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Citizenship Today: The Contemporary Relevance of T. H. Marshall, edited by Martin Bulmer and Anthony M. Rees. Bristol, PA: UCL Press, 1996. 206 pp. NPL cloth. ISBN: 1-85728-4712. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 1-85728-472-0.
Citizenship, a topic largely ignored by U.S. sociologists, has emerged as a hot issue in the 1990s. The triumph of neoliberal economic policy and the dismantling of the social welfare net have revived debates about social entitlements and the role of the state in mitigating economic inequality. Among sociologists currently writing on the welfare state, it is striking how many refer back to T. H. Marshall's classic 1949 Oxford lecture in which he distinguished among civil, political, and social citizenship and sketched the historical development of each type.
The appearance of this collection of a dozen T. H. Marshall Memorial lectures inspired by his work is therefore timely. The contributors comprise a who's who of (male) British sociology, with the addition of one American, William J. Wilson. Composed as lectures, the essays are engagingly written and admirably succinct. Although a few diverge into other areasnotably John Goldthorpe's interesting essay on historical methods-the majority of the essays revolve around Marshall's concerns with citizenship, class inequality, and social policy.
The introductory essay by Anthony Rees ably reviews the main criticisms of and amendments to Marshall's account: the twin issues of periodization and typology-whether Marshall's sequence of civil rights developing in the eighteenth, political rights in the nineteenth, and social rights in the twentieth century was accurate and whether each type is coherent and separate; the Englishness of his account-whether the concepts are applicable to other cases; and the conspicuous neglect of conflict and struggle-whether his account...