The Idea of Social Citizenship
Post 2: 14 January 2025
Social citizenship is about membership. My goal in today’s post is to explain that and give you a general sense of what social citizenship is all about. The idea was introduced by the sociologist T.H. Marshall in a series of lectures in 1949.1 I’ll quote him several times below and add my own interpretations. This post builds on the first newsletter entry (7 January 2025), which provides an overview of the whole series.
“Citizenship,” T.H. Marshall writes, “is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community.” His main argument is that full members must possess “social rights” in addition to the civil and political rights well recognized at the time.2 This is the only way to respond to the gradations of status that the operation of markets creates among ostensibly equal “citizens.” That is, this is the best way to respond to inequality. As Marshall says, “in the twentieth century, citizenship and the capitalist class system have been at war.” This is a bit dramatic, but citizenship is defined as a sphere of equality—“all who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed”— while “social class…is a system of inequality” (18).
I need to add two caveats here. Marshall does not address the divide between citizens and noncitizen aliens, so I put that issue off the table, at least for now. To underscore this, I will generally use the term membership rather than citizenship in order to sidestep immigration questions. He also fails to mention the degradations of membership status that are attributable to factors like race or gender. That’s also off the table for today while I focus on class, but as early as next week, I will have to address whether social citizenship can respond to these other threats to full membership.
The concept of social citizenship hinges on the meaning and requirements of “full membership.” Because the social rights of citizenship are often advanced through the programs of the modern welfare state, we can get caught up in the minutia of these policies and lose sight of the deeper need for membership. In particular, we think the function of these programs is mainly to provide “a modicum of economic welfare and security” (8). They insulate individuals from the worst effects of market forces or, indeed, from the full economic implications of other forms of bad luck, such as injury or illness. This is true enough, but it doesn’t really give us much substance about what sort and level of protection is required—after all, virtually every society has some sort of relief system, some social protections. The central tenet of social citizenship, in Marshall’s words, is that everyone ought to have “the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society.” (8) This is, first and foremost, about membership.
The social rights of citizenship—public guarantees to things like an adequate education, healthcare, housing, and income—are the substantive prerequisites of full membership in society. Figuring out exactly which resources are required for full membership and at what levels is the main political work of social citizenship. These things are not fixed—they depend on the level of technological and economic development, among other things—that’s the work that the phrase “standards prevailing” is doing. Ultimately, they can only be settled through the democratic process, guided by some basic philosophical insights. I’ll go into more detail in later posts. For now, you should zero in on two key ideas: we ought to have access to these minima as a matter of right; and the standard for each minimum ought to be based on what we need to be fully participating members of society.
It is easy to think of social rights as a bundle of benefits that the community as a whole owes to each of its members. That’s not wrong, but it misses a deeper point. The struggle for the social rights of citizenship is part of the broader struggle for full membership. These rights don’t just follow from membership; they are part of the essence of what it means to be a member.
That’s a big idea. What does it even mean to be a full member? The first thing we know is that it has something to do with equality. Full members of the community are one another’s equals in some important sense. This idea of equality is stronger than the formal equality embedded in our founding creed; the one that promises that all persons are created equal and all hold equal (natural) rights. But it is weaker than strong egalitarian notions aiming for equal incomes and/or wealth. What Marshall is looking for is a “conception of equal social worth, not merely of equal natural rights” (24). The goal of social citizenship is to achieve “a kind of basic human equality, associated with full community membership, which is not inconsistent with a superstructure of economic inequality” (45). I will call this condition status equality; some others label it relational equality. The relational idea is intuitive enough: everyone in society ought to treat one another with the dignity and respect expected of peers or equals, and governments ought to treat everyone with equal concern and respect. These are indeed markers of equality of status, but a more tangible way to think of it is in terms of choices or opportunities. All full members of the community ought to have a set of life choices that are comparable to others in society and the ability to choose among them. This is my best restatement of Marshall’s central tenet.
Rights are about choices. The established civil and political rights of citizenship serve to protect members in their exercise of choice across a recognized range of options—civil rights across the full range of choice in their private lives and interactions and political rights across the full range of choice in their public lives, including in their interactions with the state (as criminal defendants, for example). The problem is that our ability to exercise these rights, to really make choices, often depends on our socioeconomic status. This is true, more or less, across the spectrum of income and wealth, but at the low end, the inability to use rights effectively can render them—and the notion of individual equality—nearly meaningless, whether we are talking about the ability to bargain with an employer, seek redress in the courts, or influence public policy. This ought to be obvious, but Americans have a difficult time recognizing and dealing with this basic fact of life. Explaining why this is so will have to be its own post, perhaps several.
Here is the most succinct defense I can give for social rights: Everyone should be able to make full use of their civil and political rights. The exercise of these rights carries material and substantive preconditions. Therefore, everyone should be guaranteed access to the resources they need to be able to make full use of their rights. Social rights are these guarantees. This is why Marshall wanted to add social rights to the civil and political rights of citizenship; social citizenship completes the description of what full membership in the community entails. The politics of social citizenship requires that we be able both to enumerate the range of life choices we believe should be universal and establish tangible levels for their preconditions. (These are topics for later posts.)
Some may challenge whether social rights are really rights. They are. All rights share one critical characteristic, as Joseph Raz writes: “Rights are grounds of duties in others.”3 For most civil and political rights, these duties are negative: others, especially governments, have a duty to leave us alone in the free exercise of our rights.4 In contrast, the duties associated with social rights are positive. Social rights require public action: to provide education, to guarantee some sort of income, to ensure access to healthcare, and so on. This changes the politics of social rights—for example, it makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to pursue these rights through the courts (I’ll return to this in a later post)—but it does not alter their basic character as rights. Some civil and political rights also carry positive duties. For example, the right to counsel requires that the state provide public counsel (Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335, 1963).
Civil, political, and social rights are all grounded in membership.5 Rights enumerate the collective duties we owe to one another as members (acting through the state). There are individual duties, too, such as serving on juries or cooperating with a military draft. This framing makes the existence of positive duties easier to grasp. If you had a club, and made someone a member of the club, you would not then fail to give that person the code to the door of the clubhouse, would you? Similarly, if we say that everyone is an equal member of our society, we incur some obligation to ensure that this is actually the case in substance and not just in theory. That means ensuring that everyone is in a socioeconomic position to fully participate. We have a positive duty to share the code to the clubhouse door.
While Marshall did not see social citizenship as primarily aimed at equalizing incomes, he did claim that “the enrichment of the status of citizenship” would erode economic class distinctions (45). I strongly agree with this conclusion but leave a full defense of it to another post.
Next Post: Movements and Membership (21 January 2025)
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Notes
Photo: Thomas Humphrey Marshall, c1950. (Wikipedia)
1. T.H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Marshall and Tom Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class (Pluto, 1992).
2. Marshall’s rights categories do not cleanly map to typical American usage, but I will stick to his system. The American “Civil Rights Movement” was concerned with both liberties in the private sphere, especially with access to public accommodations, and with basic political powers, especially voting rights. In this series, “civil” should be understood as “private” and “political” as “public” (including both political powers and the protections of criminal rights).
3. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom, (Oxford University Press, 1986), 167. This is slightly tautological: the existence of a duty is associated with the existence of a right; it is the marker of that right. This leaves the ultimate grounding of these duties a bit vague. Elsewhere Raz writes that, “To say that a person has a right is to say that an interest of his is sufficient ground for holding another to be subject to a duty” (“Legal Rights,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 4 (1984), 1). Here, this question is moot. Membership itself is the ultimate ground for these, and all other, rights of citizenship (being human may be thought of as the grounds for other, less robust, rights): we are owed certain things because we are members.
4. I offer the distinction between negative and positive duties, in part, as a substitute for the commonly made distinction between “negative” and “positive” liberty. See Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969 [1958]). As later posts will make clear, I do not find the negative-positive categorization of liberty useful.
5. There is another set of rights, substantially overlapping with the set of civil, political, and social rights, but generally associated with much weaker collective duties, that is grounded in our common humanity rather than our membership in a specific society. In later posts I’ll say more about the differences between social rights (or nation-based civil or political rights) and human rights. Confounding these two sets of rights creates quite a bit of confusion. For now, keep in mind that all of these rights are attached to some version of legal residency in a specific jurisdiction.
Correction: Post 1 neglected to give the photo credit: FDR signing the Social Security Act, 14 August 1935. For more see https://www.ssa.gov/history/fdrsign.html