 If we discard the abstractions that characterize both the classical and the liberal conceptions, the citizen sheds his “political lion skin” (Pateman 1989, 92 quoting Marx 1843) and appears as “situated” in a social world characterized by differences of gender, class, language, race, ethnicity, culture, etc. To accept that politics cannot and should not be insulated from private/social/economic life is not to dissolve the political, but, rather, to revive it since anything is as political as citizens choose to make it. As we will see now, this contextualized conception of the political has informed much of the criticism aimed at the universalist model of citizenship and has inspired the formulation of a differentialist alternative. 