ABSTRACT

Social movements which aim to change society in the name of a generalized belief inevitably raise questions about the nature of participation in society and thus are inevitably movements about the rights of citizenship. Citizenship rights are the outcome of social movements which aim either to expand or to defend the definition of social membership. The long-term consequence of such social movements has been to elaborate and universalize the notion of citizenship. The notion of social movements was subsequently adopted by French Marxist and radical sociology to analyse the social movements which had so massively disrupted French life in the late 1960s. The notion of social movement is important in understanding the nature of the drive for citizenship participation by groups and collectivities which cannot be analysed exclusively by their class composition. Hegel conceptualized citizenship in terms of the growing abstraction and universalism of the state. The growth of an abstract deity thus perfectly matches the growth of abstract citizenship.