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Social Citizenship and Social Rights in an Age of Extremes: T. H. Marshall's

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Social Citizenship and Social Rights in an Age of Extremes: T. H. Marshall's Modern Intellectual History, 16, 1 (2019), pp. 155–184 C Cambridge University Press 2017. ThisisanOpenAccess article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1017/S1479244317000178 social citizenship and social rights in an age of extremes: t. h. marshall’s social philosophy in the longue duree´ ∗ julia moses Department of History, University of Sheffield E-mail: j.moses@sheffield.ac.uk This article demonstrates how T. H. Marshall’s conceptualization of sociology—its subject, key questions and methodology—was embedded within broader moments in twentieth-century political history, including two world wars, the economic crisis of the interwar era, the onset of the Cold War and the rise of decolonization. In doing so, it brings intellectual history and the history of academic disciplines (particularly sociology) together with more recent trends in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe, including research on postwar democratization, reconstruction and the global spread of human rights discourses. Marshall was a sociological thinker in what Eric Hobsbawm has called the “age of extremes,” whose understanding of social citizenship not only played a role in theorizing the welfare state in postwar Britain, but also helped shape reconstruction within Europe and international development efforts following decolonization. In this respect, Marshall was part of a transnational and global movement to recast key concepts such as democracy, human rights and citizenship after the Second World War. This broader perspective illuminates how his work straddles traditions of pluralism and idealism, liberalism and social democracy, rather than being simply representative of any one of these schools of thought. Following publication in 1950, Thomas Humphrey Marshall’s revised Cambridge lectures Citizenship and Social Class were met with relative silence ∗ This article stems from a conversation with my former supervisor Professor Jose Harris, and it is to Jose that this piece is dedicated. Many thanks to Lawrence Goldman, Stuart Jones, William Whyte, Ben Jackson, Mark Bevir, Michael Freeden and other participants at the conference in honor of Jose held at St John’s College, Oxford, for critical comments on an early draft. Thanks, too, to Bob Stern and colleagues in the Ethics of Care Philosophy Seminar at the University of Sheffield for helpful feedback. I am especially grateful to Holger Nehring and the editors and anonymous peer reviewers at Modern Intellectual History for their careful reading of the essay. 155 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.219, on 25 Sep 2021 at 03:48:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244317000178 156 julia moses for the next three decades. Sociology appeared to have moved on, as Marshall’s historical, qualitative style seemed outdated. In the midst of the Cold War, large-scale quantitative studies and, later, broad historical–comparative studies became the norm, and Marshall’s work on citizenship did not sit comfortably within the evolving discipline. Even the growing undercurrent in sociology that prioritized the psychology of individual experience in increasingly affluent societies seemed to travel in a different direction.1 Not least, a general movement in Britain away from universalist welfare in the late 1950sandearly1960smayhave also militated against Marshall’s theory of citizenship.2 By the 1980s, however, Marshall’s arguments about the relationship between citizenship and equality began to attract a broad audience of sociologists and political theorists alike. Amidst economic retrenchment in Britain, the USA and much of Western Europe, Marshall’s claims that the twentieth century was the era of social rights found favor with a wide variety of scholars.3 Moreover, as debates about the establishment and evolution of the European Union posed new questions about labor migration, minorities and European citizenship, and as a number of global crises revived discussions about the purpose and scope of “human rights,” Citizenship and Social Class found a fresh following amongst social scientists and historians alike.4 The cycles of popularity of Marshall’s work follow broadly the lines of key developments of political history. This article seeks to demonstrate how Marshall’s specific conceptualization of sociology—its subject, key questions and methodology—was embedded in these developments, and reflected them, but 1 Margaret Somers, “Citizenship Troubles: Genealogies of Struggle for the Soul of the Social,” in Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge, 2008), 147–70. 2 Jose Harris, “Citizenship in Britain and Europe: Some Missing Links in T. H. Marshall’s Theory of Rights,” ZeS-Arbeitspapier 2 (2010), at http:hdl.handle.net/10419/43703, accessed 4 March 2012, 21. Nonetheless, some, like Richard Titmuss, continued to favor universalism. Meanwhile, Marshall began pondering an indirect form of means testing through the use of tax benefits. 3 Evenifitalsofoundseveraldetractors.SeeAnthonyM.Rees,“T.H.Marshallandthe Progress of Citizenship,” in Martin Bulmer and Anthony M. Rees, eds., Citizenship Today: The Contemporary Relevance of T. H. Marshall (London, 1996), 1–23;BenRevi,“T.H. Marshall and His Critics: Reappraising ‘Social Citizenship’ in the Twenty-First Century,” Citizenship Studies 18/3–4 (2014), 452–64. 4 Forexample,MargaretR.SomersandChristopherN.J.Roberts,“TowardaNewSociology of Rights: A Genealogy of ‘Buried Bodies’ of Citizenship and Human Rights,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 4 (2008), 385–425;SeylaBenhabib,The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge, 2004); Andreas Fahrmeir, “Die moderne Staatsburgerschaft¨ und ihre Grenzen: Anmerkungen zu T. H. Marshalls “citizenship”- Konzept,” Historische Zeitschrift 286 (2008), 640–55; Matthew Grant, “Historicizing Citizenship in Postwar Britain,” Historical Journal 59/4 (2016), 1187–1206. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.219, on 25 Sep 2021 at 03:48:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244317000178 social citizenship and social rights 157 also made significant contributions to their understanding. In doing so, it brings intellectual history and the history of academic disciplines together with more recent trends in the history of twentieth-century Europe. Marshall was a socio- logical thinker in what Eric Hobsbawm has called the “age of extremes,” and he developed his ideas about the battle between communism, fascism, liberalism and social democracy in the context of the two postwar moments of democratization and reconstruction.5 Marshall’s understanding of social citizenship played a role in theorizing the welfare state in Britain. Yet it also shaped reconstruction within Europe, as well as international development efforts following decolonization. In this respect, Marshall was part of a transnational and global movement to recast key concepts such as democracy, human rights and citizenship after the Second World War. 6 However, Marshall’s concept of social citizenship was not only representative of the postwar moment of 1945. As a prisoner of war in Germany in 1914, he discovered common fellowship borne through internment; as a policy adviser on Germany and general observer during and after the Second World War, he witnessed firsthand the making of a national community in Britain through the “people’s war” and the unmaking of the “people’s community” under National Socialism. The experience of war proved formative for his social thought, shaping Marshall’s understanding of social relations, inequality and national development. This broader context illuminates how his work straddles traditions of pluralism and idealism, liberalism and social democracy, rather than being simply representative of any one of these schools of thought. By examining T. H. Marshall’s intellectual biography, I aim to unpack some of the continuities that cut across this turbulent era, and across national borders, tying postwar European ideas about the welfare state to their nineteenth- century heritage. In this respect, Marshall’s contribution mirrors those of the German emigr´ e´ intellectuals that defined the “Weimar Century.”7 Like Friedrich Meinecke, who tried in 1945 to understand what he saw as the “catastrophe” of his era, Marshall recast idealist social philosophy from the late nineteenth century in the context of two world wars in order to make sense of the present, but also to 5 For example, Mark Mazower, Jessica Reinisch and David Feldman, eds., Post-war Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives, 1945–1949, Past & Present Supplement 6 (2011). 6 Martin Conway, “Democracy in Postwar Western Europe: The Triumph of a Political Model,” European History Quarterly 32/1 (2002), 59–84;SamuelMoyn,The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2011); Sean Forner, German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal: Culture and Politics after 1945 (Cambridge, 2014). 7 Udi Greenberg, Weimar Century: German Emigr´´ es and the Ideological
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