Sociological Aspects of Citizenship Research Paper

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Classical sociological theory was especially interested in the social mechanisms ensuring social solidarity, and in the sources of conflicts that challenge the social structure. It underlined roles, functions or dysfunctions, the networks of sociability which bring the actors together, etc. In general, the founders of the discipline were not very concerned with politics and hardly dealt with the question of citizenship, which marks the integration of actors within their nation. Consequently, until very recently, the question of citizenship had its origins within political theory, having abandoned its social dimensions for a long period.

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From Aristotle to Locke and Rousseau, many philosophers have reflected on the nature of the social link, the commitment of individuals within the public space, the formation of the social contract and general willingness. People are conceived here as rational beings: By their entrance into the political community, they have access to the status of citizen which alone gives meaning to its own history. In the contemporary era, from Sheldon Wolin (1993) to Carole Pateman (1970), this reflection of political philosophy on the foundations of a democracy of citizens is illustrated by an immense literature, of which Benjamin Barber (1984) and his ‘strong democracy’ or Selya Benhabib (1996) are good representatives.

The revival of the political theory on citizenship has, however, found its origins: Hannah Arendt sought within the Greek polis the foundations of a via activa which would give life to citizens who were indifferent to the social, determined only by their reason, to enter into public space. After Arendt, it was Jurgen Habermas who took it upon himself to seek the origin of modern public space as a place of deliberation and discussion. According to him, public opinion formed by all citizens was born in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in France and in England. Viewing capitalism as a system that alienates actors and destroys their exchanges, he only found reason within contemporary ‘communicational behavior’; the use of modern information techniques would therefore give life to a democracy of citizens capable of communicating among themselves. Arendt and Habermas played an immense role in the revival of a political theory on citizenship capable of leading to a community which is undiluted by citizens who are little concerned by their particular historical identity, or their cultural identity, either social or even less biological.




A reflection upon the sociological foundations of citizenship should consequently find food for its debates elsewhere. Thus, it can be claimed that during the nineteenth century, de Tocqueville was one of the few thinkers to extend the eighteenth century tradition by giving it a more sociological context. He clearly poses the question of the commitment of ordinary citizens. Tocqueville asks himself questions about how to avoid the isolation and apathy of individuals, which favors, in France, for example, an indifference propitious to all forms of authoritarianism; in his opinion, the forms of local self-government established by US democracy limit these dangers. For Tocqueville, public space is doomed to silence and to state domination if the associations and social groups that bring individuals together with specific identical interests do not intervene within the elaboration of public politics. Citizens find themselves, from the beginning, plunged into the social. Whereas Marx thrusts aside the coming of citizenship for the birth of a society that has rejected capitalism and sees only alienation in present society, thus silencing the purely political role of determined citizens by their place in production relationships, Tocqueville was already interested in the sociological aspects of citizenship.

Strangely enough, between Tocqueville and T. H. Marshall, the predominance of the social was so important that it was necessary to wait until the end of World War II for the concept of citizenship to return to the heart of the debates: However, this time, it was not the perspective of Rousseau that prevailed but more that of Tocqueville. During his famous conference in 1949, Marshall retraced the evolution which led from legal citizenship, created during the eighteenth century with the obtaining of civil rights, to political citizenship, obtained during the nineteenth century with the exercising of political rights, and then finally to social citizenship which is granted to all, in the twentieth century, with the triumph of the Welfare State and social rights (minimum salary, health provision, etc.) (Marshall 1977).

For Marshall, the triumph of capitalism does not prevent the implementation of citizenship, this time, full and entire: From then onwards, for the first time, citizenship openly bears an essential sociological dimension, as social redistribution considers the diversity of social situations this time beyond the common role of the citizen. If the civil and political dimensions concerned all citizens in their actual state, independently from their specific social identity, the economical dimension aims at correcting the inequalities amongst citizens. Marshall himself does not underline this modification on the principle of citizenship that thrusts it into the social domain, and hardly interferes with its universalistic dimension. He does not consider either—and was later criticized for this—the persistence of so many social inequalities which remain, even in the age of the Welfare State, and occasionally even worsen, actually threatening the citizenship of the most deprived. In this way, Ralph Dahrendorf stresses ‘all those who are rejected by citizenship’: ‘the noncitizens’ who are the immigrants; ‘those who are no longer entirely citizens,’ i.e., the elderly; and finally ‘those who are not yet citizens,’ i.e., youth. The erosion of citizenship questions the image of the ‘good citizen’ equipped with all the necessary attributes for entering into public space. The explosion of the ‘underclass’ breaks the image of a citizenship which is full and entire, which all people would benefit from in an identical manner in the developed world (Heissler 1994).

From then onwards, a fairly important turnaround of perspective occurred. It no longer involved considering, in a traditional manner, that ‘in the Nation State each citizen stands in a direct relation to the sovereign authority of the country’ (Bendic 1977). It did not reflect on the conditions of admission to citizenship which separate the ‘insiders’ from the ‘outsiders’ (Gunsteren 1988). Neither did it extend this type of reflection which uses citizenship as its foundations for the territory of the nation state by dealing with the case of a postnational citizenship which would take place, for example, in the new public European space where all citizens who have become ‘cosmopolitan’ would benefit from formal identical rights based upon an intangible constitutional principle, that of ‘constitutional patriotism’ dear to Habermas, hoping for the emergence of collective mobilizations destined to accentuate the democratic dimension (Cesarini and Fulbrook 1996, Delanty 1997). Instead, the systematic research of elements of a ‘differentiated citizenship’ was undertaken, taking into account the multiple sociological dimensions peculiar to each citizen, whether it be economical, cultural, or a matter of genus.

For Kymlicka, ‘the members of certain groups are incorporated into the political community not only as individuals but also through the group. I have sometimes described these rights as forms of differentiated citizenship’ (Kymlicka 1995, p. 174). If many sociologists dealt with the consequences of these socioeconomical inequalities on political participation and the exercise of the profession of the citizen, it is even more the dimensions, diagrammatically coming under culture, that increasingly attract attention. In a context of growing crisis within the nation state that greatly effects citizenship in Weber’s sense, or even in Marshall’s or Bendix’s sense, it was suggested that the theory of integration, for example that of Marshall, ‘does not necessarily work for culturally distinct immigrants or for various other groups which have been historically excluded from full participation in the national culture—such as blacks, women, religious minorities, gays and lesbians. Some members of these groups still feel excluded from the ‘‘common culture,’’ despite possessing the common rights of citizenship’ (Kymlicka 1995, p. 180).

Stemming from such a perspective, citizenship finds itself this time plunged into the social with the risk of losing its original meaning: As a result, public space becomes diversified to an infinite extent as citizens preserve their identity there and democracy itself changes its meaning. As Amy Gutmann asks ‘What does it mean for citizens with different cultural identities, often based on ethnicity, race, gender or religion, to recognize ourselves as equals in the way we are treated in politics?’ (Guttman 1992, p. 3). The democracy of citizens in fact finds itself greatly modified in the same way as the political game, the strategy of parties and of pressure groups who use such identitarian groups as the basis for their actions. Affirmative action, a policy openly destined to smooth out socioidentitarian inequalities by privileging the members of deprived ‘ethnic groups,’ is the clear outcome which implies a differential management of citizenship and sets down an infinite number of problems of justice and of equality. From the moment that we consider that individuals possess a ‘thick self,’ it becomes difficult to claim the recovering of these differences by a ‘veil of ignorance’ (Rawls [1971] 1987), differences which are deep-rooted within these community memberships considered from now on as being essential.

A considerable literature grew up in the area of multiculturalism, which constantly further reduces the importance of the classical theory of citizenship. By moving onward from the fact that it is unfair to ignore the identity of citizens, the tendency is to reinstate their culture with the risk of slipping toward a deep relativism. In this way, the rediscovery of the identity shared by citizens relegitimizes the particular national cultures, the ‘ethnic’ feelings and also the nationalistic ideologies (Birnbaum 1996) which consider these neglected ethnic groups to be the foundations of their action in aid of the new citizens who are members of these particular homogenous cultural groups.

Plunged into a growing communitarism, citizenship therefore leads to a nationalistic revival. On an internal level of society, he justifies the ‘tribalization’ of society into many specific homogenous groups separate from each other: with the image of the working class of yesteryear which constituted a countersociety of which they claimed to be the active citizens, immigrants are supposed to conserve their culture, their language, and their own customs by benefiting from the right to vote, of local citizenship when they have not been naturalized. Women or homosexuals, like all social and cultural minorities, are also invited to join together in a particular manner.

The first among the feminist critics severely emphasized the great indifference of the classical theoreticians of citizenship toward the feminine gender: the French Revolution, which was geared towards the universalism of citizens, did, however, force women to return to the only private space (Landes 1988, Hunt 1992). In a more general way, the woman citizen demands consideration for her body and her own values in the exercise of this role within the public space ( Young 1990). In this way, it is in fact the classical theories of deliberative democracy and also the models of the integration of the social system, for example, in their systematic Parsonian presentation, which find themselves questioned (Birnbaum 1996). To take into consideration the sociological variables of citizenship is, therefore, in one way or another, to give an advantage to the ‘thick self’ to the detriment of the ‘thin’ self upon which the classical theories of citizenship were formerly built (Walzer 1994, Kymlicka and Norman 1994).

Bibliography:

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  3. Benhabib S (ed.) 1996 Democracy and Diff Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
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