ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews several approaches to citizenship and equality that directly or indirectly build on Weber's conceptualisation in order to assess their actual or potential contribution to sociology of global inequalities. It argues that those Weberian approaches that offer the widest analytical scope are the ones that leave behind the comparative-historical framework and instead offer a global framework for examining the effects that social closure through citizenship has on the reproduction of existing inequalities. Following Weber's analysis of the city, Parsons also traced the solidary social community of modern societies back to the Christian community of faith. The comparative-historical analysis of the emergence of the institution of citizenship in different parts of the world in relation to the Western model or of national citizenship policies in Western states fails to target the logic of accumulation at the same time as it reinforces the principle of ascription that underlies it.
