Citizenship as Obligation in the United States: Title II of the Family Support Act of 1988

Abstract

Citizenship is a concept with several dimensions — political, legal, social and cultural. In a famous argument T. H. Marshall developed his concept of the rights of citizenship along the first three dimensions.1 A comprehensive account of the applicability of Marshall’s arguments to the United States would have to note the exceptional place of legal citizenship there, the emphasis upon contractual over communal relations and the historical experience of slavery which denied a part of the population full citizenship rights until the 1960s.2 In this paper the discussion is narrowed to the social or welfare rights of citizenship and particularly to how these have been defined by policy developments during the 1980s. The Marshallian concept of social rights cannot be transferred uncritically to the United States. The United States’ liberal tradition, as conceived by Louis Hartz,3 does not sit comfortably with the social democratic values connoted by Marshall’s conception of welfare rights. However, that the notion of social rights is not entirely unhelpful in discussion of the United States welfare system is suggested by the distinguished historian of the New Deal Leuchtenburg’s assessment of the Social Security Act of 1935: the Act was a ‘new landmark in American history. It reversed historic assumptions about the nature of social responsibility, and it established the proposition that the individual has clear social rights.’4KeywordsFamily SupportWelfare SystemWelfare ReformWelfare ProgrammeWelfare PolicyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.