Classical Sociology

266 Classical Sociology
was part of the process of civilization wherein the virtues of the knightat-arms
were transferred to the arena of the royal court with its effeminate
courtiers and its ideology of courtesy, and later to the disciplined asceticism
of the bourgeois household. These social conditions also indicate the
rootedness of the concept of obligation as the cornerstone of bourgeois
responsibility (to family and occupation), bourgeois morality with respect
to the public/private division, and bourgeois versions of civil republicanism
(Selbourne, 1994). This politico-moral configuration was also the origin
of Karl Marx’s hostility to the ‘possessive individualism’ of the English
utilitarians such as Bentham and Mill, and to the narrow, undimensional
development of the ‘political’ in classical liberalism. With the rise of economic
rationalism in the twentieth century, interest has once more
returned to the analysis of the market in relation to possessive individualism,
indifference to strangers and hostility to welfare-dependency among
the economically marginalized. Citizenship and civic virtues are once
more seen to be an essential ingredient of a civilized and pluralistic democracy.
This concern for the political threat to civic culture in a market society
has been associated with a re-appraisal of Mill’s liberalism (Bobbio, 1987),
the importance of pluralism (Hirst, 1989) and the role of voluntary associations
in democracy (Cohen and Rogers, 1995). The cultural dimension of
citizenship is now an essential component of citizenship studies, especially
in a context where there is political ambiguity around the analysis of cultural
fragmentation and simulation brought about by postmodernization.
The final component of this sociological model of citizenship is the idea
of a political community as the basis of citizenship: this political community
is typically the nation-state. When individuals become citizens, they
not only enter into a set of institutions that confers upon them rights and
obligations, they not only acquire an identity, they are not only socialized
into civic virtues, but they also become members of a political community
with a particular territory and history. In order to have citizenship one has
to be, at least in most modern societies, a bona fide member of a political
community. Generally speaking, it is rather unusual for people to acquire
citizenship if they are not simultaneously members of a political community,
that is a nation-state. One should notice here an important difference
between human rights and citizenship. Human rights are typically conferred
upon people as humans irrespective of whether they are Australian,
British, Chinese, Indonesian or whatever, but, because human rights legislation
has been accepted by the nations of the world, people can claim
human rights, even where they are stateless people or dispossessed
refugees. In general, citizenship is a set of rights and obligations that attach
to members of formally recognized nation-states within the system of
nations and hence citizenship corresponds to legal membership of a nationstate.
Citizenship identities and citizenship cultures are national identities
and national cultures. Since nations are imaginary communities (Anderson,
1983) and since nations are created (James, 1996), the communal basis of