Prepared by Dr Chandrachur Singh for BA (Hons) Political Science, VI Semester

Students at Hindu College, University of Delhi. Strictly for Private Circulation

T H Marshall on Citizenship

Citizenship can be described as both a set of practices (cultural, symbolic and economic)
and a bundle of rights and duties (civil, political and social) that define an individual’s
membership in a polity. In his work Citizenship and Social Class.” T H Marshall presented
a detailed understanding of Citizenship. The ideas were given in the context of the post-
war creation of a British welfare state. But the issues and principles entailed have much to
say in present times as well.

Citizenship for Marshall is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a
community. Those who possess this status are equal with respect to the rights and duties
that come with it. However, there is no universal principle that determines what those
rights and duties shall be.

Marshall’s theory of citizenship is based on a – by now well-known – typology of

citizenship rights. According to this typology, the historical development of civic forms of
belonging and participation manifests itself in the evolutionary development of citizenship
rights.

Marshall spoke of the development of civil, political, and social citizenship as an

evolutionary sequence. The rights embodied in the first pointed to those of the second, and
the second to the third. Each, in succession, was secured over the three centuries following
the 1688 Revolution (when constitutional monarchy was established).

Those social democratic implications derive from Marshall’s proposition that the very
concept of modern citizenship is at odds with unmerited inequalities and should be
deployed to abate them. Citizenship, he explained, is a “status bestowed on all those who
are full members of a community.” Those members share rights, duties, and the
protections of a common law. The bonds of modern citizenship grow among them first
through the “struggle to win those rights,” and then, once gained, by their “enjoyment.”
And so, modern citizenship is born also of “loyalty to a civilization which is a common
possession.”

Marshall assumes that people are not simply egos batting about in artificially framed
spaces that they happen to call nations or states. There is such a thing as “society”; the
social individuals who make it up ought to share a basic notion—and system—of fairness
rooted in mutuality.

This thinking does not entail a simplistic negation of the positive accomplishments of
classical European liberalism, with its stress on individualism and markets; it does propose
that modern citizenship, as a status held by all, expands the domains of equality at the
expense of social class, with its vestiges of a pre-modern hierarchy of privileged estates.
The persistent enrichment of citizenship rights, thought Marshall, ought to render
important powers associated with social differences increasingly less powerful.
Prepared by Dr Chandrachur Singh for BA (Hons) Political Science, VI Semester
Students at Hindu College, University of Delhi. Strictly for Private Circulation

Civil Citizenship came first and consolidated the rule of law and equality before the law.
Its rights are those “necessary to individual freedom—liberty of the person, freedom of
thought, speech and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts and
the right to justice.” Individual civil rights also undid statutes and customs that constricted
the “right to work”; working people could now, in principle, move about legally in pursuit
of employment. It is a right that also corresponded to the need of capitalism for labor
markets.

“Citizenship” and “freedom,” at least individual freedom, appear to have become

interchangeable terms, Marshall noted.

Political Citizenship progresses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
Reform of 1832, by which Parliament expanded in a limited way an already very limited
franchise, was the “first infantile attempt” by political rights “to walk.” Steps, then strides,
led eventually to universal suffrage. Political rights caught up with civil rights by means of
more reforms. The right to vote came to working people and to women. Alongside these
developments, a labor movement grew and a Labour Party went into Parliament.

Marshall’s next move – was to assert that social rights must follow from political and civil
ones.

Social Citizenship encompasses a “whole range” of rights, says Marshall, from “a

modicum of welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and
live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in society.” These
rights find their institutional home in what, with some variation, has now been
characterized as a welfare state. Social rights mitigate inequalities generated by market
economies without abolishing markets.

Given its evolutionist underpinnings, Marshall’s theory can be regarded as a ‘stage theory’,
that is, as a sociological theory which identifies three decisive historical stages that are
particularly relevant to understanding ‘the struggle for, and attainment of, citizenship’. in
the modern era.

From Marshall’s perspective, citizenship can be considered as a mediator between the

principle of economic liberty and the principle of social equality. Civil citizenship
constitutes a predominant paradigm of the eighteenth century, guaranteeing the
individual’s legal and judicial rights and thereby challenging the arbitrary power of the
absolutist regimes of the premodern era. Political citizenship represents a predominant
paradigm of the nineteenth century, consolidating the individual’s participatory and
electoral rights, which are central to the project of modern democracy. Social citizenship
embodies a predominant paradigm of the twentieth century, particularly of the post-war
period from1945 onwards, ensuring the individual’s social rights to economic welfare and
material security.
Prepared by Dr Chandrachur Singh for BA (Hons) Political Science, VI Semester
Students at Hindu College, University of Delhi. Strictly for Private Circulation

Criticisms

1. Marshall’s theory of citizenship is problematic in that it is based on evolutionist

assumptions. Thus, it can be criticized ‘for developing an evolutionary perspective
on the historical emergence of citizenship’.

2. Marshall’s historical evolutionism can be characterized as idealistic ‘for failing to

consider the wider social context’ within which social rights were translated into
welfare policy, namely in the Second World War period and in the post-war era.
According to Mann it fails to understand that “evolution” is usually geo-politically
assisted

3. Marshall’s account of citizenship suffers from an unhealthy degree of formalism in

that it seems to suggest that the attainment of citizenship rights in the twentieth
century is a social process which is both complete and irreversible. According to
this perspective, citizenship rights – once they are both recognized and
institutionalized – represent irretrievable features of modern democracies.
Nevertheless, the assumption that the consolidation of citizenship rights is both
complete and irreversible is deeply flawed for at least two reasons. First, we need
to acknowledge that complex societies require complex forms of citizenship.
Complex forms of citizenship have to prove that they can transcend the limitations
of Marshall’s tripartite framework of legal, political, and social rights and thereby
do justice to the normative significance of other – for example, cultural, sexual, and
human – rights. Second, it needs to be acknowledged that that both the recognition
and the realization of citizenship rights are far from irretrievable, as is
unequivocally illustrated by the continuing presence and frequent resurgence of
dictatorial regimes in numerous parts of the world, which are powerful enough to
‘turn the clock back’.

4. Given its emphasis on the development of citizenship rights in Britain, the

Marshallian account remains largely ethnocentric. Marshall’s theoretical model
constitutes an explanatory framework that may well provide an accurate account
of the constitution and evolution of citizenship in Britain, but this does by no means
guarantee that it can be equally applied to other countries.

5. According to Michael Mann Marshall’s take on citizenship may be criticized for

being insufficiently radical and overly reformist in that it is based on the naïve
assumption ‘that citizenship has rendered class struggle innocuous.
Notwithstanding the question of whether or not capitalism and democracy can be
reconciled, it is hard to refute that modern citizenship – in particular with regard to
its provision of welfare rights – serves as a legitimizing vehicle for class
compromise, rather than as a delegitimizing vehicle for class struggle. The
integrative function of social citizenship manifests itself in its systemic power not
Prepared by Dr Chandrachur Singh for BA (Hons) Political Science, VI Semester
Students at Hindu College, University of Delhi. Strictly for Private Circulation

to undermine but to stabilize capitalism, thereby reaffirming its position as the

hegemonic form of social reproduction in the modern era.

Conclusion

Marshall’s theory of citizenship has been hugely influential, and it helped to shape 20th
century systems of social security and redistribution. Comprehensive welfare state
arrangements became considered to be a means to ensure the use of full citizenship rights,
including for those with lower levels of economic resources. Marshall’s framework of
rights bolstered the notion that social coverage must be universal, including all members
of society. The distinction introduced by Marshall became a strong mobilizing concept
that reframed social policy as integral to the realization of citizens’ basic rights and no
longer as an ideological preference. Welfare state expansion came to be defined as a
cornerstone of a truly democratic and inclusive society.