Media
and Citizenship
T.H. Marshall,
“Citizenship and Social Class” (1950):
Communication:
free press, free speech; free association. Political participation based on
ownership of property (land). Rights focused on property and persons.
Communication:
political advocacy and campaigning. Political participation (right to vote, to
hold office) becomes formally disconnected from class privilege.
Communication:
access; competence. Post-WWII Keynesian welfare state. Social rights come to be
seen as an essential basis of citizenship. States begin to define needs and to
develop/decide on means to satisfy them.
Second Treatise on government (1690) – explains why members of civil
society unite to form a government, the chief reason being the protection of
property interests, “to which in the state of Nature there are many things
wanting.”
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society
(1767) – emphasis on the problem of “rude nations,” the need for civility and
thus the need to protect civil liberties.
Adam Smith – The Wealth of Nations (1776) – wrote
about “economic man” (the bourgeois,
contra citoyen) actively pursuing
“the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life.”
“Categorical imperative” as
an alternative to pure self-interest. Public sphere is where we come to
understand and respond to one another. The legal order should protect it.
The Philosophy of Right (1821) – Unlike Kant, Hegel developed a theory of
politics that treated human needs not only as important, but as the
defining feature, of citizenship.
The state gives order to the
“system of needs” by ensuring the stability of private property, social class,
and the division of labor. Hegel claims a debt to the classical political
economists such as Smith.
Democracy in
There is only
one country on the face of the earth where the citizens enjoy unlimited freedom
of association for political purposes.
This same country is the only one in the world where the continual
exercise of the right of association has been introduced into civil life and
where all the advantages which civilization can confer are procured by means of
it. (vol. 2, p. 123)
Tocqueville also saw participation in local
government as a means of enabling individuals to become effective
participants in a national polity:
"Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to
science; they bring within it the
people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it" (vol. 1, p.
63).
In 1843, Marx offered a
critique of the legacy of the political achievement of the French Revolution,
which codified the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity
in the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.”
Marx concluded that “the practical
application of the right of liberty is the right of private property.”
For Marx, “citizenship, the political
community” is reduced “to a mere means for preserving these
so-called rights of man” as the citizen becomes a mere “servant of egoistic ‘man.’”
The state, in this sense, is a means through which the bourgeois-citizen is
able to pursue his self-interest.
Like Marx, Gramsci had hope
for an egalitarian civil society.
A renaissance in the use of
the concept occurred in the 1980s, due to:
“A complex and dynamic
ensemble of legally protected non-governmental institutions that tend to be
non-violent, self-organizing… and permanently in tension with each other and
with the state institutions that ‘frame,’ constrict and enable their
activities” (John Keane).
It is a predominantly Western
concept that has recently been adopted in many non-Western countries, and in
global policy forums.
The rediscovery of civil
society first focused on the nation-state, but in the mid-late 1990s the
emphasis shifted increasingly toward the idea of a global civil society.