The European Medieval Conception of Citizenship: Individualistic or Collectivistic?
Subject Areas : Research in Theoritical Politics
seyed alireza Hoseyni Beheshti
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Keywords: Citizenship Middle Ages Individualism Collectivism Citizen’s rights and duties,
Abstract :
As Europe entered the Middle Ages and the emergence of a Christian otherworldly perspective together with its individualistic and universalistic nature, the view on the Man and his status, both concerning the society and the state, transformed dramatically. The transformation had its effects on the conception of citizenship inherited from ancient Greece and Rome. The classical and more or less still dominated view on the history of social and intellectual developments of that period, offers an image according to which the spread of Christianity resulted in merging individuality into the community. Here I try to show, through relying on recent and less biased historical researches, that the classical interpretation that views the period as the fading individualism in favor of a collectivism emerged from the teachings of Christianity, the assimilatory political culture dominated early western modern societies, spring from the Renascence and then Enlightenment rather than the Christian culture.
