ABSTRACT
In my Citizenship and Capitalism (Turner 1986) and ‘Outline of a Theory of Citizenship’ (Turner 1990) I attempted to describe a comparative approach to the nature and development of citizenship in modern society but primarily in Western societies. The two dimensions of that model were what we might call the cultural and historical-structural aspects of citizenship. On the one hand, citizenship can either emerge through social struggles, primarily class conflict, for entitlements or, on the other hand, social and political entitlements can be handed down by the state with the aim of incorporating the working class or marginal social groups into the polity. This attention to popular struggles for citizenship entitlements was written in part as a response to Michael Mann’s article in Sociology (1978) which characterized the growth of citizenship as primarily a top-down state strategy to incorporate the working class into emerging capitalist societies. The other dimension was, in retrospect, more problematical, being concerned with whether a society emphasized the moral prominence of either the public or the private domain. Is the moral development of the individual thought to take place within the public sphere, or is the individual thought to be corrupted by social influences, thereby requiring some protection from the outside world? This view of education was in the western tradition closely associated with Rousseau’s educational ideas in Emile in 1762 (Rousseau 1979). These two dimensions provided a property space in which I could, broadly speaking, compare liberal, republican, national, and conservative orientations to the construction of citizenship.
