ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that citizens are controlled and constricted by laws and norms that maintain the category of virtuous citizen: patriotism, property, production, participation, and reproduction. It proposes a workable liberatory path to move liberal democracy truly forward toward equality. The book looks at the unseen in most laws, policies, and norms that constrain many in the second-class position and maintain the status quo. Citizenship theory emerged from the mid-twentieth-century World War II alongside the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The book also looks at the potential endgame: articulating why equality is important. The objective is not only to make visible the entrenchment, but to develop a path to counter this, for without correction this attitude shifts quickly from tolerance to a politics of disgust and aversion.
