Of Welfare and Citizenship

Abstract

We began Chapter 1 with an epigraph to illustrate a particular nineteenth century view which imagined that the statuses of poverty and riches were natural, proper and unalterable. We begin this chapter by illustrating a more ‘progressive’ nineteenth century view which foretold that the civilising forces of industrialised liberal democracy would ensure the amelioration of class differences and the possibility, not of social equality, but of equal citizenship. The symbols in Alfred Marshall’s vision are not of beggars and castles, but of modern factories made congenial by the advance of technology. It is a view which, precisely because it attributes status to male occupations within the labour market, once again renders invisible the lives of women and children. None the less, it is a view which at least lays claim to encompass the ordinary mass; the ‘civilised’ working class who are neither rich nor poor.

The question is not whether all men will ultimately be equal — that they certainly will not — but whether progress may not go on steadily, if slowly, till, by occupation at least, every man is a gentleman. I hold that it may, and that it will.

(Alfred Marshall, The Future of the Working Classes, 1873. Cited in T.H. Marshall 1950: 4–5)