Social citizenship and social rights in an age of extremes: T. H. Marshall’s social philosophy in the longue durée

This article demonstrates how T. H. Marshall’s conceptualisation of sociology – its subject, key questions, and methodology – was embedded within broader moments in twentieth-century political history, including two world wars, the economic crisis of the interwar era, the onset of the Cold War and the rise of decolonization. In doing so, it brings intellectual history and the history of academic disciplines (particularly sociology) together with more recent trends in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe, including research on post-war democratization, reconstruction and the global spread of human rights discourses. Marshall was a sociological thinker in what Eric Hobsbawm has called the “age of extremes”, whose understanding of social citizenship not only played a role in theorizing the welfare state in post-war Britain, but also helped shape reconstruction within Europe and international development efforts following decolonization. In this respect, Marshall was part of a transnational and global movement to recast key concepts such as democracy, human rights and citizenship after the Second World War. This broader perspective illuminates how his work straddles traditions of pluralism and idealism, liberalism and social democracy, rather than being simply representative of any one of these schools of thought.