A Citizenship in Movement

Abstract

From its inception, the philosophical-legal vehicle of citizenship has exhibited Janus-like qualities. For Karl Marx, the “first” citizenship of the classical world was a lodestone in the edifice of the “symbolic city”; a legally-delineated status that, just as surely as it included Greeks within the unitary polis, condemned the vast mass of the classical population to servility. The particularism within an originating citizenship paradoxically survived the Enlightenment, as a result of which, the figure of thecitoyenbecame the point at which a Judaic-Christian preoccupation with the inalienable personality of man could be conceptually reconciled with the perceived need to maintain a secular community of horizontal bondage within the republican state. Exclusionary impulses similarly only hardened in an age of nationalism. Even the most inclusive of “industrial” citizenships, just as they expanded the liberating potential of socialized belonging, continued to exclude the alien from their New Jerusalem with direct reference to his lack of communitarian, contractual or “accidental” concordance with the nation.