127-137Īristotle, citizenship, functional theory of citizenship, legal theory National Category Place, publisher, year, edition, pages2018. If the answer is positive, the characteristic constitutes a reason for conferring citizenship otherwise, it does not. To answer the question who should be a citizen? we must therefore look at the dialectic between form and substance: it is necessary to ask whether it is reasonable that a certain personal characteristic is deemed necessary and/or sufficient to confer the status which gives access to certain entitlements.

This theory, I argue, focuses on the relationship, or rather the functional dependence, between legal positions (rights and/or obligations that constitute the content of status civitatis) and the criteria for acquisition and loss of the status (which gives the form to the status of citizenship) that is, the two dimensions that together determine citizenship according to Aristotle. If the criteria for acquisition and loss are not aligned with the legal positions associated with citizenship, the status becomes an arbitrary instrument of social closure: As if we were to randomly distinguish citizens from non-citizens. The correlation is functional, in the sense that the criteria regulating acquisition and loss of the status must fit the entitlements or legal positions that citizenship gives access to (a.k.a. Function here appears in its mathematical meaning.

I think this relationship is best described as a functional correlation, even if these are not the Aristotelian terms. the extension of citizenship) and what a citizen is (i.e. There is, in other words, a relationship between the two dimensions, between who is a citizen (i.e. The Aristotelian theory is based on a thesis that I call the thesis of correlation, according to which access to status civitatis is not neutral, but can be conceived as a variable of the content of the status. This theory, much overlooked in the literature, is useful in order to assess the coherence and consistency of policies regulating the access to the policy, which include most notably citizenship policy, but also migration policies regulating prior segments of the route to naturalisation. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle was the first and, to my knowledge, only philosopher to have developed what may be called, using Hans Kelsen’s wording, a general theory of citizenship. 127-137 Article in journal (Refereed) Published Abstract

Aristotle on citizenship