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Citizenship 137

Limits of Marshall ’ s account of citizenship
Marshall ’ s account has several problems that are relevant to our consid-
eration of citizenship in relation to the cultural politics of social move-
ments and the consequences of globalization. We will deal explicitly with
these topics in following sections, but for the moment, we will look at
the defi ciencies of Marshall ’ s theory of citizenship more generally.
First, Marshall ’ s model is criticized for the way in which it tends to
ignore politics. It is argued, notably by Anthony Giddens, that Marshall ’ s
treatment of the extension of citizenship rights is implicitly evolutionist;
it is as if there is a natural progression from civil to political to social
rights as part of the development of modern industrial society. Giddens
argues that Marshall fails to give enough consideration to how each of
the three sets of rights has only been achieved after protracted struggle
(Giddens, 1982 : 171). Not all commentators on Marshall ’ s work agree
with Giddens. As Barbalet (1988) notes, some actually take quite the
opposite view, arguing that Marshall ’ s model shows how citizenship

rights are extended through conflict. Such divergent understandings stem
in large part from Marshall ’ s own ambivalence on the question. He is
certainly much more interested in the sequence of development of citizen-
ship rights than in how this development has been achieved, and he gives
an unresolved and even contradictory account of it. In Citizenship and
Social Class , he says that the growth of citizenship “ is stimulated both by
the struggle to win those rights and by their enjoyment when won, ” but
then almost immediately goes on to say that “ the familiar instruments of
modern democracy were fashioned by the upper classes and then handed
down, step by step, to the lower ” (Marshall, 1992 : 24 – 5). Barbalet ’ s
interpretation seems the most reasonable: although Marshall does speak

of conflict, what he means by it is the conflict of principles between capi-

talism as a system dependent on inequality and citizenship as a system of
equality rather than struggles between actual social groups. Barbalet
argues that it is not possible to judge from Marshall ’ s sparse comments
on the issue whether he saw the working out of this confl ict as a matter
of bargaining and conciliation or of struggle and violence. However, as
he notes, an emphasis on the development of new sets of rights out of
existing ones, combined with Marshall ’ s lack of interest in the actual
conditions of their development, does incline his model toward evolution-
ism (Barbalet, 1988 : 30 – 1).
From Marshall ’ s point of view, on the crest of the wave of post - war
welfare state creation in Britain, evolutionism would presumably not have
seemed as inadequate as it does to most sociologists in these less expansive