Citizenship and the welfare state – T.H. Marshall

Marshall elaborated his theory of citizenship in the late 1940s. This entry explores how Marshall developed his theory in the context of Britain after the Second World War and why his contribution became crucial in the study of welfare and social policies. Some of the conditions that had enabled the consensual and interclass development of welfare between the 1940s and 1960s gradually disappeared. The promise of equality— legal, economic, political, social— inherent in the concept of citizenship elaborated by Marshall at the end of the 1940s is today strongly questioned. A focus on Marshall’s discussion of the hyphenated society (democratic-welfare-capitalism) suggests that his contribution on this theme anticipates the current ideas on the crisis of welfare and democracy and on the tensions of present-day unsustainable society where social inequalities are growing dramatically.