ABSTRACT
“Citizenship” is a concept as old as politics itself and which has always marked two distinctions: it is bound to the existence of a state and therefore to a principle of public sovereignty, and it is bound to the acknowledged exercise of an individual “capacity” to participate in political decisions. Beyond the conflict between citizenship and allegiance to an actual or transcendentally legitimate state, history still shows that this concept has no definition that is fixed for all time. In practice, citizenship tendentiously embodies the rights of man-at-work, which have concrete existence only if the relation of individual to collectivity is redefined. For the perpetuation of the traditional cleav-ages between the dominated represents a keystone in the system of new inequalities. That is why the struggle for citizenship as a struggle for equality must begin again on new ground and with new objectives.
