In complex fashion, those revolutions
inaugurated transformations ‘from subjectship
to citizenship’ across much of the globe
that are still ongoing today, when most of
the world’s governments proclaim themselves
to be ‘republics’ of some sort populated
by ‘citizens.’ In eighteeenth-century
North America and France, to be a ‘citizen’
was once again understood to be someone
who shared in political self-governance, as
in the ancient and Renaissance Italian citystates.
Unlike the medieval European
burghers, then, these modern ‘citizens’ were
people who were emphatically not ‘subjects.’
They rejected rule by hereditary
monarchical and aristocratic families in
favor of a much broader community of
political equals. But in these modern
republics, self-governance by ‘citizens’ no
longer took place chiefly in ‘cities.’ Rather,
it occurred within ‘nations.’ These were
substantially larger populations who could
not possibly have face-to-face knowledge of
each other, only some form of ‘imagined
community,’ in Benedict Anderson’s valuable
phrase (Anderson, 1983).