Citizenship and Social Rights: The Interdependence of Self and Society

This broad-ranging text offers a comprehensive analysis of the possibilities and limitations of the idea of citizenship, and its relevance to social problems and social policies in advanced industrial societies. Fred Twine demonstrates that two concepts are essential to an understanding of the issue of citizenship: the socially embedded nature of human agents, and their interdependence with each other and with the natural and social worlds they inhabit. In contrast to the glorification of a presumed free-floating consumer, Twine emphasises the social nature of individual needs and individual rights. He also shows that interdependence is not limited to the mutual linkages within advanced industrial societies, but extends both to the relations between developed and developing nations, and to the environmental contexts of human existence. Showing how a truly social vision of citizenship offers ways in which human worlds are socially created, and can be re-created, Citizenship and Social Rights will be of interest to scholars and students in sociology, social policy, politics and philosophy.