Citizenship and the welfare state – T.H. Marshall

T.H. Marshall is certainly the scholar who contributed most to the understanding of citizenship, as a concept and as a varying reality, in the democratic industrialized countries of the West. In this chapter we shall explore how Marshall developed his theory in the context of England after the Second World War and why his contribution became crucial in the study of welfare and social policies. In the final part of the chapter, we focus on Marshal’s discussion of the hyphenated society (democratic-welfare-capitalism) and suggest that his contribution on this theme anticipates the current ideas on the crisis of welfare and democracy and on the tensions of present-day unsustainable society where inequalities are growing dramatically.