Citizenship and Social Class / Edition 1

by Tom Bottomore, T. H. Marshall

Overview

Over forty years after it first appeared, T.H. Marshall's seminal essay on citizenship and social class in postwar Britain has acquired the status of a classic. His lucid analysis of the principal elements of citizenship--namely the possession of civil, political, and social rights--is as relevant today as it was when it first appeared. This edition includes complementary material from Tom Bottomore that brings the work into a more contemporary context.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745304762
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	03/20/1987
Series:	Pluto Classics Series
Pages:	101
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

T.H. Marshall was Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, then director of the Social Sciences Department at UNECSO and President of the International Sociological Assoiciation from 1959 to 1962. Tom Bottomore is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex, where he was Professor of Sociology for seventeen years. He was a president of the British Sociological Association and of the International Sociological Association. He is the author of numerous books, including Between Marginalism and Marxism and Elites and Society.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Problem Stated with the Assistance of Alfred Marshall

The invitation to deliver these lectures gave me both personal and professional pleasure. But, whereas my personal response was a sincere and modest appreciation of an honour I had no right to expect, my professional reaction was not modest at all. Sociology, it seemed to me, had every right to claim a share in this annual commemoration of Alfred Marshall, and I considered it a sign of grace that a University which has not yet accepted sociology as an inmate should nevertheless be prepared to welcome her as a visitor. It may be-and the thought is a disturbing one-that sociology is on trial here in my person. If so, I am sure I can rely on you to be scrupulously fair in your judgement, and to regard any merit you may find in my lectures as evidence of the academic value of the subject I profess, while treating everything in them that appears to you paltry, common or ill-conceived as the product of qualities peculiar to myself and not to be found in any of my colleagues.

I will not defend the relevance of my subject to the occasion by claiming Marshall as a sociologist. For, once he had deserted his first loves of metaphysics, ethics and psychology, he devoted his life to the development of economics as an independent science and to the perfection of its own special methods of investigation and analysis. He deliberately chose a path markedly different from that followed by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, and the mood in which he made this choice is indicated in the inaugural lecture which he delivered here in Cambridge in 1885. Speaking of Comte's belief in a unified social science, he said: 'No doubt if that existed economics would gladly find shelter under its wing. But it does not exist; it shows no signs of coming into existence. There is no use in waiting idly for it; we must do what we can with our present resources. He therefore defended the autonomy and the superiority of the economic method, a superiority due mainly to its use of the measuring rod of money, which 'is so much the best measure of motives that no other can compete with it.'

Marshall was, as you know, an idealist; so much so that Keynes has said of him that he 'was too anxious to do good'. The last thing I wish to do is to claim him for sociology on that account. It is true that some sociologists have suffered from a similar affliction of benevolence, often to the detriment of their intellectual performance, but I should hate to distinguish the economist from the sociologist by saying that the one should be ruled by his head while the other may be swayed by his heart. For every honest sociologist, like every honest economist, knows that the choice of ends or ideals lies outside the field of social science and within the field of social philosophy. But idealism made Marshall passionately eager to put the science of economics at the service of policy by using it-as a science may legitimately be used-to lay bare the full nature and content of the problems with which policy has to deal and to assess the relative efficacy of alternative means for the achievement of given ends. And he realised that, even in the case of what would naturally be regarded as economic problems, the science of economics was not of itself able fully to render these two services. For they involved the consideration of social forces which are as immune to attack by the economist's tape-measure as was the croquet ball to the blows which Alice tried in vain to strike with the head of her flamingo. It was, perhaps, on this account that, in certain moods, Marshall felt a quite unwarranted disappointment at his achievements, and even expressed regret that he had preferred economics to psychology, a science which might have brought him nearer to the pulse and life-blood of society and given him a deeper understanding of human aspirations.

It would be easy to cite many passages in which Marshall was drawn to speak of these elusive factors of whose importance he was so firmly convinced, but I prefer to confine my attention to one essay whose theme comes very near to that which I have chosen for these lectures. It is a paper he read to the Cambridge Reform Club in 1873 on The Future of the Working Classes, and it has been republished in the memorial volume edited by Professor Pigou. There are some textual differences between the two editons which, I understand, are to be attributed to corrections made by Marshall himself after the original version had appeared in print as a pamphlet was reminded of this essay by my colleague, Professor Phelps Brown, who made use of it in his inaugural lecture last November. It is equally well suited to my purpose today, because in it Marshall, while examining one facet of the problem of social equality from the point of view of economic cost, came right up to the frontier beyond which lies the territory of sociology, crossed it, and made a brief excursion on the other side. His action could be interpreted as a challenge to sociology to send an emissary to meet him at the frontier, and to join with him in the task of converting no-man's-land into common ground. I have been presumptuous enough to answer the challenge by setting out to travel, as historian and sociologist, towards a point on the economic frontier of that same general theme, the problem of social equality.

In his Cambridge paper Marshall posed the question 'whether there be valid ground for the opinion that the amelioration of the working classes has limits beyond which it cannot pass'. 'The question', he said, 'is not whether all men will ultimately be equal-that they certainly will not-but whether progress may not go on steadily, if slowly, till, by occupation at least, every man is a gentleman. I hold that it may, and that it will/ His faith was based on the belief that the distinguishing feature of the working classes was heavy and excessive labour, and that the volume of such labour could be greatly reduced. Looking round he found evidence that the skilled artisans, whose labour was not deadening and soul-destroying, were already rising towards the condition which he foresaw as the ultimate achievement of all. They are learning, he said, to value education and leisure more than 'mere increase of wages and material comforts'. They are 'steadily developing independence and a manly respect for themselves and, therefore, a courteous respect for others; they are steadily accepting the private and public duties of a citizen; steadily increasing their grasp of the truth that they are men, and not producing machines. They are steadily becoming gentlemen.' When technical advance has reduced heavy labour to a minimum, and that minimum is divided in small amounts among all, then, 'in so far as the working classes are men who have such excessive work to do, in so far will the working classes have been abolished.'

Marshall realised that he might be accused of adopting the ideas of the socialists, whose works, as he has himself told us, he had, during this period of his life, been studying with great hopes and with greater disappointment. For, he said: 'The picture to be drawn will resemble in some respects those which have been shown to us by the Socialists, that noble set of untutored enthusiasts who attributed to all men an unlimited capacity for those self-forgetting virtues that they found in their own breasts.' His reply was that his system differed fundamentally from socialism in that it would preserve the essentials of a free market. He held, however, that the state would have to make some use of its power of compulsion, if his ideals were to be realised. It must compel children to go to school, because the uneducated cannot appreciate, and therefore freely choose, the good things which distinguish the life of gentlemen from that of the working classes. 'It is bound to compel them and to help them to take the first step upwards; and it is bound to help them, if they will, to make many steps upwards.' Notice that only the first step is compulsory. Free choice takes over as soon as the capacity to choose has been created.

Marshall's paper was built round a sociological hypothesis and an economic calculation. The calculation provided the answer to his initial question, by showing that world resources and productivity might be expected to prove sufficient to provide the material bases needed to enable every man to be a gentleman. In other words, the cost of providing education for all and of eliminating heavy and excessive labour could be met. There was no impassable limit to the amelioration of die working classes–at least on this side of the point that Marshall described as the goal. In working out these sums Marshall was using the ordinary techniques of the economist, though admittedly he was applying them to a problem which involved a high degree of speculation.

The sociological hypothesis does not lie so completely on the surface. A little excavation is needed to uncover its total shape. The essence of it is contained in the passages I have quoted, but Marshall gives us an additional clue by suggesting that, when we say a man belongs to the working classes, 'we are thinking of the effect that his work produces on him rather than the effect that he produces on his work.' This is certainly not the sort of definition we should expect from an economist, and, in fact, it would hardly be fair to treat it as a definition at all or to subject it to close and critical examination. The phrase was intended to catch the imagination, and to point to the general direction in which Marshall's thoughts were moving. And that direction was away from a quantitative assessment of standards of living in terms of goods consumed and services enjoyed towards a qualitative assessment of life as a whole in terms of the essendal elements in civilisation or culture. He accepted as right and proper a wide range of quantitative or economic inequality, but condemned the qualitative inequality or difference between the man who was, 'by occupation at least, a gentleman' and the man who was not. We can, I think, without doing violence to Marshall's meaning, replace the word 'gentleman' by the word 'civilised'. For it is clear that he was taking as the standard of civilised life the conditions regarded by his generation as appropriate to a gentleman. We can go on to say that the claim of all to enjoy these conditions is a claim to be admitted to a share in the social heritage, which in turn means a claim to be accepted as full members of the society, that is, as citizens.

Such, I think, is the sociological hypothesis latent in Marshall's essay. It postulates that there is a kind of basic human equality associated with the concept of full membership of a community-or, as I should say, of citizenship-which is not inconsistent with the inequalities which distinguish the various economic levels in the society. In other words, the inequality of the social class system may be acceptable provided the equality of citizenship is recognised. Marshall did not identify the life of a gentleman with the status of citizenship. To do so would have been to express his ideal in terms of legal rights to which all men were entitled. That, in turn, would have put the responsibility for granting those rights fair and square on the shoulders of the state, and so led, step by step, to acts of state interference which he would have deplored. When he mentioned citizenship as something which skilled artisans learned to appreciate in the course of developing into gentlemen, he mentioned only its duties and not its rights. He thought of it as a way of life growing within a man, not presented to him from without. He recognised only one definite right, the right of children to be educated, and in this case alone did he approve the use of compulsory powers by the state to achieve his object. He could hardly go further without imperilling his own criterion for distinguishing his system from socialism in any form-the preservation of the freedom of the competitive market.

Nevertheless, his sociological hypothesis lies as near to the heart of our problem today as it did three-quarters of a century ago-in fact nearer. The basic human equality of membership, at which I maintain that he hinted, has been enriched with new substance and invested with a formidable array of rights. It has developed far beyond what he foresaw, or would have wished. It has been clearly identified with the status of citizenship. And it is time we examined his hypothesis and posed his questions afresh, to see if the answers are still the same. Is it still true that basic equality, when enriched in substance and embodied in the formal rights of citizenship, is consistent with the inequalities of social class? I shall suggest that our society today assumes that the two are still compatible, so much so that citizenship has itself become, in certain respects, the architect of legitimate social inequality. Is it still true that the basic equality can be created and preserved without invading the freedom of the competitive market? Obviously it is not true. Our modern system is frankly a socialist system, not one whose authors are, as Marshall was, eager to distinguish it from socialism. But it is equally obvious that the market still functions-within limits. Here is another possible conflict of principles which demands examination. And thirdly, what is the effect of the marked shift of emphasis from duties to rights? Is this an inevitable feature of modern citizenship-inevitable and irreversible? Finally, I want to put Marshall's initial question again in a new form. He asked if there were limits beyond which the amelioration of the working classes could not pass, and he was thinking of limits set by natural resources and productivity. I shall ask whether there appear to be limits beyond which the modern drive towards social equality cannot, or is unlikely to, pass, and I shall be thinking, not of the economic cost (I leave that vital question to the economists), but of the limits inherent in the principles that inspire the drive. But the modern drive towards social equality is, I believe, the latest phase of an evolution of citizenship which has been in continuous progress for some 250 years. My first task, therefore, must be to prepare the ground for an attack on the problems of today by digging for a while in the subsoil of past history.

CHAPTER 2

The Development of Citizenship to the End of thes

Nineteenth Century

I shall be running true to type as a sociologist if I begin by saying that I propose to divide citizenship into three parts. But the analysis is, in this case, dictated by history even more clearly than by logic. I shall call these three parts, or elements, civil, political and social. 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 last is of a different order from the others, because it is the right to defend and assert all one's rights on terms of equality with others and by due process of law. This shows us that the institutions most directly associated with civil rights are the courts of justice. By the political element I mean the right to participate in the exercise of political power, as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such a body. The corresponding institutions are parliament and councils of local government. 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 civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society. The institutions most closely connected with it are the educational system and the social services.

In early times these three strands were wound into a single thread. The rights were blended because the institutions were amalgamated. As Maitland said: 'The further back we trace our history the more impossible it is for us to draw strict lines of demarcation between the various functions of the State: the same institution is a legislative assembly, a governmental council and a court of law. ... Everywhere, as we pass from the ancient to the modern, we see what the fashionable philosophy calls differentiation.' Maitland is speaking here of the fusion of political and civil institutions and rights. But a man's social rights, too, were part of the same amalgam, and derived from the status which also determined the kind of justice he could get and where he could get it, and the way in which he could take part in the administration of the affairs of the community of which he was a member. But this status was not one of citizenship in our modern sense. In feudal society status was the hallmark 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 virtue of their membership of the society. There was, in this sense, no principle of the equality of citizens to set against the principle of the inequality of classes. In the medieval towns, on the other hand, examples of genuine and equal citizenship can be found. But its specific rights and duties were strictly local, whereas the citizenship whose history I wish to trace is, by definition, national.

Its evolution involved a double process, of fusion and of separation. The fusion was geographical, the separation functional. The first important step dates from the twelfth century, when royal justice was established with effective power to define and defend the civil rights of the individual -such as they then were-on the basis, not of local custom, but of the common law of the land. As institutions the courts were national, but specialised. Parliament followed, concentrating in itself the political powers of national government and shedding all but a small residue of the judicial functions which formerly belonged to the Curia Regis, that 'sort of constitutional protoplasm out of which will in time be evolved the various councils of the crown, the houses of parliament, and the courts of law'. Finally, the social rights which had been rooted in membership of the village community, the town and the guild, were gradually dissolved by economic change until nothing remained but the Poor Law, again a specialised institution which acquired a national foundation, although it continued to be locally administered.

Two important consequences followed. First, when the institutions on which the three elements of citizenship depended parted company, it became possible for each to go its separate way, travelling at its own speed under the direction of its own peculiar principles. Before long they were spread far out along the course, and it is only in the present century, in fact I might say only within the last few months, that the three runners have come abreast of one another.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Robert Moore
Preface by Tom Bottomore

PART 1: Citizenship and Social Class
Marshall
1. The Problem Stated, with the Assistance of Alfred Marshall
2. The Development of Citizenship to the End of the 19th Century
3. The Early Impact of Citizenship on Social Class
4. Social Rights in the 20th Century
5. Conclusions
Notes

PART 2: Citizenship and Social Class, Forty Years On
Tom Bottomore
1. Citizens, Classes and Equality
2. Capitalism, Socialism and Citizenship
3. New Questions about Citizenship
4. Changing Classes, Changing Doctrines
5. A Kind of Conclusion
Notes

Bibliography
Index