Classical Greek Theory and the Politics of Immigration

FAIN: FB-57676-14

Demetra Fannie Kasimis
CSU, Long Beach (Long Beach, CA 90840-0004)

This book argues that the politics of immigration are a central--but curiously displaced--matter of investigation in the "canon" of classical Greek thought. It is the first study to treat the immigrant in classical democracy as an object of philosophical and political inquiry, rather than simply a historical fact about Athens. By tracking figurations of the immigrant, or "metic," in classical thought, the book animates an unappreciated strain of critique aimed at the democracy's use of nativism. Through the metic, I argue, classical thinkers explore the democracy's strategies of exclusion and suggest that descent-based citizenship, from which metics were excluded, encourages a society of passive, litigious citizens preoccupied with discerning and verifying legal status. The book asks why and to what effects the metic has been displaced from the center of classical Greek thought and brings its new readings of the ancients to bear on the contemporary politics of immigration.

Associated Products

The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy (Book)
Title: The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy
Author: Demetra Kasimis
Abstract: In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, immigrants called 'metics' (metoikoi) settled in Athens without a path to citizenship. Galvanized by these political realities, classical thinkers cast a critical eye on the nativism defining democracy's membership rules and explored the city's anxieties over intermingling and passing. Yet readers continue to treat immigration and citizenship as separate phenomena of little interest to theorists writing at the time. In The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy, Demetra Kasimis makes visible the long-overlooked centrality of immigration to the originary practices of democracy and political theory in Athens. She dismantles the interpretive and political assumptions that have led readers to turn away from the metic and reveals the key role this figure plays in such texts as Plato's Republic. The result is a series of original readings that boldly reframes urgent questions about how democracies order their non-citizen members.
Year: 2018
Primary URL Description: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/perpetual-immigrant-and-the-limits-of-athenian-democracy/3EB5EF4F81EF5802F28E9E51C671884B#fndtn-information
Access Model: N/A
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781107052437
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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