ABSTRACT
In the concept of citizenship (Biirgertum) as it is used in social history are bound up three distinct significations. First, citizenship may include certain social categories or classes which have some specific communal or economic interest. Second, in the political sense, citizenship signifies membership in the state, with its connotation as the holder of certain political rights. The notion of the citizen of the state has its forerunners in antiquity and in the medieval city. The citizen in the quality of membership in a class is always a citizen of a particular city, and the city in this sense, has existed only in the western world, or elsewhere, as in the early period in Mesopotamia, only in an incipient stage. The citizen of the middle ages was a citizen because and insofar as he came under this law and participated in the choice of administrative officials.
