Perhaps necessarily, the oldest meaning
of citizenship, participation in political
self-governance, has survived in the modern
world only in greatly modified form. The
word ‘citizen’ derives from the Latin civis or
civitas, meaning a member of an ancient
city-state, preeminently the Roman republic;
but civitas was a Latin rendering of the
Greek term polites, a member of a Greek
polis. Innumerable scholars have told how a
renowned resident of the Athenian polis,
Aristotle, defined a polites or ‘citizen’ as
someone who rules and is ruled in turn,
making ‘citizenship’ conceptually inseparable
from political governance (Aristotle,
[350 BCE] 1968: 1275a23). Though most
inhabitants of Athens, including the foreigner
Aristotle himself, were ineligible to
participate in citizenship thus understood,
this ideal of citizenship as self-governance
has often served since as an inspiration and
instrument for political efforts to achieve
greater inclusion and democratic engagement
in political life. It continues to play
that role in modern political discourse.