Those social democratic implications derive from Marshall’s proposition that the very concept of modern citizenship is at odds with unmerited inequalities and should be deployed to abate them. Citizenship, he explained, is a “status bestowed on all those who are full members of a community.” Those members share rights, duties, and the protections of a common law. The bonds of modern citizenship grow among them first through the “struggle to win those rights,” and then, once gained, by their “enjoyment.” And so, modern citizenship is born also of “loyalty to a civilization which is a common possession.”
Common. Marshall assumes that people are not simply egos batting about in artificially framed spaces that they happen to call nations or states. There is such a thing as “society”; the social individuals who make it up ought to share a basic notion—and system—of fairness rooted in mutuality. The kind of market fundamentalism that was rehabilitated closer to our times (in the Thatcher-Reagan era) is obviously at odds with this way of thinking.
This thinking does not entail a simplistic negation of the positive accomplishments of classical European liberalism, with its stress on individualism and markets; it does propose that modern citizenship, as a status held by all, expands the domains of equality at the expense of social class, with its vestiges of a pre-modern hierarchy of privileged estates. The persistent enrichment of citizenship rights, thought Marshall, ought to render important powers associated with social differences increasingly less powerful. (This has been challenged from the Left on the grounds that economic inequalities too easily, even inevitably, translate into undue political influence.)
But let’s follow Marshall’s presentation in a little more detail.