T.H. Marshall

T.H. Marshall (born December 19, 1893, London, England—died November 29, 1981, Cambridge) was an English sociologist, renowned for his argument that the development of the Western welfare state in the 20th century introduced a novel form of citizenship—social citizenship—that encompassed the rights to material resources and social services. Marshall held that social citizenship complemented and reinforced the civil and political citizenship that had been won in western Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Marshall was born into a wealthy professional family and educated at Rugby School and Trinity College, Cambridge. After spending World War I as a civilian internee in Germany, Marshall returned to Trinity as a history fellow in 1919. He stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party in the 1922 general election. Marshall later recollected that, although his experience as a candidate convinced him that he was temperamentally unsuited to political campaigning, it was also beneficial in that it brought him into close contact with working-class people for the first time and directly exposed him to the injustices and prejudices of the British class system.

When his fellowship at Trinity expired in 1925, Marshall was appointed as a tutor in social work at the London School of Economics and Political Science, which remained his main institutional base throughout the rest of his career. He was appointed to a professorial chair there in 1944, but he also undertook significant roles in public service, working for the British Foreign Office from 1939 to 1944 and, in his final post before his retirement, as director of the social sciences division of UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) from 1956 to 1960.

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Marshall’s most influential work, the essay “Citizenship and Social Class,” was originally delivered as the Alfred Marshall Lectures in Cambridge in 1949, only a few years after the Labour government had implemented the economist William Beveridge’s wartime plans for universal social insurance. Marshall claimed that citizenship in Britain was originally bestowed on members of high-status social groups as a single package of civil, political, and social privileges. He argued that, as capitalism and the modern state emerged, a new egalitarian and legally defined form of community membership began to take shape. That new kind of citizenship slowly pulled apart the package of privileges hitherto enjoyed exclusively by the well born. In the first instance, Marshall said, the 18th century saw the gradual acceptance of the idea of equal civil rights, including the right to freedom of speech, the right to own property and to conclude contracts, and the right to justice (understood as “the right to defend and assert all one’s rights on terms of equality with others and by due process of law”). With the rule of law thus entrenched, Marshall continued, the 19th century then saw the expansion of the franchise and hence the universalization of political rights, including the right to elect representatives to Parliament. Finally, according to Marshall, in the 20th century, social citizenship began to emerge, with the right to material resources and social services increasingly regarded as an integral component of each citizen’s package of rights. With many European states adopting universal access to health care, education, housing, and social insurance in the 20th century, Marshall argued that the new raft of social rights had replaced earlier ideas of providing material assistance only as a matter of charity or, as under earlier social welfare legislation, of making state assistance conditional on recipients forfeiting their civil or political rights.

Various criticisms have been leveled against Marshall’s account, among others that it merely offers a specific narrative of modern British history rather than a general social theory and that it oversimplifies the complex evolution of the status of citizenship in Britain. Many scholars also faulted him for offering a rather complacent story of inexorable upward progress, leaving out the bitter struggles involved in winning basic individual rights for all and assuming that the final victory of social rights was an irreversible achievement. In some circles, his name thus became a byword for the smug and triumphalist social democracy that was alleged to have been widespread on the moderate left after 1945.

For Marshall’s supporters, however, such objections underestimated his theory, which, they argued, consisted in a subtle attempt to integrate, and improve upon, core themes in social theory drawn from the sociologists Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. Marshall’s main insight was that there was a sharp tension between the slowly emerging legally authorized equality of the modern state and the great class inequality of capitalist societies. With the emergence of the civil rights to own property and make contractual agreements, Marshall argued, the inequalities of political power and economic resources that structure individual opportunities come to seem arbitrary, inequitable, and in urgent need of redress. The widening of the franchise and the creation of social rights are consequently required to address this tension between civil equality and political and economic inequality. Marshall did not see this as an effortless process destined to be fulfilled but, on the contrary, as the fruit of centuries of difficult struggle. He took pride in the achievements of the British welfare state of the 1940s and hoped that the future might see further progress toward a more egalitarian society. But Marshall did not underestimate the continuing, and in some ways intractable, tension between social rights and the market.