What is Citizenship? E-Book

Derek Heater

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 363

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Structured analytically, the book introduces the reader to all the facets of citizenship.

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Leseprobe

What is Citizenship?

DEREK HEATER

Polity Press

Copyright © Derek Heater 1999

The right of Derek Heater to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1999 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 2002, 2005, 2008

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ISBN 978-0-7456-2229-3ISBN 978-0-7456-2230-9 (pbk)ISBN 978-0-7456-6700-3 (ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataHeater, Derek Benjamin.

What is citizenship? / Derek Heater.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 978-0-7456-2229-3 – ISBN 978-0-7456-2230-9 (pbk)1. Citizenship. I. Title.

JF801.H433 1999

323.6—dc2199–19927 CIP

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgement

Introduction

1   The Liberal Tradition

Origins

Citizenship and capitalism

Marshall’s analysis

Marshall: influence and judgements

Social citizenship and neo-liberalism

Two additional elements

Citizenship rights at the turn of the century

The problem of rights in practice

2   The Civic Republican Tradition

Major thinkers

Purpose of citizenship

Style of citizenship

Qualities of citizenship

Role of the citizen

Forming the citizen

Revival and arguments

Adaptations for today

3   Who Are Citizens?

Legal definitions

Equality or elitism?

Feminist perspectives

Citizenship as nationality: origins

Citizenship and nationality synthesized

National citizens: made or born

Multiculturalism

4   Multiple Citizenship

The idea of multiple citizenship

Parallel citizenships

Federal constitutions

The European Union

Sub-state citizenships

The idea of cosmopolis

World citizenship identity and morality

World law and the citizen

World governance and the citizen

Pros and cons

5   Problems and Resolutions

Inherent problems and tensions

Current issues

The roles of education

Connections and essence

References

Select Reading List

Index

Preface

Yet another book on citizenship needs to be justified. This is simply done: among the great outpouring of works on the topic during the past decade or so, it is difficult to find a succinct analysis of the subject-matter. David Held recognized the gap, invited me to try to fill it, and he and his colleagues at Polity Press have been of great assistance in seeing the task through to completion. I am also grateful for the comments of two anonymous readers of the manuscript. My wife, too, deserves my usual thanks for uncomplainingly being drawn away from her interest to listen to mine. But, of course, none of these can be thought responsible for the judgements I have made about the content and general approach of the book nor for any errors that it may contain.

I must add two explanations. One is that the book perhaps reflects my own greater interest in the academic disciplines of history and politics rather than sociology, though I have striven to present what I believe to be a reasonable balance. The other is that, although the material is presented in summary form and will, it is hoped, find favour with students, what follows is not just a ‘textbook’. I have attempted in places some interpretations by clustering material into patterns, which will add, I trust, both to the understanding of this complicated topic and to its intrinsic interest.

Derek Heater

Acknowledgement

The author and publisher wish to thank Pluto Press for permission to reproduce extracts from T. H. Marshall and Tom Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class.

Introduction

The title of citizen (citoyen, citoyenne) was adopted by the French revolutionaries to pronounce the symbolic reality of equality: the titles of aristocratic distinction were expunged. The Russian revolutionaries went one better by replacing even the title of Mr (gospodin) by the uniform title of citizen (grazhdanin). Today citizenship is a commonly held status throughout the world, though, true, the title has not persisted; so equality, at least in theory, in principle and in law, might seem pervasive. But explaining that equality – how it has evolved; its variegated elements, including rights and duties; the civic identity it provides; and how far the practice so often falls short of the theory – all this is a much more complicated business than the bland statement of the generalized principle of equality might suggest.

Yet, however difficult the concept of citizenship may be, the effort of comprehension is especially necessary now. For we are at present living through an age that for good reasons considers citizenship of cardinal significance. However, as a consequence of this recognized importance, academic enquiry has uncovered the extraordinary complexity of its history and present condition to aid our more accurate understanding.

There have been other ages of heightened consciousness of citizenship, often associated with particular states. Fifth to fourth-century BC Athens, first-century BC to first-century AD Rome, late medieval Florence, late eighteenth-century America and France spring obviously to mind. The present interest is different: it is virtually global in its extent. How, then, to explain the fascination the subject currently holds? It

derives from the confluence of a number of events and concerns in the 1980s and 1990s.

First, in the established liberal democracies the emergence to political and doctrinal dominance of the New Right in the US and UK threw into question the validity of ‘social citizenship’. By social citizenship is meant the provision of welfare state benefits as a right. It is a right that was conceded in order to ensure a greater equality for citizens than would be the case if untempered market forces of employment and wages were allowed to prevail.

Secondly, partly because of accelerated human migrations and partly because of enhanced and politicized awareness of ethnic differences within states, the fact that almost all states are multicultural in demographic composition has become an issue related to the definition of citizenship as civic identity.

Thirdly, and closely related to this development, ethnic, cultural and national consciousness have brought about either the loosening or the actual fragmentation of polities hitherto thought of as nation-states. What does it mean, for example, to be a Canadian citizen if one thinks of oneself primarily as a Québécois, or an Israeli citizen, if a Palestinian Arab? In potentially fissiparous conditions like these only a stable or strong government could hold a national citizenship in place. In the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia that stability and strength failed; and the assumed nation-states disintegrated. Furthermore, it was a consciousness among a critical mass of the population of the need and the opportunity to claim an effective citizenship that wrought these changes.

But, and moreover, these states had been autocratic regimes, many of whose successor governments sought to rebuild their political systems, this time following the liberal democratic blueprint. And so, fourthly, they have needed to construct fresh constitutions and ways of conducting public life which could give reality to the legal and political rights of citizenship that had not been thoroughly enjoyed under Communism. Nor were the ex-Communist countries alone in striving to make this transition: South Africa and the states of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America that had endured but shook themselves loose from military dictatorships, have passed through similar experiences of improving the meaning of citizenship for their people.

Fifthly, we are becoming increasingly conscious that for large numbers of people throughout the world the idea of citizenship is still hollow and meaningless, deprived as they are of virtually all its attributes.

Sixthly, the validity of the nation-state is itself being put in question. Uniquely, at the sub-continental level, the European Union has created a new, legally defined category of citizenship, namely, of the Union. Meanwhile, economic developments and environmental worries have revived the ancient concept of cosmopolitan citizenship, the awareness of being a citizen of the world and the imperative need to behave and to be encouraged to behave as such. These trends are part of the increasing recognition that citizenship is a multiple rather than a singular feeling and status.

Citizenship in our complex times reflects this complexity. Its elements derive from manifold sources, influences and needs. To analyse them is, inevitably, to oversimplify and to exaggerate the separateness of the component parts. However, this is the route to understanding and therefore this is the task upon which we now embark.

1

The Liberal Tradition

Origins

Something of an oversimplification it may be, but it is most helpful to easy comprehension – not to mention quite fashionable – to distinguish between two traditions and interpretations of the nature of citizenship. These are the civic republican style, which places its stress on duties, and the liberal style, which emphasizes rights. Now, despite the former’s origins in classical antiquity and therefore its longevity, it is the liberal form that has been dominant for the past two centuries and remains so today. It is therefore fitting to start with the liberal tradition, postponing consideration of civic republicanism to the next chapter. Compared with the republican variant, liberal citizenship is much less demanding of the individual. It involves a loosely committed relationship to the state, a relationship held in place in the main by a set of civic rights, honoured by the state, which otherwise interferes as little as possible in the citizen’s life.

Liberal citizenship was the offspring of the liaison between revolutionary upheaval and contractarian natural rights theory, Great Britain playing the role of midwife. True, it was the French Revolution that first established the principle and practice of citizenship as the central feature of the modern socio-political structure, but it was the British (including, crucially, the American) experience over one-and-a-half centuries prior to 1789 that laid the foundations for the transition from a monarch–subject relationship to a state–citizen relationship. Paradoxically, the actual terms ‘citizen’ and ‘citizenship’ were rarely used in the liberal sense in the English-speaking world. Yet the English Civil War and its aftermath, the political theory of John Locke, and the seizing of independence by the American colonies and their transmutation into the United States were all absolutely vital to the evolution of the liberal mode of citizenship and citizens’ rights.

A citizen has the right to vote: Colonel Rainborough declared in 1647, ‘I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under’ (see Wootton, 1986, p. 286). A citizen also has a right to just treatment by the law: the first Habeas Corpus Act was passed in Britain in 1679. In about this year Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Civil Government (though they were not published until a decade later, in 1690). In the second of these Locke influentially expounded his theory of natural rights, that every man should have the free and equal right ‘to preserve … his life, liberty, and estate’ (Locke, 1962, s. 87). The American revolutionaries adapted this formula to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, and the French, to ‘liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression’. These rights are God-given; but it is the function of the state to ensure their protection. We therefore step from generalized natural rights, which individuals have qua human beings, to specific civic rights, which are assured by the state to individuals qua citizens. Hence the dual title of the French Declaration – of Man and the Citizen.

The distinction could be telling, as Marx recognized. The rights of man are negative, allowing the individual to pursue his own, personal life, not committing him to a life as a member of a community, a citizen. Marx cites Art. 6 of the French Declaration, which defines liberty as ‘the power of doing anything that does not harm others’, and he continues:

The freedom in question is that of a man treated as an isolated monad and withdrawn into himself… none of the so-called rights of man goes beyond egoistic man … namely an individual withdrawn behind his private interests and whims and separated from the community.

(‘On the Jewish Question’, in McLellan, 1977, pp. 53–4)

The rights of the citizen, on the other hand, have a more defined, positive character. For example, the French Declaration and the American Bill of Rights (the first ten Amendments to the Constitution), finalized within weeks of each other in 1789, concentrated particularly on a range of legal rights such as freedom of speech and conscience, equality before the law, presumption of innocence, trial by jury (see French Declaration Arts. 3–11; Bill of Rights, Arts. 1, 5–9).

Another feature of citizens’ rights considered to be crucial in these early days of defining liberal citizenship was the right to property. Locke firmly established this principle. He declared quite trenchantly that ‘government has no other end but the preservation of property’ (Locke, 1962, s. 94). The language of the Declaration of Rights is even more forceful, asserting that the right to property is ‘inviolable and sacred’ (Art. 17). Ownership of property was not only a right, it was, as a universal practice, a requirement for the basic political right of citizenship, namely the right to vote. For instance, even in Massachusetts, hub of the rebellion against the British government, the franchise was restricted in c.1790 to the owners of real estate worth $12 a year or any property with a capital value of $240. The political crises of the late eighteenth century threw up the issue of universal manhood suffrage, a cause persistently supported, for example, by Thomas Paine. But the mystique of property was too powerful for its implementation yet. Not until the 1820s did some American states lead the way.

How, then, may we characterize the concept of liberal citizenship in these emergent years? It is an important question because the consolidation of the basics from roughly Locke to the French Revolution provided a legacy which still shapes our assumptions about citizenship in our own times.

First, the individual remains an individual. The acquisition of citizenly status does not necessitate abandonment of the pursuit of self-interest. Public and private spheres are kept distinct, and citizens are under no obligation to participate in the public arena if they have no inclination to do so. Nor have citizens any defined responsibilities vis-à-vis their fellow citizens. All are equal, autonomous beings, so that there is no sense that the state has any organic existence, bonding the citizens to it and to each other. Citizens have the odd duty to perform, it is true – mainly the payment of taxes – in return for the protection of their rights by the state. But there is only a slight change of heart, a weak sense of identity, no necessary pride in thinking oneself into the station of citizen. Citizenship largely means the pursuit of one’s private life and interests more comfortably because that private life is insured by state-protected rights. In short, therefore, the extrapolation of the rights of the citizen from the rights of man may marginally have adapted, but by no means transformed, the individual from Marx’s ‘isolated monad’.

If the liberal citizen is expected to feel only a limited obligation to the state, pari passu the state is expected to impinge on the citizen’s life in only a feeble way. This is the second feature of liberal citizenship as laid down from the late seventeenth century. The state is useful to the citizen as, in Locke’s striking image, a ‘nightwatchman’. And if any government oversteps its limited powers and interferes in its citizens’ activities to the detriment of their life-styles, or, conversely, fails in its protective function, then the citizenry has the right to rouse itself from the quiet pursuit of private affairs and rebel, as the American colonists did in 1776.

And what, we ask thirdly, are these private affairs that the citizen must be allowed independently to pursue? It is the accrual of wealth. Is, then, liberal citizenship a political expression of capitalism? Yes; but the relationship is, in fact, much more complicated than that.

Citizenship and capitalism

We cannot say categorically that the evolution of modern liberal citizenship would have been impossible without the emergence of a capitalist market economy and an accompanying, increasingly powerful, bourgeois class. For one thing, pressure for the legal and political rights that were conceded by the three revolutions in England, America and France was spearheaded as much by a lawyer-dominated professional class as by entrepreneurial capitalists, perhaps even more so. Nevertheless, the decay of a feudal or quasi-feudal society and its supersession by a market economy did introduce changes that were, if no more, at least conducive to the emergence of a liberal form of citizenship. (Henceforth, in this chapter, let us take ‘liberal form of’ for granted.) Three kinds of change may be identified.

1 Pre-capitalist society was based on personal subservience – vassal to lord, apprentice to master, subject to prince. In contrast, the free exercise of individual initiative is the very essence of capitalism. Similarly, citizenship grew by the extraction of rights for the individual.

Feudalism →Capitalism →CitizenshipIndividual subservienceIndividual initiativeIndividual rightsHierarchical societyPermeable class structureCivic equalityProvincially fragmented economyOpen access to marketsNational identity

Figure 1.1

2 Feudal structure was socially hierarchical. As the Victorian poet Cecil Frances Alexander unequivocally expressed the distinction between rich and poor: ‘God made them, high or lowly, / And order’d their estate.’ Capitalism, in contrast, requires social fluidity. Class divisions, it is true, are inevitable – middle class and the lower orders; but not caste rigidity. Initiative, to refer back to our first kind of change, required the partitions between classes to be permeable. The concept of citizenship took this alteration to the logical conclusion of equality of status. A citizen is a citizen is a citizen: no differentiation.

3 Ancien régime society was, to modern minds, unbelievably provincially fragmented. Economically, that is; not to be confused with the modern convenience of devolution. Internal customs barriers, even provincially distinct measurements of weights and capacity, were anathema to the capitalist’s essential requirement of free and open access to markets. The integration and solidification of the nation-state, so essential for the capitalist, made way for citizenship as national identity.

The foregoing interpretation is simply tabulated in figure 1.1. One feature of this transformatory process was the alteration in the relationship between civil society and citizenship. In the Middle Ages citizenship meant being a privileged inhabitant of a city or other municipality, and the status tended to be accorded to members of corporate bodies such as guilds, that is, the component organizations of civil society. The growth of capitalism and the revolutionary changes wrought in Europe from the late eighteenth century undermined this localized and fragmented political role of civil society, and citizenship became attached to the national instead of the municipal sphere. The individual’s communal identity was therefore bifurcated.

Marx, in fact, takes an extra step and argues that the collapse of the old structure also destroyed the sense of commitment which had made civil society such a co-operative network. ‘The shaking off of the [feudal] political yoke’, he explained, ‘entailed the shaking off of those bonds that had kept the egoistic spirit of civil society fettered’ (McLellan, 1977, p. 56). In so far as this analysis is valid, it means that citizenship in the modern, broader sense could alone provide a feeling of communal togetherness (stiffened, of course, by the ideology of nationalism).

One further introductory point on this matter of the relationship between capitalism and citizenship: we have a picture of a movement from a hierarchical to an increasingly egalitarian society as the rights of citizenship became democratized. But we must examine this picture more closely because, lurking there, is the counterbalancing economic inequality induced by unfettered capitalism. This is how Bryan Turner has explained this ‘progress’: ‘The growth of modernity is a movement from de-jure inequalities in terms of legitimate status hierarchies to de-facto inequalities as a consequence of naked market forces where the labourer is defined as a “free” person’ (Turner, 1986, p. 136).

So, in various ways and with outcomes not all necessarily an advance on what had been left behind, capitalism facilitated the emergence of liberal citizenship. But the connection has not been a one-way process, it has been reciprocal; for citizenship, in turn, has supported capitalism. We have already seen how prominent in the list of citizens’ rights as drafted in the early years was the right of property ownership. In times of political upheaval this was a comforting formula for the middle classes. For instance, even the French Declaration of Rights of 1793, formulated by the radical Convention on the eve of the Terror, reiterated this right. The nervousness of the wealthy in the face of social and political upheaval provides another consideration, too: the damping down of civil discord by the broad concession of civil (i.e. legal) and political rights in practice affords a welcome calming of these fears. What is more, the middle classes benefited not just in this indirect manner. Chronologically it was they, not the working classes, who first had access to and made use of these civil and political rights of citizenship.

Nevertheless, the relationship between capitalism and citizenship has by no means been all mutual cosiness. In some circumstances citizenship has been threatening to capitalism and capitalism has been hostile to citizenship. The basic question has then arisen whether the state can ever, or indeed should ever, be a neutral observer when the interests of capitalism and citizenship are in collision.

One must, naturally, recognize that the state has an obligation to protect its citizens. How far does this extend? In practice, the state has often intervened on behalf of the citizen by curbing the absolute freedom of the capitalist to maximize his profit. This intervention has taken two main forms. One is by regulating the market by laws, for instance, against the formation of cartels and monopolies. The other is by increases in taxation on higher income and heritable wealth in order to fund welfare and educational services for the mass of citizens. For, particularly in the twentieth century, the belief that citizenship embodies social as well as legal and political rights has taken hold. Consider one illustration of this. Even in the Reagan–Thatcher era, when the Republican administration in the USA and the Conservative in the UK pursued quite radical neo-liberal free-market policies, the amounts spent by the governments on health and social security still increased. From 1979 to 1984 in the UK expenditure on health rose by 16 per cent and on social security by 26 per cent; from 1980 to 1984 in the USA expenditure on health rose by 38 per cent and on social security by 12 per cent. Taxation inevitably increased.

The capitalism–citizenship coin, however, has another side: the threat posed by capitalism to citizenship. We must not forget that the citizenship model presents a state composed of citizens of equal status, equally enjoying their rights and relating to the state by virtue of those rights and concomitant duties. Capitalism weakens this egalitarian political structure by giving primacy to economic relationships.

New class divisions open up, separating the wealthy entrepreneurs from the general populace, a gulf condoned by the liberal virtue of individual enterprise. For the successful, profit in the market place, not civic loyalty, gives social identification. For the rest, they are consumers of products and services, not citizens in the proper sense. The Citizen’s Charter published by the British Conservative government in 1991 lets the capitalist cat out of the civic bag: the text refers in a number of places to ‘customer’ and ‘client’ as if these were synonymous with ‘citizen’. The danger is that if citizenship is perceived as a set of rights to protect the individual qua consumer against some of the problems exposed by a private or privatized economy, then the need to preserve and improve the core rights of real citizenship will be lost to sight.

Marx, as one would expect, portrayed the hostility of capitalism to citizenship in the starkest of terms, as embedded in the very nature of the state. According to his interpretation, the modern state is a bourgeois state, the expression and protector of bourgeois interests. It follows that the state is incapable of resolving the conflict between capitalism and citizenship because it is not itself a disinterested party. Citizenship as a status and a value is therefore in reality nothing more than a sop, a cloak for the citizen’s impotence: ‘political man is only the abstract fictional man’ (McLellan, 1977, p. 56).

If there are two apparently contradictory arguments – that capitalism and citizenship are mutually supportive and mutually antipathetic – what conclusions can be drawn? There are two options.

The first is to settle for the view that the relationship is shot through with ambivalence. The modern state (certainly since the collapse of Communism) – swayed but gently by the doctrinal differences between moderate Left and Right political parties – juggles as best it can with guaranteeing both profit-making for the businessman and -woman and a measure of welfare and education for the general citizenry. In addition, there are two quite valid but different interpretations of the relationship between civil and political rights on the one hand and social rights on the other. One interpretation declares, following Marx, that the existence of civil and political rights is of little use for the majority of citizens if a reasonable life-style is not sustained by the allocation of social rights. The contrary interpretation is that, in fact, civil and political rights are, and historically have been, an essential set of levers for extracting those necessary social rights. More on this relationship between kinds of rights later.

The second option to adopt in the face of the fundamental contradictory arguments is to plump for one of them. This is a fairly common practice; and the case that is considered the stronger is that the ethic of capitalism and the ethic of citizenship really are incompatible. Liberal economics cannot cohabit with liberal politics without falling out over the issue. To quote Bryan Turner again:

The societies of western industrial capitalism are essentially contradictory and there is an ongoing dynamic relationship between citizenship and the inequalities of the market place. The dynamic feature of capitalism is precisely the contradiction between politics and economics as fought out in the sphere of social citizenship.

(Turner, 1986, p. 12)

The same conclusion has been expressed more pithily in the following words: ‘it is clear that in the twentieth century, citizenship and the capitalist class system have been at war’ (Marshall and Bottomore, 1992, p. 18). They were written by T. H. Marshall in the most famous single work to have been composed on liberal citizenship, Citizenship and Social Class.

Marshall’s analysis

In 1949 Marshall, then Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, delivered that year’s lectures in Cambridge in commemoration of his namesake, Alfred Marshall. He published these lectures in expanded, essay form in the following year. Citizenship and Social Class has correctly been described as a seminal work and therefore deserves a generous allocation of space in this chapter. The present section provides, simply, a bald summary. There follows a brief review of the essay’s influence and some of the judgements it has prompted from the many commentators who have responded to it since its publication. The section after that delves into recent debates concerning citizenship and social class including the concept of social citizenship, in particular from the neo-liberal standpoint; and these are issues which can hardly avoid cross-referencing to Marshall’s work. So intertwined are these matters that there will inevitably be some slight repetition across these sections and the first two sections of the chapter also: this will at least reinforce the fact of the interconnections. We start, then, with a précis of Marshall’s essay.

In one of his papers Alfred Marshall had argued the possibility of the progressive amelioration of the condition of the working class through economic and educational improvements in order to reach the life-style of what he called a ‘gentleman’. T. H. Marshall draws the implication that ‘We can go on to say that the claim to enjoy these conditions is a claim to be admitted to a share in the social heritage, which in turn means a claim to be accepted as full members of the society, that is, as citizens’ (Marshall and Bottomore, 1992, p. 6).

The basic thesis is that, although economic inequalities can never be completely ironed out, ‘the inequality of the social class system may be acceptable provided the equality of citizenship is recognised’ (p. 6). By the 1940s this compatability of citizenship with class had become so ingrained that ‘citizenship has itself become, in certain respects, the architect of legitimate social inequality’ (p. 7). Marshall set himself four questions: (1) ‘Is it still true that the basic equality can be created and preserved without invading the freedom of the competitive market?’ (2) What is the effect of the coexistence of socialism and the market? (3) ‘What is the effect of the marked shift of emphasis from duties to rights?’ (4) Are there ‘limits beyond which the modern drive towards social equality cannot, or is unlikely to, pass’? (p. 7).

Marshall then enters into a historical survey. He starts by defining his tripartite analysis of citizenship into civil, political and social, which has been so widely adopted:

The civil element is composed of the rights necessary for individual freedom – liberty of the person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to justice. … By the political element I mean the right to participate in the exercise of political power, as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such a body. … By the social element I mean the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society.

(p. 8)

For the modern development of these rights in Great Britain (and Marshall confines his study to Britain), he stresses their separateness and assigns an approximate, though overlapping, period for each: civil (in which he incorporates the economic right to work) – eighteenth century; political – nineteenth century; social (in which he incorporates the right to education) – twentieth century.

Marshall was mainly interested in the third, social, type of rights because, as he explains, ‘my special interest is in [citizenship’s] impact on social equality’ (p. 17). He dates the modern development of these rights to the provision of elementary education in the nineteenth century. But he identifies an apparent paradox from a much earlier period. This is the emergence of the egalitarian principle of citizenship in its civil guise from the late seventeenth century contemporaneously with the development of socially inegalitarian capitalism.

Marshall clarifies the problem by distinguishing between legally entrenched feudal class divisions and modern economically differentiated classes. With the former citizenship is incompatible; with the latter, compatible. More:

civil rights were indispensable to a competitive market economy. They gave to each man, as part of his individual status, the power to engage as an independent unit in the economic struggle and made it possible to deny to him social protection on the ground that he was equipped with the means to protect himself.

(pp. 20–1)

But civil rights have limited value if unaccompanied by social rights:

if you … explain to a pauper that his property rights are the same as those of a millionaire, he will probably accuse you of quibbling. Similarly, the right to freedom of speech has little real substance if, from lack of education, you have nothing to say that is worth saying, and no means of making yourself heard if you say it.

(p. 21)

Civil and, later, political rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, in fact, equal only in principle, not in access, for several reasons, notably class prejudice and economic influence. These impediments to equality have gradually waned, though economic barriers to access to the law remained forbidding in Marshall’s time.

The development in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the notion of citizenship effected important changes. It introduced ‘the conception of equal social worth, not merely of equal natural rights’ (p. 24); it gave ‘a direct sense of community membership based on loyalty to a civilisation which is a common possession’ (p. 24), including national patriotism; and in both its political and its civil forms it came to pose a threat to capitalism. Of great importance was the use by trade unions of civil rights to extract social rights by the method of collective bargaining. ‘Trade unionism has, therefore, created a secondary system of industrial citizenship parallel with and supplementary to the system of political citizenship’ (p. 26).

In the fourth section of his essay Marshall reaches the heart of what he wished to say, namely the issue of social citizenship in the twentieth century. For long, the alleviation of poverty was unassociated with any consideration of rights. Then:

A new period opened at the end of the nineteenth century, conveniently marked by Booth’s survey of Life and Labour of the People in London and the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor. It saw the first big advance in social rights, and this involved significant changes in the egalitarian principles expressed in citizenship.

(p. 28)

Economic changes also were eroding class distinctions and were gradually producing a more integrated and egalitarian society. This led to a desire for full equality. ‘These aspirations have in part been met by incorporating social rights in the status of citizenship and thus creating a universal right to real income which is not proportionate to the market value of the claimant’ (p. 28).

One of the problems associated with legislating for social rights is how ‘to combine the principles of social equality and the price system’ (p. 31). The most common solution is for the state to guarantee ‘a minimum supply of certain essential goods and services … or a minimum money income available to be spent on essentials. … Anyone able to exceed the guaranteed minimum out of his own resources is at liberty to do so’ (p. 32). But there are problems in the details of administering such a system. The main point to grasp is that

The extension of the social services is not primarily a means of equalising incomes. … What matters is that there is a general enrichment of the concrete substance of civilised life, a general reduction of risk and insecurity, an equalisation between the more and the less fortunate at all levels. … Equalisation is not so much between classes as between individuals within a population which is now treated for this purpose as though it were one class. Equality of status is more important than equality of income.

(p. 33)

However, benefits of social citizenship, such as education and health, are concerned with the quality of life, which means that these rights of the citizen cannot be precisely defined or legally enforced. Nor is it possible to determine with any precision what is or will be affordable by the state. A crucial distinction therefore arises in the sphere of social rights concerning those faults in the system for which the individual citizen can obtain redress and those where only government intervention (central or local) for society as a whole can effect a remedy. In the latter case, the social rights of the individual may have to be subordinated to the rights of the community: housing, town-planning and education are obvious examples, where there has not been equality of provision, whatever the intentions.

In the case of education, the post-1944 system aimed at a citizenly right to equality of opportunity. However, in practice, the system channelled individuals into particular kinds of jobs determined by their schooling and with little chance of job mobility in later life. Inherited privilege was weakened by the selective educational system, but a new ‘hierarchy of groups’ was consolidated (p. 39). And so,

through education in its relations with occupational structure, citizenship operates as an instrument of social stratification. There is no reason to deplore this, but we should be aware of its consequences. The status acquired by education is carried out into the world bearing the stamp of legitimacy, because it has been conferred by an institution designed to give the citizen his just rights.

(p. 39)

Turning now to the relationship between citizenship and capitalism, there is an inherent conflict between the system of status of the one and of contract of the other, between social justice and market price. A study of the trade unions highlights the distinction because they have acted out an anomaly by creating ‘a sort of secondary industrial citizenship’ (p. 40). Citizens’ rights are just that – rights; they are not matters for bargaining. A living wage is a social right, yet trade unions have bargained for this goal. But if trade unions base their claims on the principle of citizenship, they should balance their demand for rights by a sense of duty: unofficial strikes are incompatible with this position.

More importantly, the idea of a fair wage raises the question of wage differentiation between jobs and their relative status. Consequently, as with education, jobs become classified into a hierarchy. In practice, the social concept of status becomes entangled with the economic pressures of the market price for the needed workforce, and national wage standards with the principle of individual incentive.

In conclusion, Marshall identified three factors that have affected social structure:

First, the compression at both ends, of the scale of income distribution. Second, the great extension of the area of common culture and common experience. And third, the enrichment of the universal status of citizenship, combined with the recognition and stabilisation of certain status differences chiefly through the linked systems of education and occupation. The first two have made the third possible.

(p. 44)

The issue of status differences is important. Marshall concludes that such distinctions are compatible with citizenship so long as they do not cut too deep and are not hereditary.

The matter of the duties of citizenship is also important, partly because they are not so clearly understood as rights. How, for example, can one impress upon the citizenry the obligation to work and to work conscientiously? Devolution of the expected discharge of duties to the local community or workplace might be a solution.

Finally, social inequalities have become more acceptable because of the levelling effects of the welfare state and other devices which have widened the distinction between money income and real income. In any case, Britain c.1950 featured many socio-economic paradoxes, such as the relationship between citizenship and social inequality; yet with tolerance they could be abated and lived with.

Marshall: influence and judgements

There is a good case to be made that the most significant contribution to social and political theory made this century by a British sociologist is ‘citizenship’ and that it was made by the very English T. H. Marshall.

(Colin Bell, on jacket of Bulmer and Rees, 1996)

This is the considered judgement of one British academic. More epigrammatically, Ralf Dahrendorf has rated the lectures as ‘one of the gems of social analysis’ (Bulmer and Rees, 1996, p. 35). Recognition of Marshall’s signal contribution to the study of citizenship has burgeoned since the mid-1980s. He has been honoured by the institution of a series of memorial lectures at the University of Southampton and his work has been the subject of a remarkable amount of commentary, development and criticism. The main focus of this exegesis has been his Citizenship and Social Class, though his subsequent work on the topic (notably in The Right to Welfare and Other Essays, 1981) has also been embraced in many of these analyses.

Why the fame? His two principal assertions – that citizenship contains three elements or ‘bundles’ of rights, and that social citizenship is a vital underpinning for the other two – were simple, illuminating insights encapsulating much truth. In particular, few commentators on citizenship rights before him thought to add social to the political dimension of citizenship. True, Marshall’s predecessor Leonard Hob-house is an important exception to this statement, but he exercised much less influence. Marshall’s eminence derives not just from the quality of his work but also from its clear relevance in Britain to the post-war creation of the welfare state and the problems and doubts surrounding these social institutions and provisions in the 1980s and 1990s.

Nor has Marshall’s fame and influence been confined to his native land. His arguments that citizenship contains three elements and that social citizenship is a vital underpinning for the other two, especially civil citizenship, have become very widely accepted. For example, two Canadian scholars, W. Kymlicka and W. Norman, have described Citizenship and Social Class as ‘The most influential exposition’ of the ‘postwar conception of citizenship-as-rights’ (Beiner, 1995, p. 285). And when in the mid-1990s a British research project undertook to identify the ‘hallmarks of citizenship’ imprinted in the laws and practices of the member states of the European Union, the published findings used the threefold division explicitly acknowledged as being derived from Marshall (Gardner, n.d., p. 9).

On the other hand, Marshall has by no means been spared from criticism, as is only to be expected. After all, no one, no matter how distinguished, is immune to failings, either by the tests of his own time or retrospectively. (Even so, to balance this observation, it should be noted that some of Marshall’s critics have themselves been the subject of academic counter-attack.)

A survey of the critical judgements on Marshall reveals a formidable list of identified faults. These may be clustered into five categories: that his study was temporally and geographically too myopic; that his notion of citizenship was too exclusive; that his vision was too optimistic; that his triad of rights was too simplistic; and that his interpretation was too unhistorical. (For an alternative classification of criticisms, see Faulks, 1998, pp. 41–52.) However, despite this range of apparent failings, covering both detail and the core of Marshall’s thesis, some of the commentary has overstepped the boundary into unfairness. The remainder of this section is accordingly devoted to an analysis and judgement of these five points. A review of this critical work is, indeed, worthwhile not merely for the light it sheds on Marshall’s interpretation, but also as an informative commentary on the liberal version of citizenship, particularly in England.

First, Marshall’s myopia. He delivered his lectures in 1949. The Beveridge Report (1942), the Butler Education Act (1944) and the creation of the National Health Service (1946) seemed at this time to have laid firm foundations for a welfare state second to none in the world. In his enthusiasm for these achievements Marshall, so his critics aver, underestimated the perhaps tentative nature of the social citizenship which he saw the welfare state as consolidating. He gave no thought to the possible future need to advance the social element in the citizenly status, let alone defend it against retrogression.