ABSTRACT
A human agent who is endowed with particular social characteristics which have a legally codified political significance (such as rights, duties and obligations, the freedom to make decisions which are a matter of their own private interests and to participate in matters of public interest, to participate in the life of civil society) is generally said to have citizenship. Such citizenship is sometimes termed ‘substantive citizenship’, in contrast to the possession of ‘formal citizenship’, which is now usually taken to signify merely the fact of being a member of a nation state. The possession of citizenship in the first of these senses implies that an individual is part of a socio-political body, and that the rights, duties, and so forth which that individual has are possessed both concretely and in virtue of their being a member of that body. Thus, for instance, a French citizen is granted a particular political status (citizenship) as a result of being both (i) subject to and (ii) able to appeal to the rule of French law. Whether the possession of a particular right necessarily entails obligations is, however, unclear. Such a view would be disputed by, for instance, advocates of libertarianism, who tend to conceive of rights as being the fundamental issue accompanying questions of political freedom. Likewise, whether the legal codification of rights is commensurable with the satisfactory articulation of the interests a subject may have, has been questioned by the philosopher Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard.
