders will not hold citizenship, as their occupations are incompatible with the formation of civic virtue. The citizen of the Laws must attend assemblies and serve in office; but more fundamentally, he must have been formed by a system of laws and festivals and education that orients him toward the common good. Plato's conviction that a city's constitution is inseparable from the character of its citizens — and that character must be deliberately formed — runs through the chapters on Education and Constitution.

Plato establishes the terms within which later debates about citizenship turn: the question of who is fit to exercise political power, of whether fitness is natural or acquired, and of what political education must accomplish. Aristotle will contest Plato's conclusions about the ruling class and insist on a broader conception of citizenship, but he does so within the framework Plato defines.

Aristotle defines the citizen not by birth, property, or residence, but by active participation in political life. The citizen, in the strictest sense, is one who "shares in the administration of justice and in the holding of office." This definition is deliberately functional: citizenship is not a status passively enjoyed but a capacity actively exercised. Every form of government produces its own kind of citizen, because the constitution shapes what participation means.

The definition immediately generates exclusions. Slaves are property, not persons in the political sense. Women, children, and resident aliens lack the standing to deliberate or judge. More surprisingly, Aristotle also excludes working men from the best constitution: those whose occupations require constant attention cannot find leisure for the activities of citizenship, which in the Greek city-state were nearly a full-time occupation. The best form of state will not admit mechanics or tradesmen. These exclusions are not incidental; they reflect Aristotle's conviction that political life requires both leisure and the character that leisure makes possible.

What these exclusions define, by contrast, is a constitutional idea of citizenship: the citizen is distinguished by relation to other citizens, not by relation to a master or ruler. In the constitutional state, citizens "rule and are ruled by turns," because their natures are equal. This alternation of ruling and being ruled is what distinguishes political freedom from the condition of either the subject or the slave. The subject is governed for his own good by one wiser than he; the slave is used for another's benefit. The citizen alone participates in self-government among equals.

Aristotle's functional definition sets the terms for subsequent debate. To argue about citizenship is to argue about who counts as an equal, what participation requires, and whether the division between leisured rulers and laboring subjects is natural or contingent. The bearing of different types of constitution on the character of citizenship, and especially on the extent of the franchise, is treated more fully in the chapter on Constitution.

Plutarch does not define citizenship philosophically. He shows it biographically. The Lives portray the great statesmen of Greece and Rome as citizens-in-action, men whose virtues and failures played out on the stage of public life. What emerges from the paired portraits is less a theory of citizenship than a gallery of exemplars: Solon legislating for Athens, Lycurgus forging Sparta's austere constitution, Pericles guiding the Athenian democracy at its height, Cato the Elder maintaining Roman virtue against the encroachments of luxury and power.

Two questions run through Plutarch's portraits that bear directly on citizenship. The first is who may become a citizen. Solon's naturalization law admitted foreigners who came to Athens with their whole families to practice a trade, a policy Plutarch regards as of "doubtful character" since it may have weakened the city's cohesion. The Roman tradition was notably more expansive: Gibbon later remarks that "the aspiring genius of Rome sacrificed vanity to ambition" and extended citizenship to the virtuous regardless of origin. Plutarch's portraits trace this difference and its consequences for the vitality of two great republics across centuries.

The deeper question is what citizenship demands. In Plutarch, the great citizen is not merely one who votes or holds office but one who subordinates private interest to public duty, often at personal cost. Aristides accepted poverty; Pericles submitted to law; Cato resisted corruption at every turn. The Lives function as political education: by reading about great citizens, later generations learn what citizenship requires. This is why the work became canonical for Renaissance humanists, the writers of the Federalist, and the American founders, who treated the Lives as a handbook of republican virtue.

Plutarch bridges Greek theory and Roman practice by showing that citizenship is as much a matter of character as of legal status. The question of what habits and dispositions republican citizenship requires, and whether political institutions can reliably form them, is one that Rousseau and the authors of The Federalist approach from different directions, as their respective threads on this idea indicate.

Marcus Aurelius writes as a Roman emperor who regards his imperial office as the least important of his identities. "As a human being, my city and country is the world." The Stoic tradition had long distinguished between the particular city in which one happens to live and the universal city constituted by all rational beings sharing in the divine logos that governs the whole. Marcus gives this tradition its most sustained and personal expression. The Meditations returns again and again to the thought that obligation to family, city, and empire is real, but derives its authority from a prior obligation to rational nature itself.

This is not an argument for withdrawal from politics. Marcus spent most of his reign on campaign, administered justice, and regarded service to the Roman state as a serious duty — but a duty grounded in the fellowship of rational beings rather than in local pride or dynastic loyalty. "That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee." The citizen of the world does not renounce his Roman citizenship; he practices it as one expression of a more fundamental membership. What he refuses is the identification of his ultimate allegiance with any particular people, territory, or legal order. The Roman who fights for Rome is also, and more fundamentally, a member of the city of reason that encompasses Romans and barbarians alike.

The cosmopolitan dimension of Marcus's citizenship has consequences for how he relates to those outside the empire. If rational nature is the basis of fellowship, then every human being — the philosopher and the slave, the Roman and the Parthian — participates in the common city, even those who have not realized this. Marcus speaks of the good man's obligation to those who wrong him: correction, patience, instruction are appropriate, because even the one who wrongs him is a fellow citizen of the larger commonwealth. Whether this cosmopolitanism is compatible with the real inequalities of Roman imperial rule, or whether it functions as an ideology that makes those inequalities easier to bear, is a question the tradition has pressed with different degrees of urgency.

Marcus represents the Stoic alternative to the polis-centered citizenship of Aristotle: the unit of membership is not the city-state but the rational order itself, and duties to particular political communities are genuine but secondary. Kant will revive this cosmopolitan ideal in secular form when he argues for a league of republics bound by cosmopolitan right; Augustine will accept the universalism but insist that the true universal city is the City of God, not the city of reason.

Augustine writes The City of God in response to the charge that Christianity had weakened Rome and made it vulnerable to the Visigoths. His answer reframes the entire question of political citizenship. There are not many cities and one empire; there are only two cities, defined not by geography or law but by love. The earthly city is built by love of self carried to contempt of God; the heavenly city is built by love of God carried to contempt of self. Every human being is a citizen of one or the other, and no political arrangement visible in history corresponds simply to either.

The practical consequence is that the Christian lives in both cities simultaneously, and owes each a different loyalty. The earthly city provides temporal peace — security of persons, stable law, the conditions for ordinary life — and the Christian should not despise this peace or refuse to participate in maintaining it. Augustine insists that citizens of the heavenly city are not withdrawn from political obligation; they use the earthly peace while making their way toward a peace that political order cannot provide. But the obedience they give to earthly authority is strictly conditional: it extends to temporal matters and stops where divine command begins. The martyr who refuses to sacrifice to Roman gods is not a traitor; he is simply giving ultimate loyalty to the city whose citizenship defines him most deeply.

This doctrine of two cities restructures the relationship between political philosophy and theology that Plato and Aristotle had assumed. For Plato, the ideal city and the ideal soul are analogues, and the philosopher's political obligation flows from his understanding of the good. For Aristotle, the city is the natural home of the human being. For Augustine, the city is a more ambiguous thing: necessary, good for what it provides, but incapable of offering what the soul most needs. Roman citizenship, however extensive and however justly administered, does not touch the deepest question of who one is and where one belongs. The bearing of this argument on the relation between church and state is pursued further in the chapters on Religion and Law.

Augustine's two cities become the most influential framework through which medieval political theology organizes the competing claims of temporal and spiritual authority. Aquinas will moderate and systematize the relationship; Hobbes will read it as a dangerous source of divided loyalty and design a sovereignty capable of ending the conflict; Locke will draw on it to argue for toleration. Each response is, in part, a response to Augustine's insistence that political citizenship is always penultimate.

Hobbes begins where citizenship ends. In the state of nature — the condition of human beings without common authority — there is no law, no justice, no mine and thine, and therefore no citizen. There are only individuals, each with an equal right to everything and an equal vulnerability to everyone else. Life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." From this starting point, Hobbes derives the social covenant: each person agrees with every other to transfer the right of self-governance to a sovereign, creating in one act both civil society and absolute authority. What emerges from the covenant is not a citizen in the classical sense — an active participant in governance — but a subject, one who has surrendered the political role in exchange for the protection that only undivided sovereignty can provide.

The distinction matters for every subsequent theory of citizenship. Aristotle had defined the citizen as one who rules and is ruled in turn; Hobbes denies that any such alternation is compatible with peace. The sovereign is not a party to the covenant, cannot be in breach of it, and cannot be legitimately resisted — even tyrannically. The subject retains only one right: the right of self-preservation in extremity, which no covenant can extinguish because the whole point of the covenant is the preservation of life. Outside this narrow reserve, political membership is submission. The Hobbesian "citizen" is an oxymoron: the social contract dissolves active citizenship into subjection as its price.

Hobbes directs this argument explicitly against the Aristotelian tradition and against the divided loyalties that Augustine's two-city doctrine makes possible. He regards the doctrine of papal supremacy, the claim that subjects owe ultimate allegiance to a spiritual authority above the temporal sovereign, as the primary source of civil war in his century. The solution is to make the sovereign the final arbiter of all disputed questions, including religious ones. The subject who obeys a sovereign in outward action while reserving inward faith is, for Hobbes, doing everything that can reasonably be required. The separation of inner conviction from outer compliance is the mechanism that allows absolute sovereignty to coexist with something like religious conscience. Whether this separation is coherent, or whether it concedes too much to the subject's private judgment, is a point Locke's theory of toleration addresses directly.

Hobbes defines the limiting case of political membership: the subject with no share in governance, whose political existence consists entirely in obedience to one sovereign power. Locke and Rousseau both construct their accounts of citizenship as explicit answers to this position, arguing that the covenant which Hobbes designs to end conflict actually misunderstands what political association is for. The question of where the line between protection and domination falls is one the chapters on Liberty and Government pursue further.

Locke's political thought begins not with citizenship but with natural freedom. Before any political community exists, men live in "a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions as they see fit." Political society arises when individuals consent to give up the natural freedom to execute the law of nature themselves, placing that power in the hands of a community. The citizen, for Locke, is not someone who happens to be born within borders but someone who has, at least implicitly, consented to the terms of civil society. Where Aristotle defined citizenship by active participation in ruling, Locke grounds it in will and consent; membership is a matter of agreement, not of natural fitness or political function.

From this foundation Locke draws two consequences that reshape the idea of citizenship. First, the government holds power in trust: it exists to protect the natural rights of life, liberty, and estate that citizens bring with them into civil society. It cannot take what they have not granted. Second, when government violates this trust, the people retain the right to dissolve it. This right of revolution is not an exception to citizenship but its ultimate expression: the citizen is one who can judge the government and, if necessary, withdraw consent. The subject of an absolute monarch has no such recourse. Locke distinguishes sharply between being under a government and being a member of a civil society.

Locke's account of property as the fruit of labor connects his theory of citizenship to economic life. Every man owns his own body; his labor is therefore his own; what he mixes his labor with becomes his property. Citizens bring their property into civil society precisely to protect it. This means that government which taxes without consent or appropriates without process has violated the very terms of membership. Locke does not yet extend full citizenship to all; women remain largely outside his account, and the propertyless are barely visible. But the logical pressure of his principles toward broader inclusion is what later thinkers will exploit.

Locke transforms citizenship from a practice of active participation, as Aristotle defined it, into a claim grounded in natural rights, which government exists to protect rather than to constitute. The question his account leaves open is whether a theory built on the protection of property can generate the broader civic equality that democratic principles tend to require. Rousseau and Mill press this question from different directions, as their respective threads indicate.

Montesquieu's central claim about citizenship is structural: the kind of civic life a constitution demands depends entirely on the kind of constitution it is. In a republic, citizens must be animated by love of the laws and the fatherland, a passion he calls virtue — not moral virtue in the comprehensive sense, but the specific disposition to prefer the common good over private interest, to accept personal sacrifice for collective welfare, and to submit willingly to law one has helped make. In a monarchy, subjects are animated by honor — the desire for distinctions and preferments, which an aristocratic order channels productively without requiring citizens to actually love the public good. Under despotism, only fear moves people, and there are, properly speaking, no citizens at all, only trembling subjects.

This typology connects citizenship to the much larger question of what sustains any form of government over time. Montesquieu argues that every constitution contains within itself a principle — the passion that must be alive in the governed for the constitution to function — and that the decay of that principle is the decay of the constitution. A republic loses itself when citizens become lazy or corrupt and transfer their public energy to private acquisition; a democracy is especially vulnerable when citizens grow more interested in their own equality of fortune than in the laws by which equality is maintained. The history of Rome is, in Montesquieu's telling, a sustained meditation on how a republic exhausts its civic virtue and slides toward despotism.

The implications for political design are precise. If civic virtue is the principle of republican government, then the institutions of a republic must be calibrated to produce and maintain it. Small territory, relative economic equality, public education, sumptuary laws, and the careful distribution of offices all serve to keep the disposition of citizens aligned with the public good. The Spirit of Laws is not merely descriptive but diagnostic: by mapping the conditions under which each constitutional principle flourishes or withers, Montesquieu provides a framework for assessing why actual governments succeed or fail. This framework runs directly into the American constitutional debates, where Hamilton and Madison engage it explicitly in The Federalist.

Montesquieu gives Rousseau the vocabulary of civic virtue and the contrast between republican citizenship and commercial individualism; he gives the Federalists the analytical distinction between direct and representative democracy and the argument that a large republic may be more stable than a small one. Tocqueville inherits the question of what habits and institutions sustain civic virtue in a democratic age, when the leveling of social distinctions removes the aristocratic intermediary bodies Montesquieu regarded as indispensable.

Where Locke asks that citizens consent to the terms of civil society and enjoy the protection of their natural rights, Rousseau insists that genuine citizenship requires something closer to a transformation of the self. The citizen of a true republic is not merely a member who obeys the law; she is a sharer in sovereign power, and this requires her to identify the general will, not her particular interest, as her own deepest desire. Rousseau distinguishes sharply between the bourgeois, who calculates his private advantage, and the citizen (citoyen), who wills the common good.

The Social Contract creates citizenship through an act by which each person, "giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody." This is Rousseau's famous claim that the social pact produces a moral transformation: what were separate, self-interested individuals become, through the act of association, a collective moral person with a general will. The citizen, as subject of this general will, is both ruler and ruled. Rousseau calls the same person "citizen" insofar as she shares in sovereign authority and "subject" insofar as she is bound by its laws. This double status is not a contradiction; it is the definition of self-government.

Rousseau is acutely aware that this ideal is nearly impossible to realize in large, commercial, modern states. He admires the city-republics of antiquity and uses Geneva as the closest modern approximation. The more a society is divided by inequality and dependence, the less genuine citizenship is possible. Citizen virtue requires economic independence; luxury corrodes it. This is why Rousseau's political thought connects to his criticism of the arts and sciences: civilization as the moderns know it actively undermines the conditions of true citizenship.

Rousseau's account of citizenship is inseparable from his critique of modern commercial society, which he regards as actively corrosive of the civic virtue he requires. His insistence that genuine self-government depends on a transformation of private individuals into citizens who will the common good remains a standing point of contention in democratic theory, taken up from different vantage points by Kant, the Federalists, and Mill.

Kant derives citizenship from the idea of a rightful civil condition rather than from historical contract or natural community. He identifies three "juridical attributes" that belong to every citizen by right. First, constitutional freedom: no citizen may be compelled to obey a law to which he has not given his consent or approval. Second, civil equality: no citizen may recognize anyone as a superior in law, though he may recognize differences in rank, talent, and wealth. Third, political independence: the citizen must be able to maintain his existence not by the arbitrary will of another, but by his own rights and powers as a member of the commonwealth. These three together constitute what Kant calls the idea of a republican constitution.

The third attribute, political independence, creates a problem that Kant states with unusual candor. Those who must depend on others for their livelihood cannot, in his view, exercise the voting right that "properly constitutes the political qualification of a citizen." He calls apprentices, servants, women, and day laborers "passive citizens": they enjoy the protection of law and have the rights of humanity, but they do not have the right to deal with the state as active members. Kant insists, however, that it must be possible for passive citizens to elevate themselves to active status by acquiring economic independence. The restriction is provisional, not permanent.

What redeems Kant's account is his insistence that the restriction of active citizenship is a defect of existing conditions, not of the idea. The republican constitution aims at universal inclusion, even when it cannot immediately achieve it. This is the logic of the regulative ideal: we judge actual institutions by the standard of a fully rightful civil condition even when the standard cannot yet be fully realized. Mill and Tocqueville will work within this framework while arguing that the conditions for full citizenship can be extended far more widely than Kant assumed.

Kant's account gives citizenship a rational foundation that does not depend on historical contracts or on the natural communities Aristotle took as his starting point. His distinction between active and passive citizenship names a tension that runs through all liberal democratic theory: the universality of the right against the particularity of the conditions required to exercise it. Mill and Tocqueville take up this tension, as their threads on this idea indicate.

The Federalist is the most sustained American contribution to the theory of republican citizenship. Hamilton and Madison write in the immediate aftermath of the Constitutional Convention, defending the proposed framework against critics who argued that a republic on the scale of the United States was a political impossibility. Their response is not to deny the classical objection but to reformulate what citizenship can mean in a large commercial republic. Where ancient republicans required small, homogeneous, virtuous communities, the Federalists argue that the extended republic is actually more stable, because it makes it harder for factional majorities to oppress minorities.

Citizenship in the Federalist framework is primarily electoral and deliberative, not directly participatory. The citizen's chief function is to choose representatives who will exercise judgment on her behalf. Madison argues that representation "refines and enlarges the public views," filtering them through the reasoned deliberation of elected officials who are likely to be wiser and more knowledgeable than the average voter. This is explicitly an argument against Rousseau's direct-participation model. The problem is not that Rousseau's citizens are too demanding but that direct democracy on a large scale produces the very factional instability it is supposed to cure.

The Federalists are, however, deeply worried about what produces and sustains the civic character necessary for republican government to function. Madison in Federalist 57 insists that representatives must maintain a connection with the people they represent, and that the surest guarantee of this is the civic vigilance of the citizens themselves. "If it be asked what is to be the restraint upon the representatives, the answer is: the vigilance and weight of their constituents." Citizens who abandon their political responsibility for private comfort endanger the republic as surely as tyrannical rulers. The Federalists thus combine a structural argument for representative government, which filters public opinion through elected deliberation, with a recognition that no institutional design succeeds without citizens who take seriously their responsibility to monitor and judge their representatives.

The Federalist provides the most sustained American argument that citizenship in a large republic consists primarily in informed electoral choice and civic vigilance rather than in direct participation in deliberation. Whether this account of citizenship is sufficient for the purposes of a free government, or whether it falls short of what genuine self-governance requires, is a question that Mill and Tocqueville examine from different perspectives.

Mill's contribution to the theory of citizenship is double: he argues both for the expansion of the franchise to its fullest extent and for attention to the quality of citizenship so produced. His case for universal suffrage in Considerations on Representative Government is the first systematic defense of universal adult suffrage in the English-speaking tradition. Mill's argument is not merely about justice (though he believes exclusion is unjust) but about the developmental effects of participation. "It is not sufficiently considered how little there is in most men's ordinary life to give any largeness either to their conceptions or to their sentiments." Political participation is one of the few experiences that broadens the mind beyond the horizon of private interest.

Mill's advocacy of "plural voting," by which educated voters would receive more than one vote, marks his distance from both Rousseau's pure equality and Aristotle's outright restriction. His position is that citizenship should be formally universal but that its weight should reflect the quality of civic judgment. He is especially insistent that women must be included: The Subjection of Women argues that excluding women from political life wastes enormous civic talent and perpetuates a false image of their capacities. The exclusion is not merely unjust to women; it corrupts politics by removing half of the human race from its deliberations.

Mill is also the theorist who most clearly identifies the second great revolution in citizenship: the shift from winning constitutional government (Locke's achievement) to extending full civic rights to all members of society. He argues that the political disqualification of the laboring classes, however common in earlier theory, is incompatible with democratic principles once those principles are taken seriously. The threat he most fears is not radical democracy but a democracy that becomes passive: citizens who withdraw from public affairs and leave governing to officials, producing "the government of mere official routine."

Mill's deepest concern is not the franchise's breadth but its depth: a democracy of disengaged voters, content to leave governing to officials, is for him as dangerous as an oligarchy. The drift toward civic withdrawal under conditions of democratic equality is a tendency Tocqueville examines from a sociological perspective, as the latter's thread on this idea indicates. The question of whether formal inclusion in the franchise is sufficient for meaningful citizenship, or whether it requires the cultivation of active participation, connects Mill's constitutional thought to his broader arguments under the idea of Liberty.

Tocqueville studies American democracy not to celebrate it but to understand the conditions that keep it alive. His central observation is that formal rights of citizenship (voting, legal equality, freedom from arbitrary rule) are necessary but not sufficient for a genuinely free society. What sustains citizenship in practice is a layer of habits, associations, and institutions that stand between the individual and the central state. Without these intermediate structures, democratic equality tips into what Tocqueville calls "soft despotism": a government that is not tyrannical in the classical sense, but that keeps citizens in "perpetual childhood" by managing their affairs for them.

The Americans' genius, in Tocqueville's account, is their cultivation of the "art of association." In a democracy, powerful individuals and aristocratic families are absent; their socializing function must be replaced by voluntary associations. Americans form associations for every imaginable purpose, and in doing so they practice the habits of civic life: deliberation, compromise, the representation of interests, the subordination of individual will to collective decision. Tocqueville also stresses the importance of local government and jury service as schools of citizenship: institutions where ordinary people exercise real judgment on real matters and develop the political competence that larger democracy requires.

Tocqueville's deepest worry is that democratic equality, left to itself, produces a kind of civic withdrawal. When everyone is formally equal, no one looks to others for guidance; each tends to retreat into private life, family, and personal advantage. The public good becomes, in time, nobody's business. This individualism (Tocqueville's own term, which he coins for the occasion) is distinct from the selfish egotism of the tyrant: it is a quiet, decent abdication of civic responsibility. The only antidote is deliberate cultivation of civic habits, strong local institutions, a free press, and the kind of civic religion that ties private virtue to public duty.

Tocqueville identifies the pathology peculiar to democratic freedom: not tyranny but comfortable abdication. Where earlier theorists worried chiefly about the concentration of power, Tocqueville worries about its diffusion into a bureaucratic tutelage that citizens accept because it spares them the trouble of governing themselves. Whether the intermediary institutions he regards as the antidote (local government, voluntary associations, a free press) can sustain the habits of citizenship against the centralizing tendencies of modern states is a question the chapters on Democracy and Liberty pursue further.