ABSTRACT
Attention to the meaning and making of citizenship rights has been glaringly absent from recent sociolegal research agendas for far too long. Thirty years have passed since Reinhard Bendix’s Nation-Building and Citizenship, and over 40 since Т. H. Marshall first published his masterful series of lectures, Citizenship and Social Class (Bendix 1977; Marshall 1950). Happily this is beginning to change with the recent contributions of, among others, Jeffrey Alexander (1992:289), Rogers Brubaker (1992), Anthony Giddens (1982, 1987), Michael Mann (1987:339), Charles Tilly (1990a, b), Bryan Turner (1986), and Alan Wolfe (1989). Now we truly have cause for scholarly celebration with the republication in a new edition of the Т. H. Marshall volume (1992). 1 Hardly could this be more timely. Rarely have Marshall’s driving themes—the politics of citizenship, rights, and social change—more dramatically been yoked together than in the revolutions and upheavals of recent years. Across Europe and Asia, societies constructed and reconstructed on a framework of national state control and putative economic redistribution have collapsed or have been fundamentally challenged by the dynamic momentum of an extraordinary source of power—the mobilizing force of popular claims to citizenship rights and identities. The world-historical impact of these events is obvious. The implications for sociological reflection should also be both large and urgent: Just what is this power we call citizenship and how and why is such an identity constructed as a dynamic force in history?
