The big picture of tension between the recurring idea of citizenship as a shared and active life, and the idea of citizenship as a passive status is that each conception of citizenship contains traps, either for the integrity of the political entity to which citizens might belong, or for the citizens themselves. It might seem that a fusion of passive status with the experience of active citizen engagement with the polity would be the ideal solution, but history is not on the side of that phenomenon as a realistic proposition. Indeed, Gibbon suggests that for the most part passive status as citizen yields nothing like active political engagement as citizen. Early on in his history of the decline of the Roman Empire, Gibbon acknowledges the value of the extension of Roman citizenship beyond the aristocrats and oligarchs of the mother city, observing that Virgil came from Mantua and Cicero from Arpinum (Gibbon, 1983, p. 30). Yet he also cites the emperor Caracalla's extending the coveted status of Roman citizenship, formerly reserved for free inhabitants of greater Rome, to free provincial peoples, as a means of fostering administrative efficiency, civil unity, and a larger tax base. But the effect over time was to "diffuse[] a reverence for the Roman name," such that the value of Roman citizenship "was continually diminished" (p. 32). Add to that what could be called the "extra-Roman" momentum of Christianity being preached to Roman, Greek, slave, and barbarian alike from the first century A.D. onward, and the diminution of Roman-citizen identity is brought into even more specific relief.
The phenomenon of unintended or unanticipated consequences or implications attaching to a particular conception of citizenship has by no means been confined to ancient Rome, though consequences and implications have not prevented competing theories of citizenship from entering political and social discourse.
The evolution of conceptions of citizen...