Citizenship

Modern political thought has bequeathed two conceptions of citizenship, one leading to a conception of citizenship as participation in civil society and the other a view of citizenship as a legal status based on rights and generally [Page 94]defined with respect to the state as opposed to civil society. In republican political theory, from classical thought through the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, citizenship has been largely associated with the idea of the participation of the public in the political life of the community. This has given rise to a strong association of citizenship with civil society and in general with a definition of citizenship that stresses “virtue,” the active dimension of what membership of a political community entails. In contrast to this, in fact, quite old tradition, the liberal idea of citizenship is one that emphasizes citizenship as a largely legal condition. In this understanding of citizenship, which had its origins in English seventeenth-century political theory, citizenship concerns the rights of the citizen. In addition to the dimensions of rights and participation, an adequate definition of citizenship will include the further dimensions of duties and identity. A full definition of citizenship, then, includes the four dimensions of rights, duties, participation, and identity. The first two of these refer to the formal dimensions of citizenship, while the dimensions of participation and identity refer to substantive dimensions.

Citizenship conceived in terms of rights is complicated, since rights take many forms. Four can be specified as of particular salience to issues of citizenship: civic, political, social, and cultural rights. The first three are the classic rights typically part of the liberal heritage and which were the subject of T. H. Marshall's ([1950] 1992) famous essay on citizenship, Citizenship and Social Class. In this account, which has been heavily criticized for its neat evolutionary view, civic rights—the right to free worship, peaceful opposition, free speech, the right to enter contract, ownership of property—are fairly minimal rights. Political rights, on the other hand, refer to the right to vote and the related right to stand for election. Social rights refer to the right to welfare, education, unemployment benefits, and pensions. Finally, cultural rights, which did not figure in Marshall's framework, entail the right to speak one's language, the right to express one's identity, and special representation rights. In general, cultural rights are a more recent addition to the rights discourse and are mostly conceived of as group rights for minorities, in contrast with the individual focus of the traditional rights.

That citizenship entails duties was an assumption common to both the republican and liberal traditions. In return for rights, the citizen had to perform certain duties, such as the duty to take up arms, to pay taxes, mandatory education, and the general duty to be a good citizen. However, in the liberal tradition, this dimension was generally downplayed and was, in fact, more strongly present in the republican tradition, with its characteristic notion of the good citizen. The following are the main duties of citizenship: taxation, mandatory education, and in many countries conscription. These are on the whole formal duties, but informal duties can also be mentioned; for example, there is the general duty to be a responsible, law-abiding citizen and the duty to vote.

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