 The capacity for rational agency has long functioned as a threshold condition for citizenship. In Aristotle’s Politics, for example, the exclusion of women and slaves from citizenship is based on an account of their souls as lacking the appropriate kind of rationality. The long history of the extension of citizenship to groups previously excluded did not change this basic understanding. It involved instead the recognition that the newly included (e.g. women, workers, descendants of former slaves) did, in fact, satisfy the threshold condition.