Rights and Duties

Abstract

Ideas about citizenship — its rights and duties, privileges and obliga­tions — have lain at the heart of political debate through the centuries. It is a status that expresses the relationship between government and people, defining those who are accorded a collection of ‘entitlements’, but also excluding those whose claims are not acknowledged. Himmelfarb has remarked that the natural, unproblematic poverty of one age becomes the urgent social problem of another. So, too, people without particular rights but also, perhaps, with little sense of deprivation at one period may come to feel themselves and be seen by others as deprived at a later time. Thus, women’s political and social expectations and opportunities have been transformed over the past hundred years. And young and old people, homosexuals, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities have all gained wider citizenship status.