The political animal
The platform reads Aristotle's account of citizenship as resting on his most famous claim: that "man is by nature a political animal." Human beings, on this view, are not self-sufficient individuals who form societies by calculation, but creatures whose very nature is fulfilled only in the community of the polis. The faculties that distinguish us — speech, reason, the sense of justice — exist for life in a community, and the person who could live entirely outside one would be "either a beast or a god." The platform reads this as the foundation of the Western ideal of the human being as fulfilled in shared political life.
Citizenship as activity
The platform reads Aristotle's definition of the citizen as his most distinctive contribution. The citizen is not defined by birth, residence or property, but by participation — "the citizen is one who shares in ruling and being ruled in turn," who takes part in the deliberative and judicial functions of the city. Citizenship is thus an activity, not a status: to be a citizen is to share in the governing of the community, alternately commanding and obeying as a free man among equals. The platform reads the reciprocity at the heart of this — the willingness to obey laws one also helps to make — as the distinctive virtue of the free citizen, and the deepest difference between the citizen and the subject.
The legacy and the limits
The platform reads Aristotle's citizenship as the ancestor of the whole Western tradition of active, participatory citizenship — the ideal carried by the republican tradition from Rome through the Renaissance city-states to the modern democracies, that a human being is most fully realized as a participant in self-government. But the platform reads it with its limits in plain view: Aristotle's citizen was a free, propertied, leisured male, and he excluded women, the enslaved (in his most criticized argument), and labourers, on the grounds that citizenship requires a leisure and a rational capacity he wrongly denied them. The platform reads these exclusions as the real boundaries of the ancient ideal — and reads the long history since as, in part, the gradual extension of Aristotle's participatory citizenship to those he excluded.
Why the platform reads it
The platform reads Aristotle on citizenship as one of the most consequential political ideas the classical world produced — the conception of the citizen as ruler-and-ruled that underlies republican and democratic thought to this day. It connects to the platform's reading of the invention of citizenship and citizenship and duty, and it is the human core of Aristotle's whole constitutional politics: the city exists for the sake of the good life of its citizens, and the citizen is realized in the life of the city.