Citizenship in a Globalizing World

2

The Classical Conception of Citizenship

Ashok Acharya

The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.

 

Hannah Arendt, 1958

Introduction

In the Suppliant Women, written probably around 422 BC, Euripides—one of the great Greek tragedy playwrights living in fifth-century BC Athens—captures some aspects of the conventional contrast between one man's rule (understood here as tyranny) and the rule of the many. A messenger from Thebes, as Euripides recounts, appears before Theseus of Athens and asks who the master of the land, ...