Exclusion, Injustice, and the Democratic State

Who is in and who is out?—these are the first questions that any political community must answer about itself. Particular communities are constituted by the answers they give or, better, by the process through which it is decided whose answers count. This is true even if the decision isn’t definitive, doesn’t draw an absolute line between insiders and outsiders. In fact, absolutism is rarely possible here. Ancient Greeks and Israelites, for example, distinguished themselves from foreigners on relatively straightforward kinship lines. But their political communities included, alongside citizens and brethren, an intermediate group of resident aliens, metics or ge’rim—not kin, but not foreign either, ...