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Citizenship, Social Citizenship and the Defence of Welfare Provision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Extract

This article analyses the normative status of claims to the social rights of citizenship in the light of New Right criticisms of the welfare state. The article assesses whether there is any normative justification for treating welfare provision and citizenship as intrinsically linked. After outlining T. H. Marshall's conception of citizenship the article reviews its status in relation to: traditional arguments about citizenship of the polity; relativist arguments about the embedded place of citizenship within current societies; and, drawing upon Rawlsian analysis, absolutist arguments about what being a member of a modern society implies. Each argument has some strengths and together they indicate the importance of retaining the idea of citizenship at the centre of modern political debates about social and economic arrangements.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

1 See, for example. Taylor-Gooby, Peter, Public Opinion, Ideology and State Welfare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).Google Scholar The 1986 British social attitudes survey revealed growing support for the institutions of the welfare state: see Bosanquet, Nick, ‘Interim Report: Public Spending and the Welfare State’, in Jowell, Roger, Witherspoon, Sharon and Brook, Lindsay, eds, British Social Attitudes: The 1986 Report (Aldershot: Gower Publishers, 1986).Google Scholar For an alternative view, and criticisms of these opinion polls, see Harris, Ralph and Seldon, Arthur, Welfare Without the State: A Quarter-Century of Suppressed Choice (London: Hobart Paperback No. 26, Institute of Economic Affairs, 1987).Google Scholar

2 See: Dryzek, John and Goodin, Robert E., ‘Risk-Sharing and Social Justice: The Motivational Foundations of the Post-War Welfare State’, British Journal of Political Science, 16 (1986), 134CrossRefGoogle Scholar; King, Desmond S., The New Right: Politics, Markets and Citizenship (London: Macmillan, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Morgan, Kenneth O., Labour in Power 1945–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

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6 See Gilder, George, Poverty and Wealth (New York: Basic Books, 1981).Google Scholar For a similar, but more effectively developed, thesis see Murray, Charles A., ‘The Two Wars Against Poverty: Economic Growth and the Great Society’, The Public Interest, 69 (1982), 316.Google Scholar Murray attributes the drop in husband-wife family units in the United States during the 1960s to the federal anti-poverty programmes associated with the Great Society: during the 1960s, he argues, ‘fundamental changes occurred in the philosophy, administration, and magnitude of social welfare programs for low-income families, and these changes altered – both directly and indirectly – the social risks and rewards, and the financial costs and benefits, of maintaining a husband-wife family’ (p. 15).

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9 See figures in: King, , New RightGoogle Scholar; King, Desmond S., ‘The State and the Social Structures of Welfare in Advanced Industrial Democracies’, Theory and Society, 16 (1987), 841–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Robinson, Ray, ‘Restructuring the Welfare State: An Analysis of Public Expenditure, 1979/80–1984/85’, Journal of Social Policy, 15 (1986), 121.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

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12 Marshall, T. H., ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, Class, Citizenship and Social Development (New York: Doubleday, 1964).Google Scholar This essay was first published in 1949.

13 Marshall, , ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, pp. 84, 92.Google Scholar

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25 With regard to the first set of issues, much of the debate has occurred within stratification studies, where Marshall's essay was ‘one of the seminal works which resulted in the reorientation of the whole discussion of the class structure in capitalist societies’ according to Lockwood, David, ‘For T. H. Marshall’, Sociology, 8 (1974), 363–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Arguments about citizenship informed Dahrendorf's, RalfClass and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957)Google Scholar in which he considers the accuracy of Marshall's claims about the equalizing impact of social rights. The argument here is about empirical accuracy not normative validity. Dahrendorf contends that Marshall's thesis neglects the social distribution of power: though greater equalization through citizenship rights has certainly occurred, it has not resolved the conflicts centred on class. More recently, Giddens considers also the utility of Marshall's claims as a possible refutation of the centrality of class conflict. He argues that citizenship rights cannot be separated from the contradictory forms of modern capitalism, and more specifically, since the rights of citizenship do not extend to the workplace – where class conflict is most persistent according to Giddens – Marshall's thesis is an in adequate account of contemporary Western democracies: see Giddens, Anthony, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 226–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A more sympathetic treatment of Marshall's arguments is contributed by Turner who argues that the pursuit and establishment of citizenship rights has altered the nature of capitalist society in a fundamental and positive way: Turner, Bryan S., Citizenship and Capitalism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1986).Google Scholar

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27 Marshall, , ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, pp. 102–3, our emphasis.Google Scholar

28 Marshall, , ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, p. 117.Google Scholar

29 We are grateful to Robert Goodin for drawing this distinction to our attention. See Goodin, 's Reasons for Welfare, Chap. 4 on ‘Community’.Google Scholar

30 Marshall, , ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, p. 84.Google Scholar

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41 As de Tocqueville puts it, once the workman becomes habituated to the concerns of, say, his particular place on the assembly line, ‘he no longer belongs to himself, but to the calling which he has chosen … In proportion as the principle of the division of labour is more extensively applied, the workman becomes more weak, more narrow-minded, and more dependent’; Tocqueville, Alexis deDemocracy in America, ed. Mayer, J. P. and Lerner, Max (New York, Harper & Row, 1970)Google Scholar, Bk II, Chap. 20. This seems to mean then that the workman lacks the necessary qualities for citizenship: an open and broad mind, an independent point of view, and sufficient experience of the world beyond his own hovel or workshop to allow him to address himself intelligently to the great and general issues of politics.

42 As John Stuarl Mill puts it: ‘those whose bread is already secured, and who desire no favours from men in power, or from bodies of men, or from the public, have nothing to fear from the open avowal of opinions’. On Liberty (London: Dent, 1972), Chap. 2, para. 19.Google Scholar

43 ‘We receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner as we enjoy and transmit our property’, Burke claimed, as an inheritance from the past and a responsibility for the future (Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the French Revolution (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 120Google Scholar). He insisted therefore that ‘by the spirit of philosophic analogy’, we should conclude that the skills which are developed in those who are used to handling landed property are the very skills which we should want the citizen to exercise. These are skills which are unavailable to the common masses, who ‘immersed in hopeless poverty, could regard all property … with no other eye than that of envy. Nothing lasting, and therefore in human life nothing useful, could be expected from such men’ (Burke, , Reflections, p. 134).Google Scholar

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46 Benlham, , Theory of Legislation, p. 111.Google Scholar

47 See Hayek, F. A., Law, Legislation and Liberty (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, 1976 and 1979), 3 vols.Google Scholar

48 Some of these points are discussed in Marshall, T. H., The Right to Welfare (London: Heinemann, 1981), pp. 83–4.Google Scholar For the motion of a right to welfare, see Waldron, Jeremy, Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 156–60.Google Scholar

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50 Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983), p. 62.Google Scholar

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52 Walzer, , Spheres of Justice, p. 68.Google Scholar

53 Walzer, , Spheres of Justice, p. 84.Google Scholar

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55 Walzer, , Spheres of Justice, p. 67.Google Scholar See Goodin, , Reasons for Welfare, Chap. 4Google Scholar, for a general critique of ‘community’ in arguments of this sort.

56 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

57 Rawls, , Theory of Justice, pp. 275–84.Google Scholar Minimum provision in this context is discussed in Waldron, Jeremy, ‘John Rawls and the Social Minimum’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 3 (1986), 2134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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65 Rawls, J., ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 7 (1987), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Rawls, , ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’, Journal of Philosophy, 77 (1980), 515–72.Google Scholar For a critique of this relativism, see Waldron, , Nonsense Upon Stilts, pp. 166–72.Google Scholar