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Abstract
This dissertation argues that the politics of immigration in classical Athens are a central context for interpreting the period’s theories of citizenship. I animate a hitherto overlooked, deeply resonant strain of critique in which theorists take aim at the democracy not simply for its erasure of difference, as traditionally held. They investigate as well the differences—the harms, exclusions, and contradictions—that Athens’ equalizing operations produce and rely on producing. The key to this challenge lies in bringing the “metic” (metoikos ), or resident foreigner, ‘back’ into ancient investigations of Athenian citizenship.
I contend that in the history of political thought, the displacement of the metic from the center of classical Greek theory has rendered these texts irrelevant to matters of immigration even in their own space and time. The metic’s erasure has implicitly decided some of the stakes of ancient normative debates. As a result, contemporary efforts to think about citizenship through the category and experience of the noncitizen and the strategies of exclusion that constitute membership rarely if ever turn to the ancients’ assessments of these issues for provocation. I intervene in such practices of reading to enlist the critical resources of the ancients on behalf of—and through—contemporary democratic theory.
Euripides’ Ion and Plato’s Republic , the central texts of the study, mobilize metic figurations to explore the descent-based, status-oriented conception of membership espoused in the myth of autochthony, which privileges blood over acts. Both texts are efforts to re-write the myth, which encourages a culture of secrecy, blackmail, exposure, and effortlessness. In different ways, the authors argue that the ‘natural’ categories of standing the city bestows do not correspond with or decide one’s experience of membership in the city. By troubling the logic that underlies the democratic order of inclusion, the Ion and the Republic join a tradition, practiced primarily by contemporary political theorists, that sees the nativism running through democratic society’s descent rules for membership to be at odds with its own overt commitments to political equality, active participation, productivity, and inclusion.
