A social thinker and critic who dies at the age of 87 might reasonably have expected that he would have outlived the vagaries of fashion, and, in particular, the years of indifference that frequently seem to follow the brief excitement attendant upon the publication of an apparently new, relevant and challenging set of propositions. In T. H. Marshall’s case this did not happen, perhaps partly because his most seminal ideas were either not crystallized and written down, or did not command wide attention, until after he retired, at the age of 62 in 1956, from his professorship at the London School of Economics. What is always regarded as his most important work, Citizenship and social class, was given as the (Alfred) Marshall Lectures in Cambridge in 1949, and was published by the Cambridge University Press in the following year, but did not achieve its full impact until 1963, when Heinemann made it the centrepiece of Sociology at the crossroads, a collection of essays and lectures produced or delivered over the previous 30 years (Marshall 1963).
Shortly before Marshall’s death in 1981, Robert Pinker edited a second collection of essays brought together under the title of The right to welfare (Marshall 1981), together with a thoughtful introduction from his own pen and a series of “afterthoughts” to the principal articles contributed by Marshall himself. It is, however, an indication that the quickening of interest in Marshall’s work at the time was only modest that the book failed to appear in paperback. The obituaries themselves were warm and appreciative (Halsey 1984) but, as is the way with obituaries, they seemed to be closing a chapter rather than opening one. The tone of commentators was respectful and indeed overt hostility to Marshall has been very rare, although in a review of Martin Bulmer’s Essays on the history of British sociological research, Stanislav Andreski (1986) referred to Halsey’s chapter on the LSE Sociology Department, and declared:
He glosses over some nasty intrigues which went on there and is overgenerous in attributing intellectual merit, especially to T. H. Marshall whose contribution to knowledge was nil.
This summary verdict may be eccentric, but others have regretted that Marshall was so sparing in the deployment of the statistical and research skills acquired in his first academic career as a historical demographer during his later career as a sociologist and social policy specialist. He explained himself that when he accepted Ginsberg’s offer to join the LSE Department of Sociology as a lecturer in 1930:
I realized that broad comparative studies in the Hobhouse tradition must be built on secondary sources, and the thought that I might leave the basic task of fact collecting to others appealed enormously to my lively and impatient mind. (Marshall 1973)
It is interesting to place this slightly ingenuous admission in the context of Goldthorpe’s strictures in Chapter 6 on the recent school of “grand historical sociologists”. Would Goldthorpe apply them to Marshall, one wonders? Anyway, Marshall became a “sophisticated consumer” of other people’s data (Halsey 1984), and this, together with the fact that detachment does not breed many disciples, may help to account for the non-emergence of “a Marshallian ‘school’ of social administrators of the kind that Titmuss gathered together during his lifetime” (Pinker 1981). Marshall came to be seen as a synthesizer; and the fate of the synthesizing “man of wisdom”, it was insinuated, is that lapidary observations and incisive insights do not often have a very long shelf-life. Yet even this more measured conclusion fails to account for the very considerable influence that Marshall exerted over many of his most distinguished successors in the next two generations, those who came to intellectual maturity in the 20 years after the Second World War. Michael Mann (p. 126) lists Reinhard Bendix, Ralf Dahrendorf, Ronald Dore, A. H. Halsey, S. M. Lipset, David Lockwood and Peter Townsend, and that is clearly naming only a few. And since the mid-1980s – when the Marshall Memorial Lecture series that forms the basis for this book started – there has been an explosion of interest in Marshall s ideas among a newer generation of scholars. Whole books have been written commenting on – and in the view of their authors, improving on – Marshall’s conception of citizenship (Turner 1986, Barbalet 1988). Most of the contributions to the numerous edited collections on citizenship contain at least one reference to Citizenship and social class – sometimes these are mere tokens, sometimes extended commentaries on his seminal formulation (Andrews 1991, Vogel & Moran 1991, Coote 1992, van Steenbergen 1994).
It could be argued that what has been rediscovered in the later 1980s and the 1990s is less Marshall himself than the central importance of citizenship, interest in which in Britain has been much subject to intellectual fashion. In three periods it has come to the fore. What might be called the “first wave” occurred in the 30 years or so before the First World War: it was associated with the brief dominance of Idealist thought in British intellectual life under the influence of T. H. Green, but was carried forward by later thinkers like Hobhouse who were very critical of Idealist assumptions. The “second wave” lasted from the Second World War to the 1960s: it might be roughly demarcated by the publishing history of Citizenship and social class (see above). During this period Marshall almost single-handedly revived the notion of citizenship, and disseminated a particular view of it so successfully that it came to be seen (at least in England) as the only possible account. The fact that the writers of the “third wave” – which is, of course, with us today – so very often use Marshall as their starting point is therefore a justifiable act of homage.
There is no space here for more than a little speculation about why the concept of citizenship has moved in and out of favour. One clue may be afforded by the fact that the two most obviously “dead” periods – the 1930s and the 1970s – were marked by a brief fleuraison of Marxist thought. However, this has always been rather a thin story in Britain. A more important factor must be that the “three waves” coincided with vigorous and anxious debates about appropriate welfare systems, centring respectively on the social legislation of the New Liberalism, the implementation of the post-war social democratic welfare state and the Thatcher/Major recasting of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This emphasis on “social citizenship” was, of course, very much in line with Marshall’s own central preoccupation.
For in Citizenship and social class Marshall had a tale to tell. It is one of the gradual evolution of citizenship so that it culminates in the coming of age of the British welfare state after mid-century. In Marshall’s later writings a darker element intrudes – he became less convinced of the strength and reality of social rights, and of citizenship as a unifying concept (Rees 1995). However, it is from Marshall’s classic formulation of his case in Citizenship and social class that modern commentators have drawn inspiration, and it is with this evolutionary account that this chapter is concerned. The aim is to consider how, why and with what justification it has been adopted, adapted, criticized and utilized. To this end, I shall begin by setting out Marshall’s schematic presentation of the historical development of citizenship in more detail. Then, in three longish sections I shall consider three questions, each of which has attracted a considerable volume of literature. First, does Marshall give a correctly ordered account of what transpired in Britain, full enough for his (and our) purposes? Secondly, is this account universalizable, applicable to other societies and polities that have undergone similar transformations in the past two centuries? Thirdly, does Marshall describe too consensual, too bland an evolution, one that lacks an emphasis on the crucial factor of struggle?

Marshall’s account of the progression of citizenship

In this section, I shall use Marshall’s own words where possible, although a health warning is in order: Citizenship and social class contains a number of complex reworkings and modifications of statements that appear more baldly and quotably near the start of the text, so things are not always quite as they seem (Rees 1995). How Marshall describes the three elements in citizenship is set out below (all quotes from Marshall 1963: 74). It should be noted that not only does he ascribe the development of civil, political and social rights to the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, but he also argues that each was accompanied by the rise of a set of characteristic institutions.
1. 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.
The institutions most associated with the establishment of these rights are the civil and criminal courts of justice:
2. By the political element I mean the right to participate in an exercise of political power, as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of such a body.
In this case the corresponding institutions are Parliament and local elective bodies. We may note here that Marshall’s equation of political citizenship with the extension of the franchise and related opportunities for political participation is not followed by all contributors to this volume. Dahrendorf, for example, includes significant elements of civil citizenship – freedom of association, freedom of speech – under the political rubric.
3. 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 civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society. The institutions most closely connected with it are the educational system and the social services.
Here Marshall names the educational system and the social services, although responsibility for these has always been divided between central government administration and local councils. There is not therefore any very clear distinction between political and social rights in this respect.
In the Middle Ages, according to Marshall, “these three strands were wound into a single thread … because the institutions were amalgamated” (Marshall 1963: 74). He goes on:
In feudal society status was the hall-mark of class and the measure of inequality. There was no uniform collection of rights and duties with which all men – noble and common, free and serf – were endowed by the membership of the society. There was, in this sense, no principle of the equality of citizens to set against the inequality of classes. (Marshall 1963: 75)
The process that Marshall traces in later centuries is one both of fission and of fusion – the former because the three elements in citizenship rights were separated out and followed different paths, the latter in the sense that rights and duties no longer conferred a status that was specifically local or municipal but had, so to speak, been nationalized. Marshall actually devoted little space to the emergence of a specifically national sense of citizenship, and what he did have to say mainly occurs in passages about the eighteenth century (Marshall 1963: 96). As a sociologist whose teaching career spanned the three decades of the 1930s, the 1940s and the 1950s he was more concerned to define the relationship between social class and citizenship. Today, when social class is commonly seen as a waning force both as an integrator and a divider, and citizenship is often sanitized of overt class connotations, this perhaps needs stressing:
If I am right in my contention that citizenship has been a developing institution in England at least since the latter part of the seventeenth century, then it is clear that its growth coincides with the rise of capitalism, which is a system, not of quality, but of inequality. Here is something that needs explaining, How is it that these two opposing principles could grow and flourish side by side in the same soil? What made it possible for them to be reconciled with one another and to become, for a time at least, allies instead of antagonists? The question is a pertinent one, for it is clear that, in the twentieth century, citizenship and the capitalistic class system have been at war. (Marshall 1963: 87)
The words “in the twentieth century” indicate that Marshall is thinking here especially of social rights, and is putting forward one of the most frequently claimed ways in which they may be said to be “different”. To the conundrum he has set himself in this passage he gives an answer a few pages further on:
Nevertheless it is true that citizenship, even in its early forms, was a principle of equality, and that during this period (ie the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) it was a developing institution. Starting at the point where all men were free and, in theory, capable of enjoying rights, it grew by enriching the body of rights which they were capable of enjoying. But these rights did not conflict with the inequalities of capitalist society: they were, on the contrary, necessary to the maintenance of that particular form of inequality. The explanation lies in the fact that the core of citizenship at this stage was composed of civil rights. And 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. (Marshall 1963: 90)

Criticisms of Marshall’s periodization

I now want to consider some recent objections and emendations to Marshall’s account of the rise of citizenship. I will start with some observations of Gertrude Himmelfarb (1984), which might be read as a commentary on the passage quoted at the end of the last section. She sets out Marshall’s theory of historical development, and continues:
It is this sequence that gives rise to the familiar idea that political rights are less advanced, less progressive than social rights, that they are “merely formal”, insubstantial, illusory, until fleshed out with a full complement of social rights. (Himmelfarb 1984: 268)
Himmelfarb then refers to the “moral economy” of the eighteenth century that so pervades the thought of Adam Smith and many of his contemporaries, and suggests that to a nineteenth-century radical – “an ‘Old Corruption’ radical or a Tory radical”– the location of rights might have appeared very differently. Social citizenship already existed in the form of a tissue of rights and obligations that tied together a single society – not “two nations” – based on rank. This paternalistic order was threatened in the early nineteenth century by soulless Utilitarians and greedy industrialists, but it was nevertheless there, precisely because it was a natura...