Sciortino-full Citizenship (Parsons)

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2010 10: 239Journal of Classical SociologyGiuseppe Sciortino

citizenship and modern society'A single societal community with full citizenship for all': Talcott Parsons,

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Corresponding author:Giuseppe Sciortino, Dipartimento di Sociologia e ricerca sociale, Universit di Trento, Via Verdi 26, 38122 Trento, Italy Email: [email protected]

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A single societal community with full citizenship for all: Talcott Parsons, citizenship and modern society

Giuseppe Sciortino Universit di Trento, Italy

AbstractThe main claim of this paper is to show that any canon of citizenship studies should include Talcott Parsons. Contrary to the received views, Talcott Parsons provides an innovative view of citizenship as a key sociological structure, rooted in his theory of modern society. In doing so, he anticipates contemporary debates on the topic by highlighting the relationship between citizenship and cultural pluralism in modern Western societies. The paper provides both an interpretative account of Parsons analysis of citizenship and an assessment of its contemporary relevance.

Keywords citizenship, differentiation, ethnicity, inclusion, Parsons, pluralism, race

As with any new and rapidly expanding academic field, citizenship studies has an uneasy relationship with its potential founding classics. From one side, there is some pressure to define the field as being concerned with a set of recent events requiring answers that go beyond existing frameworks and intellectual traditions (Ong, 2006). This is not surpris-ing, since the field is vibrant and new, and both publishers and students want to hear that contemporary social life requires an entirely new understanding of citizenship, inclusion and recognition. They wish to claim that previously established conceptual frameworks have melted into thin air.

From the other side, there is the need for a canon, as fluid and contested as it may be. A set of common references is helpful in multiple dimensions of scholarship in regulating debates, condensing communication, providing resources for teaching and thinking, increasing reciprocal understanding and clarifying conceptual cleavages. In disciplines that are fragmented, some argue, a set of classics is the functional equivalent to a hegemonic


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240 Journal of Classical Sociology 10(3)

single conceptual paradigm (Alexander, 1987; Poggi, 1996). As citizenship studies is a recent, multidisciplinary and multi-paradigmatic field (Isin and Turner, 2002), it will likely develop along this classical track.

The main claim of this paper is to show that any canon of citizenship studies should include Talcott Parsons. The notion of citizenship plays a crucial role in Parsons analysis of contemporary Western society. In broad terms, Parsons account of modernity is sys-tematically rooted in evolving structures of solidarity and thus it continually touches upon issues of membership and inclusion. Building and expanding on T.H. Marshalls (1950) work, Parsons presents citizenship as a key sociological structure. He sees citi-zenship as linked to a primary feature of social integration the self-reinforcing relation-ship between generalized membership and social pluralism. In doing so, he anticipates contemporary debates on the topic by highlighting the relationship between citizenship and cultural pluralism in modern Western societies. He also provides an analysis of citi-zenship as an evolutionary achievement, claiming that the structural differentiation of modern societies produces a set of tensions that may be managed successfully only through the development of a generalized inclusion in a common polity. Finally, this grounded liberalism defines the existence of any ascriptive, second-class status within the citizenship complex as a significant obstacle and an effective threat to the integration of Western societies. Indeed, in many ways that resonate with the contemporary context, Parsons delves into the complexities of citizenship from within and the issue of second-class citizenship.

Taken together, these claims provide the basic outline of Parsons analysis of citizen-ship. They also demonstrate the enduring significance of his work, in both empirical and theoretical terms, for contemporary citizenship studies. The main strength of Parsons corpus is its capacity to differentiate his interpretation of citizenship both from the empirical implausibility of much normative theorizing in political philosophy and from the nostalgic temptations of critical theory. To argue for the enduring centrality of Parsons analysis implies neither a claim nor a desire for empirical correctness or theo-retical superiority. The point is not that Parsons was always adequate in his analyses or that his approach is the right one. Some of the progressive premises he took for granted in the climate of the 1960s and 1970s have turned out to be spurious or short-lived. His analysis underplays key factors in the historical expansion of social citizenship, such as the exigencies of warfare. And his strong evolutionary approach often blinded him, along with most liberal intellectuals of the period, to the possibility that rights not only expand but also contract, that inclusive and exclusive tendencies may alternate or even coexist, and that processes of socio-economic change may operate both ways. To claim an endur-ing significance for Parsons work does not signify hero worship or an attempt to show that in the last instance he was right. What makes Parsons a classic for citizenship studies is simply that both his achievements and his shortcomings are highly instructive and fertile for contemporary research.

Social Membership as a Key Structure of Sociological InterestAlbeit a self-proclaimed incurable theorist, Talcott Parsons has contributed to virtually every field of empirical inquiry. A cursory glance at his bibliography reveals essays and



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empirical research on a large variety of sociological topics ranging from family life to health, political phenomena to religion and ethnicity to sexuality. Although some of these are regarded as among his best contributions to sociological knowledge (Levine, 1989), the systematic nature of his empirical interests and their embedding in his theoretical project remain largely unappreciated (Lidz, 1986).

Issues of membership and inclusion are a common thread throughout Parsons analy-ses of Western society from his early concerns with anti-Semitism and free-floating aggression (Parsons, 1942a, 1942b, 1945, 1946, 1955) to his evolutionary work in the 1960s (Parsons, 1964b, 1966a, 1971c) up to his final attempt to provide an adequate description of the integrative structures of American society (Parsons, 2007). What con-nects Parsons empirical and theoretical work is a sustained attempt to go beyond political-economy approaches that are centred (and caged) in the duality of state and market in order to provide an account of social life that not only avoids treating cultural identities and social solidarities as residual categories but also integrates them systematically within a sociological framework. No doubt most of his theses may be contested and heavily criticized (Alexander, 2005). But the ways in which Parsons posed the problems related to societal membership and the conceptual frameworks he provided for thinking about them are nevertheless an unsurpassed sociological resource (Sciortino, 2005).

How does Parsons broader theoretical framework connect to his specific analyses of citizenship and inclusion? There is no room here to provide even a cursory introduction to action theory, one of the most complex, and sometimes esoteric, monuments of modern social science.1 For an analysis of Parsons works on citizenship, however, a good start-ing point is the fact that for most of his career he was preoccupied with two major ques-tions. Analytically, he sought to construct the possibility of a voluntaristic social order, accounting for the social coordination of actors in terms different from the assumptions of a zero-sum game. Empirically, he worked toward the development of an account of social change and modernity that was able to explain the highly unlikely social processes that have brought about the breakdown of ascription as the main component in regulating social interaction. Parsons saw modern society mostly in terms of the differentiation, albeit uneven and incomplete, of a sphere of pluralistic social relationships, held together not only by domination and exchange, but also by cross-cutting ties of sociability, iden-tification, solidarity and persuasion. It is not surprising that a lifelong exploration of these problems made him deeply sensitive to issues of citizenship, as a political institu-tion and as one component of the system of individual memberships. Citizenship is indeed a key concept in most of his writings on Western society, particularly those con-cerning the United States (Lechner, 1998; Lidz, 2009; Turner, 1993).

Parsons understanding of social membership is strictly linked with a key, although often underestimated, feature of action theory its break with classical social theory about the forms of sociological theory. His work represents a conscious effort to move sociological analysis beyond the search for social wholes, the construction of epochal dichotomies and the attempt to identify first movers for all societal processes. His action theory substitutes last-instance explanations rooted in the structure/superstructure assumption with the analysis of interdependencies among analytically irreducible ele-ments. It substitutes total or ideal types with a nested level of analysis; it substitutes reductionism with multidimensional analysis. From the double contingency of interaction




to the pattern variables, from the AGIL scheme to the generalized media of interchange, Parsons efforts do not reduce a plurality of epiphenomena to a single criterion of order but rather develop an inquiry into the modalities of coordination among differences (Bourricaud, 1977).

This feature of action theory is particularly evident in Parsons analysis of social integration. He defines social integration in a way quite distinct both from the political tradition centred on consensus and from the evolutionist thrust of the Durkheimian distinction between mechanical solidarity based on uniformity and group identification and organic solidarity based on functional interdependence and individual diversity. Contrary to Durkheim, and implicitly to a variety of classical theorists from Spencer to Tnnies, Parsons analysis takes for granted that both mechanical and organic dimen-sions exist in any social system, regardless of its level of complexity (Parsons, 1960). He sees mechanical and organic solidarity not as two societal forms of integration, but rather as two dimensions analytically differentiable that define two axes of integra-tion within any social system. Mechanical solidarity defines the coordination among the units of the system as equally included, while organic solidarity defines the coordination among the units in reference to their differentiation. Both axes are constitutive of the integration of any social systems. Thus, in a very important sense, simple societies are as complex as modern ones.

According to Parsons, social evolution should be interpreted in terms of structural differentiation between these forms of solidarity, not as an account of the substitution of one for the other (Parsons, 1971c). From the beginning, Parsons stressed that in Western society, mechanical solidarity is rooted in the institutions of citizenship, which applies equally to all individuals, while organic solidarity is typified most clearly in the institu-tion of the social contract, which formalizes cooperation and exchange among differenti-ated interests and roles. Mechanical solidarity refers to diffuse networks of solidarity and categories of belonging, where membership is contingent upon what the actor is assumed to be. By contrast, organic solidarity refers to specific or performance-related networks, with membership contingent upon the sharing of specific interests, values, competencies and tastes. The coexistence of pressures to homogeneous membership and to differenti-ated forms of participation and allocation creates an intrinsic dynamism and the potential for a large and inevitable variety of conflicts and adaptations (Baum, 1975). In Parsons view, an adequate theory of social integration should focus on how different forms of social solidarity may be regulated and made compatible. The regulation of such coordi-nation patterns, however, is complex, defined by tensions over both the allocation of resources and rewards as well as the recognition of prestige and influence in the com-munity (Chazel, 1974).

Parsons held that such a theory could not rely on a single factor, because the integra-tive outcomes of markets, hierarchies, networks and communities require an explanation of how they are combined and regulated. Citizenship is a key form of social member-ship, but it is not the only one. Contrary to the assumptions of most political theory, it is not always the most empirically important or the most normatively precious. It is rather a main element within a system of social memberships, often competing and sometimes conflicting with other elements. A second consequence is the acknowledge-ment that both mechanical and organic solidarities are comprised of a plurality of complex,



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collective identities, with differences in the assumptions that descend from membership in such categories and in the management of expectations attached to such member-ships. In the realm of mechanical solidarity, there are strains related to the existence of a plurality of collective identities, the differences assumed to attach to membership in the various groups, and the complex expectations associated with each membership. Organic solidarity must deal with the allocation of resources among competing ends, as well as with the structural externalities produced by the different clusters of differentiated interactions. Societal integration is consequently a second-order problem, focused on the reciprocal interactions of such integrative mechanisms, along with their overall impact upon the social environment.

In Parsons framework, the above dynamic applies to any social system, large or small, lasting a few moments or enduring over centuries. During the 1960s, in his attempt to apply his scheme to the analysis of whole societies, Parsons chose to name their inte-grative subsystem with a term that expresses clearly the ambition to overcome the dis-tinction between community and society: he called it the societal community. According to this perspective, the societal community is a collectivity displaying a patterned con-ception of membership which distinguishes between those individuals who do and do not belong. Immediately after this definition, however, Parsons stressed that although the societal community must maintain the integrity of a common cultural orientation, broadly (though not necessarily uniformly or unanimously), shared by its membership, as the basis of its societal identity, such a collectivity is inevitably plural and differenti-ated (Parsons, 1966a: 10). Some years later, his definition of the problem centred even more explicitly on the issue of societal membership:

A societal community is a complex of collective loyalty networks and interpenetrating collectivities, a system where units are characterized both by functional differentiation and segmentation. The normative system that regulates such loyalties must integrate the rights and obligations of the various collectivities as well as the legitimation basis of the overall order.

(Parsons, 1971c: 27, italics added)

Moreover, the integration of contemporary societies is entrusted to a system of solidari-ties, defined explicitly as a network of crisscrossing inclusions which also has a hierar-chical aspect based on the functional nature of the solidary groupings, on its inclusiveness and on the prestige ranking, by relevant criteria, of the units and classes of them which are involved (Parsons, 2007: 273273274). As I will discuss later, the availability of an abstract legal order and an effective, generalized criterion for membership (what Parsons calls citizenship) represents the basic precondition for the ability of such a complex and stratified system of solidarity to provide integration.

Citizenship and Pluralism in Contemporary Western SocietiesThe implications of such a conceptual framework for Parsons view of citizenship are far-reaching. The use of this broad theoretical lens generates a view of citizenship with innovative connotations. A good way to highlight its novel aspects is to compare Parsons




theory with the classical account of citizenship previously provided by T.H. Marshall (1950). In his writings, Parsons has nearly always, quite modestly, presented his analyses of citizenship as merely an application of Marshalls ideas. And there is little doubt that he regarded Marshalls work as both theoretically crucial and empirically sound.2 Parsons subscribed to the distinction of civil, political and social components within the citizen-ship complex and he was deeply sympathetic to Marshalls historical reconstruction of its evolution. In Parsons account, citizenship has evolved in a complex and conflicted way, over the course of the process of structural differentiation between the societal community and the government. States, in exchange for their ever-increasing, politically uniform powers, have had to define a set of rights for citizens, the protection of which has been increasingly acknowledged as an obligation. A second phase, building on the social processes triggered by the first, concerns the participation in public affairs and in particular the right of citizens to select governmental leadership. This development was difficult and hard-won, with the combination of mass suffrage, equal value of the votes and secrecy of the ballot becoming the crowning achievement of Western democratic societies (Parsons, 1971b). A third and highly contested development has been the insti-tutionalization of a public responsibility for the welfare of citizens seen not as a matter of public charity but as the provision of realistic opportunities to participate in societal institutions and in the societal community itself (Parsons, 1969). In developing this evo-lutionary sequence, Parsons follows Marshall quite closely and with all the strengths and weaknesses of the original scheme (Birnbaum, 1997; Mann, 1987).

However, it would be a mistake to assume that those who have read Marshall may dispense with reading Parsons. Parsons theory has significantly revised and expanded Marshalls analysis, making it more sophisticated and taking it in new directions, which are definitely closer to contemporary understanding of citizenship issues. In his original canonical treatment, Marshall (1950) sees citizenship nearly exclusively in reference to social class it is an egalitarian status that stands in tension with the structural inequali-ties of the social positions endlessly produced by the dynamics of capitalism. The tension is so strong that Marshall writes of it in terms of an unending war that, thanks to the enlargement of rights, knows only temporary truces between the combatants. Unsurprisingly, his focus was on the traditional social-democratic vision of the welfare state. In the same vein, the main weakness Marshall identifies in the development of contemporary citizenship is the fact that even entitlements gained through citizenship-regulated processes may increase equality of opportunity only at the price of some decrease in the equality of outcomes. Ethnic, religious and cultural differences are almost completely absent in Marshalls original analysis, and only marginally acknowledged in his later work (Marshall, 1969). Moreover, he is concerned almost exclusively with citi-zenship from within, as amelioration or removal of second-class statuses, and does not pay any particular attention to the ways in which individuals may (or may not) acquire such membership. Immigration is conspicuously absent from his framework. Of the three markers of contemporary citizenship income taxes, pensions and passports Marshall dealt exclusively with the first two (Turner, 2009).

Parsons does not ignore redistributive issues. He is strictly persuaded that social rights are a primary condition for any inclusion process and, as a strong supporter of US President Lyndon B. Johnsons war on poverty, he constantly stressed how the lack of



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access to economic resources was an obstacle on the road to full participation in the larger community for disadvantaged populations (Parsons, 1971c). Moreover, like Marshall, Parsons tends to see social rights as part and parcel of the evolution of modern citizen-ship, largely underestimating the possibility of serious contractions in the entitlements and provisions attached to it.3

The major difference between the accounts of citizenship provided by Marshall and Parsons lies rather in the fact that Parsons is much more aware of the need to complement the issue of class inequality with considerable and constitutive attention to religious, racial and ethnic diversity. Reflecting a rich North American tradition of social inquiry into ethnic hierarchies, Parsons acknowledges both the significance of citizenship as a bounded criterion of membership and the empirical existence of a variety of second-class statuses predicated upon the assumption that specific religious, ethnic or racial markers render an individual unable to fulfil the duties and obligations of full citizenship. In fact, Parsons very definition of society is among the first in the classical literature to deal explicitly with issues of resident foreigners and transnational allegiances. Moreover, he defines both the non-coincidence of territorial membership and citizenship and the exis-tence of a variety of cross-border loyalties as normal and to be expected features of advanced societal life (Parsons, 1971c, 2007). Not surprisingly, large waves of immigra-tion, together with the process of industrialization and the educational revolution, are among the major social factors he uses to account for the specific features of American social life (Parsons, 2007: 90140).

A major consequence of Parsons broader framework lies in the way in which he anal-yses the existence and significance of ethnic identities and loyalties in contemporary societies (Kivisto, 2004). In his view, modernization does not destroy ethnic and religious diversity nor does it necessarily reduce their social significance. Rather, it implies a change in their structural roles. When matched by a universalistic legal order and a gen-eralized definition of citizenship, societal heterogeneity is not a danger to citizenship, but, on the contrary, it is a factor that strengthens it. This may come as a surprise, as Parsons is often depicted as describing social evolution primarily in terms of a rupture in the ascriptive organization of the world (see Parsons, 1964b), which systematically stresses the connections between structural change and the dissolution of the matrix of ascription-based expectations (Parsons, 1966a). To identify modernity with the breaking of ascrip-tion as a master frame for the allocation of resources and recognition does not imply sic et simpliciter the disappearance of meaningful ascriptive categories or the absence of de-differentiation processes (Parsons, 1975). For Parsons, ethnicity is not an archaic phe-nomenon nor is there any contradiction between diffuse solidarities and modern society (Sciortino, 2005). In highly differentiated societies, modernization does not herald the end of ascriptive categories they may still function as a widespread base for identity construction. On the contrary, difference-based networks or associations are just one primary example of a large genus of types of social collective organization, along with kinship networks, religious associations, educational establishment (and the societal community itself), which are strengthened, not weakened, by social evolution (Parsons, 1975: 387388). The process of structural differentiation is not the destroyer of the natural ways of life, as is so often pronounced by advocates of pseudo-Gemeinshaft (Holton and Turner, 1986). In fact, it is a process that may, when matched by the development




of democratic citizenship, have emancipatory consequences for both mechanical and organic forms of solidarity.4

Parsons sees the development of modern citizenship as having an effect not only upon the external relationships among the societal community, the market economy and the polity, but also within the societal community itself. The introduction of (relatively) gen-eralized criteria for membership and the notion of citizenship as shared and equal participation in the civil sphere modifies the existing structure of the system of social solidarities. Democratic citizenship does not destroy prior forms of collective identifica-tion, such as religion, ethnicity, region or subculture; it simply changes their structural meaning. With the enactment of a general status of citizenship, the range of difference-based affiliations and attributions compatible with a common membership increases enormously and, Parsons argues, contributes to stabilize the very existence of a common public space and to increase the variety of channels for social participation. Eventually, the effects of differentiation on previous solidarities and identities are such that a struc-tural pressure originates for an increasing generalization of the cultural definition of societal membership. A main trend of contemporary society, according to Parsons (2007), is precisely the de-coupling of societal membership from neatly defined expectations of cultural uniformity.5 Contrary to most scholarly perspectives and much textbook lore, in his analysis of contemporary citizenship Parsons is first and above all a Meistersinger of contemporary social pluralism, offering an account of this feature of contemporary soci-ety that contrasts sharply with both the nostalgic vision of conservative thought and the jeremiads of critical theory. Where others see the breakdown of a common culture into fragments of highly specialized, narrowly developed tastes, Parsons stresses the devel-opment of a sophisticated normative order, in which the requirements of common mem-bership are distinguished from the pressures to conformity exercised by particularistic traditions. Where others identify in the existence of segmental loyalties a danger to the unity of the national societal community, Parsons stresses how such networks once embedded in universalistic individual rights represent a source of strength and flexibil-ity in a democratic society. Where others lament the end of the common good, Parsons identifies the highly institutionalized premises of the freedom from ascription and from compulsory allegiance. Where others see the eventual corruption of the moral order, Parsons sees the emergence of a pluralist societal community existing in relation with, but analytically independent from, economic control, political power and cultural impo-sition (Mayhew 1997; Parsons, 1971b, 1974, 1975 ).

Why does Parsons see ethnic and subcultural pluralism only if taking place in the context of a common citizenship and of an independent legal order as a stabilizing force? A primary reason is that in his theory the main integrative problem for a complex social system is not social conflict, but rather social polarization (Parsons, 1942b, 1964a, 1968). Any social system has to avoid breakdowns in structural interdependencies as well as in the motivations of members (Parsons, 1971c). But each social subsystem has built-in polarizing tendencies that are intrinsic to its own development. The reason Parsons is so interested in social pluralism is precisely the fact that it operates as a strong countervailing force to these polarizing tendencies. In the presence of a common generalized member-ship, Parsons argues that social pluralism implies the existence of multiple individual memberships spanning across any single cleavage. Processes of inclusion randomize the



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distribution of ascriptive and achieved statuses, making it difficult to polarize society along any single dimension. This is precisely why he defines the integrative subsystem as a network of crisscrossing solidarities (Parsons, 2007). And this is not an innovation of the late Parsons. For example, he argued early on that it was exactly this form of pluralism that kept political polarization under control in the American polity:

The very looseness of the relation between structural solidarities other than the political party and the party structure itself can be said to constitute an important protection against the divisive potentialities of cleavage. The essential fact here is that the most important groupings in the society will contain considerable proportions of adherents of both parties. The pressure of political cleavage by activating ties of solidarity at the more differentiated structural levels that cut across the line of cleavage tends automatically to bring countervailing forces into play.

(Parsons, 1969: 223224)

This important function of social pluralism is not, however, intrinsic to social pluralism itself. The ideal type of the plural society, characterized by the spatial coexistence of bounded groups that exchange only through group-defined channels, is not inherently peaceful or progressive (Furnivall, 1939; Rex, 1959). Most empires have been equally characterized by a broad and deep social pluralism, managed through a constantly chal-lenged and continuously policed, ascriptive hierarchy of social ranks. And economic and political cleavages may often align with religious and ethnic cleavages, thus strengthen-ing rather than reducing their divisive role. Taken alone, social pluralism can well be a factor of structural instability, particularly in the context of modernizing change or geo-political pressures. Not to mention that it is often a fertile ground for oppression. In Parsons analysis, social pluralism becomes a stabilizing force only when matched by the existence of common rules implemented in (relatively) universalistic ways. The contem-porary societal community is social pluralism plus citizenship. In other words, it requires the detachment of the public sphere both from ascription-based allocation processes and from particularistic cultural traditions. The definition of membership in a modern plural-ist society, according to Parsons, has stabilizing effects only when it is characterized by the fact that the duties of the public sphere are not identified with the protection of particular cultural traditions or with the rights of any collectivity over its members.6 The relationship between social pluralism and citizenship is bi-directional. Citizenship as a generalized membership protects the pluralism of social collectivities (functioning as a kind of societal anti-trust legislation, so to speak) as well as the right of the individual to choose his or her solidary networks (Parsons, 2007). And pluralism stabilizes the nor-mative order, as the very same variety of overlapping networks rooted in differences among categories and groups impedes the success of fundamentalist pressures attempt-ing to re-couple membership in the societal community to a particular group identity.

Citizenship as an Evolutionary AchievementLike T.H. Marshall, Parsons interprets citizenship in broadly evolutionary terms, as a (largely) irreversible process characterized by increasing inclusion. In both cases, but




particularly in the case of Parsons, their attempts to develop an evolutionary framework for the analysis of modern society have encountered sustained criticism, mainly based on gross misunderstanding, but some definitely well taken.7 However, Parsons theory of social change also has a strong Weberian inspiration. His evolutionary work may be read also in non-evolutionary terms, as an historical inquiry into the highly unlikely structural preconditions for the institutionalization of a single societal community with full citizenship for all, able to sustain and nurture a fully pluralistic large-scale system of social solidarities (Parsons, 1965: 1040). This follows along the lines of Webers attempt to understand the preconditions for the rise of capitalism in Western Europe, rather than as an aspiration to replicate Herbert Spencers ambitions to identify a blanket recipe for modernization.

The fact is that, according to Parsons, social inclusion is not a natural trend of his-tory. It is triggered, not caused, by structural differentiation. During any differentiation process, societies face a number of contrasted alternatives. A hierarchical order or a political difference among groups may be re-established. Fundamentalist reactions may repress the exact same structural basis of such challenges. Even if differentiation alters the structure of ascriptive loyalties, the outcome may still vary from subordinate incor-poration to structural polarization (Parsons, 1968, 1971a). As Parsons himself acknowl-edges, the specific solution of a single societal community with equal citizenship for all has become conceivable and feasible only in very special cases, and only after a long series of conflicts (Parsons, 1965: 1040). To explain how such a goal becomes an inher-ent part of the normative project of modern societies is the major aim of most of Parsons evolutionary analysis.

In the same vein, the fact that Parsons openly celebrates citizenship as a major achievement of Western, and specifically US, society does not necessarily imply that he was complacent over or oblivious to the many sources of structural tension existing in such an arrangement. There is little doubt that Parsons deeply identified with the norma-tive account of American society (Alexander, 1983; Lechner, 1991). And contrary to most radical theorists of the 1960s, hailing from both the left and the right, he was deeply convinced of the practical superiority of the American model of liberal democracy at the international level. He consistently denied that Western societies were structurally unsta-ble or socially doomed.8 He was deeply convinced that in Western society, ascriptive inequalities were living on borrowed time (although he knew it was definitely a long-term lease). But he did not deny that the normative promises of the civil sphere in modern society were still largely unfulfilled, and he acknowledged the existence of several built-in sources of serious social strain. His criticism of leftist intellectuals was rooted not in a conservative attitude but rather in his deep conviction that their accounts of modern soci-ety were theoretically inadequate and politically counterproductive. While in the 1960s and 1970s, most radical intellectuals were willing to focus nearly exclusively on class inequality, Parsons was willing to claim that, for the social integration of advanced industrial societies, issues of social diversity and social recognition were no less impor-tant than the regulation of organically integrated units centred on economic and political interests. In the mid-1960s, he even claimed that the civil rights movement, if able to assume a more general definition of the structurally disadvantaged, had the potential to become the American equivalent of a socialist movement (Parsons, 1965).



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All these elements are clearly spelled out in the closing pages of Parsons work on social evolution (1971c), and they are worth quoting at length. Here, Parsons recognizes both the comparative structural advantages and the strong potential for conflict and strain embedded in modern societies. And he places the societal community and the normative promises of citizenship squarely at the center of an oncoming storm:

The salient foci of tension and conflict, and thus of creative innovation, in the current situation does not seem to be mainly economic in the sense of the nineteenth-century controversy over capitalism and socialism, nor do they seem political in the sense of the justice of the distribution of power, though both these conflicts are present. A cultural focus, especially in the wake of the educational revolution, is nearer the mark. The strong indications are, however, that the storm center is the societal community . The most acute problems will presumably be in two areas. First is the development of the cultural system as such in relation to society. We may picture it as focused on certain problems of rationality, or what Weber called the process of rationalization. Second is the problem of the motivational bases of social solidarity within a large-scale and extensive society that has grown to be highly pluralistic in structure. Neither set of problems will be solved without a great deal of conflict. We should expect that anything like a culminating phase of modern development is a good way off very likely a century or more. Talk of a postmodern society is thus decidedly premature.

(Parsons, 1971c: 121, 143)

Regardless of ones judgment on the overall framework of societal evolution, it is pos-sible to argue that Parsons reconstruction of the long-term development of modern citi-zenship does not take citizenship for granted. On the contrary, he acknowledges openly the crucial, normative and empirical role played by generalized membership in contem-porary Western society as well as the existence of a growing number of tensions related to the citizenship complex. Regardless of how one reconstructs his basic arguments, many of them have contemporary relevance for citizenship studies. This will be even clearer once I review critically Parsons analyses of the processes of inclusion.

Citizenship From Within: The Problem of Second-Class CitizensOne of the main implications of a generalized citizenship complex is the assumption that citizens are from the point of view of the duties and rights of their membership putatively equal. Ostensibly, they deserve equal respect and recognition and are fully qualified to contribute to the commonwealth. In the language of generalized citizenship, the breaking away of the ascriptive matrix implies above all the end of status consistency between ascriptive and achieved roles. The consistency between certain ascriptive fea-tures of the individual and his or her full membership status moves from moral require-ment to moral anomaly. As Parsons states, the best indicator of inclusion is when it is no longer safe to infer that a person has a working-class background from knowing that he is a Catholic of Irish descent (Parsons, 1966b: xxi).

Such an abstract notion of membership, however, is never abstract enough. Real Western societies have developed their notions of nationhood and citizenship in specific historical periods, and they have codified their membership according to the particular




cultural visions of their mainstream, core groups (Alexander, 1990, 2006).9 Those who are unable or perceived as unable to comply with such bounded requisites for full memberships are usually relegated to the peripheries of membership. Legal citizenship may in fact coexist with severe discrimination regarding access to economic opportuni-ties, political voice, sociability patterns and cultural recognition.

The difference between citizenship and full citizenship and the processes through which second-class status diminishes or disappears are at the core of Parsons writings in the mid-1960s. Here, Parsons was writing under the influence of the US civil rights movement in the context of the important effort by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to contribute to a better understanding of the issues involved (Lidz, 2009). In a short period, Parsons produced several papers detailing a new vision of the process of inclusion and of the role played by social movements (Parsons, 1965, 1966b, 1967, 1968, 1970). The focus of these papers is the possibility and the process through which demo-cratic societies may actually carry out the normative goal of eliminating within a societal community any category defined as inferior in itself (Parsons, 1965: 1039). Parsons defines inclusion as the process through which formerly marginalized members of a societal community become participants with full standing. He is very careful in distin-guishing inclusion from assimilation: the former implies a process of symbolic general-ization of the criteria for membership that allows for both the new members and their activities and values to synchronize with the common value system. To be included, the normative system must undergo a process deep enough to define the social markers of the included group as positive for, or at least indifferent to, the common good. Parsons also stresses that inclusion is not an automatic consequence of citizenship. A generalized definition of membership may actually coexist for quite a long time with material and symbolic exclusion or subordination. Citizenship as a legal status is a necessary but not sufficient condition for full inclusion (Parsons, 1966b). In his analysis, Parsons thus introduces a more specific and interactive model of active citizenship, fairly innovative even for contemporary visions of political belonging.

The starting point of Parsons analysis is the development of a process of structural differentiation, which creates integrative strains in the established hierarchies of mem-berships. In reference to ascriptive stratification, social differentiation involves a change in the allocation of resources: some clusters of membership units attain a level of gener-alized resources that, in kind or degree, are different from what the established ascriptive hierarchy expects or mandates. Differentiation involves the development of new activi-ties or the transformation in meaning for traditional ones; it often involves a process of empowerment and a breach in traditional expectations. The excluded or some of them at least appear as prospective full-fledged members based on their contribution to the commonwealth or their prospective capabilities to offer such contribution. The conse-quences of this process, however, do not necessarily redefine the criteria for membership to include the previously marginalized group into full membership. Selective incorpora-tion, through assimilation and social mobility, of a minority of members of the excluded group may coexist with the reproduction of the collective boundary against the others. A hierarchical caste-like difference may be re-established, and fundamentalist reactions may repress the very same structural basis of such a challenge. Even if differentiation triggers an inclusive process, the outcome may vary from subordinate incorporation to structural polarization (Parsons, 1968, 1971c).



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To understand such outcomes, however, structural analysis alone is not enough. For this, Parsons needs a group-specific, interactional scheme able to account for the internal structure of inclusion processes. And precisely such a scheme the demand for and supply of inclusion is at the core of his essays on the civil rights movement in the United States (Parsons, 1965, 1966b).

Parsons argues that any inclusion process requires the existence of a demand for and supply of inclusion able to cut across the cleavage between outsiders and insiders namely the qualifications for membership of the excluded group and the structural conditions that make their participation viable. In other words, the supply side is mul-tidimensional. It includes the factors that make the organic solidarity between the included and the excluded a social fact and contains all the social and cultural elements that make solidarity normatively desirable.10 As Parsons stressed, however, social life is not a morality play (Parsons, 1978: 262). Inclusion does not come about without a con-scious, and often conflict-ridden, effort on the part of a variety of actors. The demand for inclusion defined as the collective action targeted to exploit the opportunities for inclusion as well as to manage their consequences thus plays a crucial role. For an inclusion process to take place, sectors within both the excluded and the included catego-ries must believe that inclusion is a valued goal, and furthermore they must be willing to mobilize toward its achievement. In some cases, such mobilization may happen in a dif-fuse, nearly invisible way. But where the distance between the normative definition and the reality is highly entrenched, the inclusion process requires the development of a social movement able to challenge the established system of social identity and to con-vert the gap into the basis for action.

In his analysis of the US civil rights movement, Parsons does in fact sketch the founda-tions of a voluntaristic theory of social movements. He claims that the critical variables for the success of such movements are relational. On the supply side, he stresses how economic resources, political power, normative protection or value commitment are not able to operate in isolation. What matters is the historically specific relational composi-tion of these resources (Parsons, 1966b). The activation of a value commitment without structural opportunities brings backlashes and the deflation of this resource (Parsons, 1975). While political power is necessary at several key points, inclusion does not mani-fest itself through exclusively political means.11 If it is true that a market economy con-tributes to the dissolution of ascriptive stratification, this happens only once some key non-contractual guarantees of the membership are established and enforced. In other words, while the structural conditions do define the window of opportunity for inclusion, the strategies pursued by social movements are not without consequences for the social reception of their claims to inclusion. On the demand side, Parsons stresses that, since inclusion crosscuts ethnic stratification, it has supporters and enemies at both poles. Parsons seems to identify two basic recipes for a successful inclusion movement. First, it should try to reproduce the basic character of the inclusion process: the integration of differentiated units across established boundaries. A successful movement toward inclu-sion must mobilize a pluralistic social grouping a coalition able to trigger a cumulative learning process. Second, the challenge to ascribed status based on universalistic values should be able to respond to the anxieties connected to the possible debasement of the value of membership. According to Parsons, this calls into question the role of social rights as achieved only through a generalizing tendency and establishes a connection




between the minority claim and the upgrading of all those sectors of the society that fall below membership standards. He asserts: The most important single condition of avoid-ing the inflationary debasement is the general upgrading not only of the Negro, but of all elements of the population falling below the minimum acceptable standards of full citizenship (Parsons, 1965: 1044). With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to appre-ciate how developments in this direction would soon encounter significant difficulties. But this neither invalidates the argument that long-term inclusion of African Americans requires a significant reform in the social rights component of the civil rights movement, nor negates the claim that the removal of legal barriers and exposure of the strength of economic barriers makes it necessary to address more general redistributive issues (Gould, 1997, 1999; Parsons, 1965).

Conclusions: The Fragility of Citizenship Reading Talcott Parsons on citizenship today, it is difficult not to remain impressed by what appears to be an overly optimistic tone. He regarded inclusion as a process that while surely difficult and wrought with tensions and strains is largely irreversible. Moreover, he considered the de-ethnicization of US citizenship as more or less accom-plished. He was largely correct in stressing how the conflation of ascriptive membership and economic inequality is the main stumbling block toward achieving full inclusion in contemporary Western societies and in insisting that such conflation cannot be redressed without the development of social rights. But, exactly like T.H. Marshall, he never doubted that the social component of citizenship was well entrenched and bound to further expand. In the late 1970s, he noted the existence of backlashes against the welfare state, but he seemed to consider them a transitory phenomenon that could never devolve into a long-term reality (Parsons, 2007). The reasons for such optimism are both historical and theoretical.

The historical period in which Parsons lived throughout most of his career was bound by an expansion of Keynesian economics that seemed irresistible even to its former adversaries. The rate of economic growth was remarkable, and the opposition to high taxation was far from becoming a main cleavage across all social strata. The expansion of social programmes and the strengthening of welfare states seemed to be irreversible trends to many observers, both on the left and on the right. The 1960s registered a wide and far-reaching activism on ethnic issues, with the passage of civil rights legislation and the removal of racial criteria from immigration legislation. A significant number of the trends Parsons identified were not delusional. As with the demise of the Soviet Union, Parsons optimism has been closer to the mark than most of the predictions of his more radical critics. The impact of the trends he identified in the 1960s has been broadly inclu-sive, with a large change in the rules of sociability, recruitment practices and social and political participation in the direction of a single societal community with full member-ship for all. To be sure, the societal community in the United States remains heavily fragmented along religious, ethnic and racial lines, but it is more broadly inclusive and de-ethnicized than most observers would have been ready even to conceive four decades ago.12 And most other Western democratic states, no matter how unsatisfactory their policies may be judged to be, use remarkably less ethnicized notions of membership and belonging than was the case at the time of Parsons writings (Joppke, 2003, 2005, 2008).



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To keep fighting over who was right does not make for good theoretical progress. For the purposes of this article, it seems more important to stress the existence of some social problems that Parsons, given the depth of his theoretical framework, could have anticipated as possibilities. Surely, we have learned in recent decades that we must consider an under-standing of citizenship that is able to take into account adequately not only the strength of its role but also its fragile nature. Citizenship is something that may be gained, but it can also be lost. While second-class membership may decline, it just as well may be reproduced or even created anew. These perspectives may have seemed far-fetched in the climate of the sixties, but they are of fundamental importance for contemporary citizenship studies.

The first sociological problem to account for is the possibility that increasing social heterogeneity and high rates of immigration, particularly when they take place within the framework of embedded liberalism, may actually reduce social support for welfare state measures. According to a strand of contemporary research, societies with high degrees of social heterogeneity are increasingly facing the scarcity of trust and reciprocal support necessary for many voters to perceive redistributive measures as an investment and not as a burden or a waste (Alesina and Glaeser, 2004; Eger, 2009; Putnam, 2007). If Parsons is correct in assuming that social rights are necessary to promote the development of full inclusion in sociability networks and crisscrossing solidarities, a satisfactory theory of citizenship should also take into account the possibility that the enforcement of these rights may be more controversial and less legitimate precisely during the phase in which they will be most needed.

The second problem concerns the relationship between increasing socioeconomic dif-ferentiation and the processes of social and cultural inclusion. In Parsons scheme, the main effect of economic development is the breaking down of ascriptive categories and the empowering of at least certain strata within excluded groups to a position where their claim to full membership can be both made and heard. While this is largely correct, recent decades have also shown that economic, technological and economic developments may have the opposite effect, weakening the base for such claims and triggering processes of exclusion. A severe decline in manufacturing has produced exclusionary effects for many segments of the population especially in the inner cities of the United States. The shift to professional armies has sharply reduced the relationship between welfare and warfare that has been a historically important driving force for social policies. Various mecha-nisms operating in market economies may have adverse effects on some ascriptive cate-gories, even if they are not designed to produce such effects (Sunstein, 1991). In many cases, these processes of socioeconomic exclusion particularly when matched by strong concerns regarding the cost of welfare provision have been rationalized through the resumption or the coinage of new ascriptive categorizations in particular, racial ones. In most of Parsons analyses, as well as in those of nearly all of his contemporaries, ascrip-tion is something existing before differentiation occurs. The possibility that it is also something that derives from it should not, however, be neglected.

Notes

1. There are several good introductions to Parsons work (see, for example Bourricaud, 1977; Lidz, 2000; Mayhew, 1982), and an innovative selection of his writings is available from Turner (1999). For assessments of Parsons relevance for contemporary social theory, see Alexander (1987) as well as Joas and Knobl (2009).




2. It is interesting to note that the esteem was reciprocal. As Marshall (1973a) writes in his autobiography, he considered Parsons work as the only outstanding, albeit ultimately unsuc-cessful, example of contemporary attempts to build a general theory of society. The paragraph is missing, however, from the shortened version of the paper, published the same year by the British Journal of Sociology (Marshall, 1973b).

3. Moreover, Parsons follows Marshall in defining social rights in terms of a mix of defensive entitlements designed to protect citizens from adverse life-chances and pro-active entitle-ments, designed to enable them to pursue an active and civilized life. The only difference in the texts of the two authors is that Marshall stresses the protective aspects, while Parsons is more concerned with the second, particularly regarding access to education (Parsons and Platt, 1973). The difference, however, is more in emphasis than in content, and it concerns different visions of social reform embedded respectively in British labour traditions and US liberalism.

4. It is consequently quite surprising that one of the few detailed critical reviews of Parsons view of citizenship, written by Pierre Birnbaum, defines Parsons as a theorist scared by the unex-pected revival of diversity-based claims and as considering them as a threat for the integration of American society (Birnbaum, 1997).

5. In his work, Parsons deals repeatedly with the well-known pluralism born out of the dif-ferentiation of economic and political interests and subcultures. But he pays equal attention to religious and ethnic diversity as well as intellectual and professional specialization. At a certain point, Parsons even stresses that contemporary society may also be characterized by a noticeable degree of ethical pluralism (Parsons, 1968).

6. There is a strong similarity between Parsons framework and the analyses of the de-ethniciza-tion trends in citizenship acquisitions developed more recently by Christian Joppke (2003).

7. Critics of Parsons evolutionary theory have attacked his work on several grounds. Granovetter (1979) has focused on the role attributed to the master trend of increase in adaptive capacity. Bortolini (1999) has criticized the principle of the special significance of the most highly developed case, and Tilly (1984) has questioned its usefulness for the study of social change. Luhmann (1984) has even denied that Parsons scheme qualifies as a genuine evolutionary theory.

8. On the contrary, he was among the first sociologists to stress that totalitarian forms of govern-ment, such as the Soviet Union, would in the end prove politically unstable and economically regressive (Parsons, 1961a, 1964b). On Parsons analysis of the communist countries, see Mouzelis (1993).

9. This is not necessarily a consequence only of the fact that even liberal societies have a pre-liberal history. The process may occur in already liberal societies, as is the current case with certain European countries in their approaches to Islamic residents. Here, even procedural liberalism may be transmuted into a form of substantive identity that ascribes to the Islamic minorities a cultural difference that excludes and disqualifies them from full participation (Joppke, 2008).

10. Parsons does not provide a systematic list of these factors. In his analyses, however, he often refers to the degree of value generalization, the opportunities for political mobilization, the structure of the normative system and the configuration of the arena of influence makers.

11. According to this point of view, much of what some consider Parsons conservatism may be more appropriately defined as the acknowledgement of the limits of political will in a highly differentiated society.



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12. Even if Parsons was overly optimistic, his adversaries have denied the full significance of his analysis only to pay a high price in empirical plausibility (Birnbaum, 1997; Harris, 1979; Lyman, 1972). For a detailed assessment of how Parsons analyses have withstood the test of time, see Lidz (2009).

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Author biography

Giuseppe Sciortino teaches sociology at the Universit di Trento. His research interests are social theory, migration study and cultural sociology.



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Sciortino-full Citizenship (Parsons)