Defining Citizenship in Modern Political Communities

What does it mean to be a citizen? It sounds like a simple question, but it sits at the heart of how political communities are organized, who belongs, who is excluded, and what rights and responsibilities flow from membership. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a citizen is broadly understood as a member of a political community who enjoys rights and assumes the duties of membership. Yet this compact definition barely scratches the surface of a concept that has evolved across thousands of years, from the city-states of ancient Greece to the modern welfare state – and continues to be contested today.

Citizenship as a legal status 🔗

At its most fundamental level, citizenship is a legal status – the formal recognition that an individual belongs to a particular political community. As Sociology Plus explains, citizenship is the status of being a member of a political community structured as either a territorial state or a national state, and it establishes a relationship of mutual obligation: the individual owes loyalty to the state, and in return the state owes that individual protection. This reciprocal logic – rights in exchange for duties – has been the defining feature of citizenship from its earliest forms to the present day.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies three core dimensions of citizenship: first, citizenship as legal status, defined by civil, political, and social rights; second, citizenship as political agency, meaning active participation in a society’s institutions; and third, citizenship as a source of identity and belonging within a community. These dimensions are not always in harmony – they can pull in different directions, especially when formal legal equality coexists with real social inequality.

Ancient roots: citizenship in Greece and Rome 🔗

The concept of citizenship is often traced to the ancient Greek polis – the small, self-governing city-states where political life and daily life were inseparable. Wikipedia’s entry on citizenship notes that in Athens, citizens were both rulers and ruled; political and judicial offices were rotated, and all citizens had the right to speak and vote in the political assembly. Aristotle captured this spirit bluntly: to take no part in the running of community affairs was to be either a beast or a god.

But this model was deeply exclusionary. Women, slaves, and resident foreigners – known as metics – were all denied citizenship. The obligations and privileges of civic life were reserved for free, property-owning men. The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology highlights that Aristotle’s famous declaration that “man is a political animal” was not inclusive – it referred only to those men who were not enslaved. Citizenship in ancient Greece was therefore a marker of status and privilege as much as a mechanism of governance.

The Roman Empire expanded the concept somewhat. Romans recognized that granting citizenship to people across their territories helped legitimize Roman rule over conquered areas, shifting citizenship away from a form of direct political participation toward something more like a judicial safeguard – a legal identity that conferred rights, the ability to own property, and protection under Roman law. The idea that citizenship could be earned, granted, or extended to new populations became a lasting legacy of the Roman model.

T.H. Marshall’s model: civil, political, and social rights 🔗

The most influential modern framework for understanding citizenship comes from the British sociologist T.H. Marshall. In his landmark 1950 essay Citizenship and Social Class – originally delivered as a lecture at Cambridge in 1949 – Marshall offered a definition of citizenship as a status bestowed on all those who are full members of a community, with all such members being equal in respect of the rights and duties attached to that status. Writing for Dissent Magazine, Mitchell Cohen summarizes Marshall’s framework as built around three interlocking dimensions: civil citizenship, political citizenship, and social citizenship.

Marshall argued that these three elements of citizenship developed in England in a historically sequential order, each century broadly corresponding to one type of right. Britannica’s entry on Marshall describes how he saw civil rights taking shape in the eighteenth century, political rights expanding in the nineteenth century, and social rights emerging in the twentieth century – each built on the foundation of the last.

Civil rights: the first building block 🔗

Civil rights were the earliest to develop and form the bedrock of individual freedom within a political community. As Marshall’s own framework is summarized by INFLIBNET, civil rights include the right to liberty, equality before the law, the right to own property, freedom to enter into valid contracts, freedom of speech, and the right to justice. The key institutional home of civil rights is the court system – the mechanism through which individuals can assert and defend their freedoms against other individuals and against the state itself.

Importantly, civil rights also underpinned the emerging capitalist economy. The freedom to enter into labor contracts and to move in search of employment was central to the functioning of a market economy. Marshall noted that civil rights did not fundamentally challenge class inequality – they co-existed with it, providing a legal equality that left material inequality largely intact.

Political rights: expanding the franchise 🔗

Political rights refer to the right to participate in the exercise of political power – principally through voting and the right to stand for elected office. According to Britannica, Marshall saw the nineteenth century as the era when civil rights, already established as a general status, were gradually extended to new sections of the population rather than creating entirely new rights. Universal adult suffrage in Britain was not fully achieved until 1918 for men and 1928 for women – underscoring that political citizenship was won slowly and incompletely across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Political rights gave citizens the formal means to hold governments accountable and to shape the laws under which they lived. For Marshall, this was a crucial step: once people had political rights, they gained the tools to push for the third and final layer of citizenship.

Social rights: citizenship and the welfare state 🔗

Social rights represent Marshall’s most distinctive and controversial contribution. ScienceDirect’s overview of social citizenship explains that it was only after the Second World War – against the backdrop of the British welfare state and William Beveridge’s reforms – that social rights became a central feature of citizenship. Social rights encompass the right to a basic level of economic security and welfare: access to education, healthcare, housing, and social insurance. Marshall argued that without social rights, civil and political rights remained hollow – theoretically available but practically inaccessible to those excluded from economic life by poverty.

Cambridge University Press notes that Marshall proposed that citizenship endowed members of a community with equality of social status that could coexist with inequality of material status – meaning that people could be formally equal as citizens even if economically unequal as workers or earners. Social rights were meant to provide a floor below which no citizen should fall, regardless of their class position.

Critiques and limitations of Marshall’s model 🔗

Marshall’s framework has been enormously influential, but it has also attracted sustained criticism from multiple directions. Britannica notes that critics argue the model merely offers a specific narrative of modern British history rather than a general social theory, and that it oversimplifies the complex evolution of citizenship even within Britain itself. Three major lines of critique stand out.

The Anglocentric problem 🔗

Marshall’s sequence – civil rights in the eighteenth century, political rights in the nineteenth, social rights in the twentieth – was derived almost entirely from the British historical experience. Wikipedia’s article on T.H. Marshall cites scholars who argue that this sequential ordering is no longer the prevalent pattern in developing and transforming countries, where the order of rights acquisition has often been quite different. Some nations developed social rights before fully securing political rights; others saw all three emerge simultaneously under particular historical pressures. The model, in short, cannot be straightforwardly applied as a universal blueprint.

The gender blind spot 🔗

A second major critique comes from feminist scholars. UK Essays summarizes the feminist critique by pointing out that Marshall’s entire framework was built around the experience of the white working-class male. Women were largely excluded from the civil and political rights Marshall described as already established – in Britain, women only gained the right to vote in 1918 (partially) and 1928 (fully). Marshall’s claim that civil freedom had already been broadly achieved in England was simply inaccurate when applied to women, who lacked the legal standing to exercise those rights on equal terms with men well into the twentieth century.

The class and capitalism tension 🔗

Marxist critics have challenged Marshall on a different front: his model fails to address the structural conditions of capitalism that continuously reproduce inequality. Political sociology scholars note that while Marshall acknowledged a tension between social rights and the market economy, he argued these could coexist – that the welfare state could contain class conflict without transforming the economic system itself. Critics on the left find this optimistic: as ScienceDirect observes, Marxist scholars argued that providing equality in civil and political rights left untouched the practical inequalities in people’s ability to exercise those rights, since economic class continued to determine life chances in ways that formal legal equality could not address.

Neoliberal challenges to social citizenship 🔗

From the right, the critique takes a different form. Wikipedia’s article on Marshall’s social citizenship describes how neoliberal ideology holds that state abstention from economic protection is the foundation of a good society, and that welfare programs have encouraged passivity among the poor without genuinely improving their opportunities. Rather than social rights being unconditional entitlements of citizenship, neoliberal policy frameworks have increasingly made access to benefits conditional on fulfilling obligations – such as work requirements or behavioral conditions – fundamentally restructuring the relationship Marshall described between status and social provision.

Citizenship beyond Marshall: modern and global dimensions 🔗

Study.com’s overview of citizenship in sociology highlights that in today’s world, citizenship extends well beyond Marshall’s three-part model. Transnational migration has created communities with ties to multiple nations, raising questions about dual citizenship and where loyalty lies. The European Union developed a layer of regional citizenship that overlaps with national citizenship – granting rights that cross national borders. Indigenous peoples assert citizenship claims based on historical sovereignty that challenge colonial state formations entirely.

Oxford’s OxPol blog on the sociology of citizenship captures the contemporary challenge well: with the role of the nation-state undergoing major transformation, and scholars grappling with overlapping sovereignties, citizenship needs to be understood as a sociological process – one shaped by ongoing collaborations and contests between people and the institutions that govern them. The question of who belongs, on what terms, and with what rights is never permanently settled; it is continuously renegotiated.

Cultural citizenship has also emerged as an important concept – the idea, developed by scholar Renato Rosaldo, that minority communities have the right to be culturally different without forfeiting their right to participate fully in democratic political life. The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology notes that this framework locates citizenship not just in legal status but in struggles for dignity, recognition, and respect – dimensions that Marshall’s model, focused on rights within a national welfare state, was never designed to fully capture.

What do you think? Does Marshall’s sequential model of civil, political, and social rights still offer a useful framework for understanding citizenship today, or has global migration and cultural diversity made it too limited to apply? And if social rights – like access to healthcare and education – are genuine components of citizenship, what does it mean when governments scale them back?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/citizenship/
2. https://sociology.plus/glossary/citizenship/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship
4. https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/citizenship
5. https://dissentmagazine.org/article/t-h-marshalls-citizenship-and-social-class/
6. https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-H-Marshall
7. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/soc15/chapter/t-h-marshall-citizenship-and-social-class/
8. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/social-citizenship
9. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/social-citizenship-and-social-rights-in-an-age-of-extremes-t-h-marshalls-social-philosophy-in-the-longue-duree/76E7DE0396793F737D4F073230CB1D7B
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._H._Marshall
11. https://www.ukessays.com/essays/social-policy/th-marshalls-theory-of-citizenship.php
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.H._Marshall's_Social_Citizenship
13. https://study.com/academy/lesson/citizenship-in-sociology-definition-types-rights.html
14. https://blog.politics.ox.ac.uk/sociology-of-citizenship/