ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the normative status of claims to the social rights of citizenship in the light of New Right criticisms of the welfare state. It assesses whether there is any normative justification for treating welfare provision and citizenship as intrinsically linked. New Right theorists are troubled by the welfare state for both economic and moral reasons. Despite the influence enjoyed by the New Right challenge, it is striking how little the welfare state has actually been eroded. The principal theorist of the ‘social citizenship’ idea is the British sociologist, T. H. Marshall. In an essay entitled ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, published originally in 1949. The present argument is not a cast-iron defence of welfare provision. The arguments are separate but they are not meant to be mutually exclusive: the people have presented them as partially overlapping, partially complementary ways of teasing out the normative implications of social citizenship.
