June 2015

by Sylvia de Mars

(c) Howard Coster, 1944, National Portrait Gallery

Belatedly, on account of holidays and illness, we did not reconvene for Take 2 of TH Marshall until June 2015 – and on account of technical issues, we did not manage to record second discussion of Citizenship and Social Class.  It proved an appropriate capstone to our year of considering issues surrounding ‘citizenship’ in detail, however, as this revisiting of a sociological ‘classic’ on modern citizenship emphasized a significant number of the problems we uncovered in our reading over the last year.  The explicit acknowledgement of ‘community’ as the substance of citizenship (more so than its rights) that Marshall stresses throughout is almost entirely absent in modern legal-style ‘citizenship’, which is almost sterile in relative comparison; we agreed, though to differing degrees, that citizenship has extreme normative value but is easily ‘used’ and has been fostered as a concept by the ruling class to create a culture of mistrust of the outsider.

Going from a ‘collective’ concept to a potentially more ‘individual’ one, we agreed that our next common theme for reading will be “Identity and Technology“.  This loose title is there to capture all reading that (inter alia) considers how advances in technology change our conceptions of self, our control over said conception, and the extent to which and the ways in which law can potentially function as a bridge between the ideal and the reality.  The next session will hopefully take place in July and actually be recorded – details to follow.