Historical development of citizenship

Abstract

Historically, the distinctive core of citizenship has been the possession of the formal status of membership of a political and legal entity and having particular sorts of rights and obligations within it. This core understanding of citizenship goes back to classical times and coalesced around two broad understandings of citizenship stemming from ancient Greece and Imperial Rome respectively that later evolved into what came to be termed the ‘republican’ and ‘liberal’ accounts of citizenship. This entry first examines these two classic views, then looks at how they changed during the Renaissance and Reformation, and finally turns to the ways the two were to some extent brought together following the American and French revolutions within the liberal-democratic nation state.