Most contemporary theoretical considerations of citizenship and political organization touch on citizenship’s antecedents in ancient Greece. To participate in the body politic, Athenian citizens had to be property owners, heads of a household, and male. In Citizenship (2015), Étienne Balibar turns to the Greek term politeia to trace the linguistic resonance in contemporary conceptions of political organization, including postnational and deterritorialized conditions. “The Romans ‘translated’ this as res publica, and the British of the classical period translated it first as polity, then as commonwealth, adopting alternate ancient etymologies,” Balibar writes (Citizenship, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton; 2015; Malden, MA: Polity). Out of this emerges a universal conception of political organization that has expanded to include more than propertied males in the more contemporary arena, leading Balibar to wonder “to what extent this category contains an unchanging kernel of meaning, and whether its application to a context that...

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