20th Century Accounts of American Citizenship

Accounts of citizenship by Presidents of the American Political Science Association (APSA) are examined through Mannheim"s sociology of knowledge. We use Marshall as a platform to reconceptualise the dynamics of Mannheim"s three incommensurable "thought styles": one liberal; one conservative; and one dialectically social. We suggest on this basis that American political citizenship in the twentieth century entails three incompatible but concurrent "thought styles", that involve a triple helix of political rationalities (see White and Donoghue 2003). The model is tested in a longitudinal study of "citizenship and democracy" in regular social scientific usage. The empirical material comprises the presidential addresses to the American Political Science Association (APSA) published in the American Political Science Review (APSR) from 1906 to 1997. The findings suggest that the addresses by the presidents of the Political Science Association of America invoke intertwining rationalities that relate twentieth century citizenship to classical political discourses. Accounts of citizenship by Presidents of the American Political Science Association are examined through Mannheim"s sociology of knowledge. In the introductory section on citizenship the paper will stress that citizenship is essentially contestable; that it is component of modern democracy and that it involves trinary orderings to accommodate tensions. Marshall"s tripartite models of citizenship provide a point of departure: the widely discussed claim in his early work that civil, political and social rights emerged sequentially and the less noted account of democratic-welfare-capitalist tensions in the "hyphenated society". The paper will briefly sketch Marshall"s arguments and then use them to reconceptualise the dynamics of Mannheim"s three incommensurable "thought styles": one liberal; one conservative; and one dialectically social. The paper suggests on this basis that American political citizenship is seen as entailing three mutually incompatible "thought styles" that involve a triple helix of political rationalities (see White and Donoghue 2003). The paper suggests that the Presidents" accounts invoke the ragged intertwining of rationalities, and in the concluding discussion the citizenship will be linked to modern themes in the study of politics. "Citizenship" is a key marker of participation and membership. It has never proved amenable to exhaustive and comprehensive definition. Like other central social scientific concepts, it is essentially contestable, in that its meanings emerge in disputed and recursive use (Gallie 1964, Isin 2002). That has been a feature throughout all the accounts of citizenship written since Aristotle"s pragmatic allowance for the difficulty: "(w)hat effectively distinguishes the citizen proper from all others is his participation in giving judgement and in holding office" (Politics 1962: 22). Since that simply shifts the issue to what "participation" means, and since accounts of "participation" are always entangled in politico-moral claims, the definitional problem remains. Marshall"s version, that citizenship is "a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community" (1950: 28), leaves the question as open as did Aristotle"s, for while "membership" may be formally defined, "community" retains all the uncertainty of its popular use. Contestable concepts can yield relatively fixed points in what would otherwise be an impossible churn, and they are also points of departure. Writers on citizenship often take Marshall"s 1950"s tripartite model of the successive stages of civil, political and social rights as a point of departure rather than as a given. One effect of the paradigmatic functioning of that model, however, has been the return of the "economic man" who has been striding through so much of the social analysis of the last two hundred years. To take civil, political and social as analytically distinct and as historically successive is already to