Political thinkers throughout the ages have considered the meaning of citizenship and the relationship that does and/or should exist between the citizen and the state. The meaning of citizenship has been addressed in different ways by various schools of thought, beginning with the Greeks. Citizenship means the state of belonging to a collective, a state, and an important element that emerges from Greek, Roman, and early Christian thinkers is that citizenship both confers rights and requires the fulfillment of responsibilities for an individual to be considered a good citizen.
The Greeks are the beginning of political thought, and the form political thought took from the beginning was related to the rationalism of the Greek mind. One of the primary conditions for the development of political thought in Greece was a sense of the value of the individual, and this also meant that one of the issues that had to be addressed was the proper relationship between the individual and the collective, between the individual and the state:
That sense had its manifestation as much in practice as in theory; and it issued into action in the shape of a practical conception of free citizenship of a self-governing community--a conception which forms the essence of the Greek city-state (Barker 2).
The classical features of Greek democratic tradition was an emphasis on disbursing political power among all citizens, and the participation of all citizens was seen as essential both to the well-being of the state and the citizen himself--these constitute the two prongs of citizenship. This tradition is embodied in aspects of the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.
Much of Plato's theory of politics is found in The Republic, and the city referred to in that work by Socrates can be seen as any state. The primary subject of The Republic is justice, examined in broad terms:
The Republic is probably the most elaborate monograph on j...