ABSTRACT

Prevailing social scientific definitions view citizenship as a modern institution for the distribution of civil, political, and social rights meant to counterbalance social inequalities among members of the same polity. German sociologist and national economist Max Weber viewed citizenship as an institutionalized association of an autonomous status group of individual burghers subject to the same law and traced it back to the ancient Greek polis and the medieval Occidental city. In the mid-20th century, Weber’s idea that the equality of citizens before the law represented an overcoming of particularities of birth became central to T. H. Marshall’s sociology, who considered the “modern drive toward social equality” the latest phase in the evolution of citizenship. By taking the autonomous city-state of Western Europe as the locus of emergence of citizenship, approaches reinforced the notion of a linear trajectory leading from ancient Greece and Rome to revolutionary France and Western-style democracy.