Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2018
The republication after 40 years of T. H. Marshall's Citizenship and Social Class signifies a revived interest in sociolegal historical approaches to citizenship rights. For decades students have been guided by Marshall's classic treatise. But can Marshall's argument for the causal power of the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” continue to provide an adequate grounding for sociolegal approaches to citizenship and rights formation? Building on Marshall's path-breaking expansion of the concept of citizenship, I use institutional analysis and causal narrativity to present an alternative explanation. I argue that modem citizenship rights me a contingent outcome of the convergence of England's medieval legal revolutions with its regionally varied local legal and political cultures, not of the emergence of capitalist markets.
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27 Minow, , 96 Yale L.J., for a similar definition of rights to the one I am using here.Google Scholar
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40 Rick Lempert has pointed out correctly that these questions can be sensibly posed as a sociology of knowledge question: Why do we ignore certain rights and not others in our theories of modern citizenship? The answer, in part, is that theories of citizenship are embedded within a prevailing sociolegal knowledge culture (similar to Kuhn's paradigm) constituted by a master-narrative about modern law and institutions which largely defines in advance what is to count as a modem right in the first place. The importance of this sociolegal knowledge culture is taken up in the conclusion at greater length. See also Somers, “Where is Social Theory?” (cited in note 14).Google Scholar
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55 This interesting question was raised by an anonymous LSI referee.Google Scholar
56 Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds.Google Scholar
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59 Cited in Donald Hansen, From Kingdom to Commonwealth: The Development of Civic Consciousness in English Political Thought 157 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) (“Hansen, From Kingdom to Commonwealth”).Google Scholar
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69 Noticeably absent from my argument is discussion of the king's peace or the criminal law—arguably the dimensions of royal law that most ordinary people were confronted with daily. There is a wealth of literature and debate on the social history of the criminal law (see, e.g., the vast debate surrounding Douglas Hay's edited volume, Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-century England (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), and E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975)) (“Thompson, Whigs and Hunters”). Less attention has been paid these other aspects of law that I argue were so central to the formation of citizenship identities.Google Scholar
70 The next few paragraphs draw from Somers, 58 Am. Soc. Rev. (cited in note 7).Google Scholar
71 In France, by contrast, the community was excluded. See Bruce Lenman & Geoffrey Parker, “The State, the Community, and the Criminal Law in Early Modem Europe,” in V. A. C. Gatrell et al., eds., Crime and the Law 11 (London: Europa, 1980) (“Lenman & Parker, ‘The State’”).Google Scholar
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