ABSTRACT
Amongst advanced industrial nations the tensions between the State and civil society have deepened as the functions of government have expanded with economic growth. In Britain, these tensions have surfaced in a resurgence of possessive individualism, somewhat extravagantly polemicised by a decade of government committed to ‘rolling back the frontiers of the State’. However, aside from the manifestos and slogans, the issue on which most politicians divide is not whether economic growth or increasing affluence is a social good, but the extent to which resources should be distributed by the market or mediated in the public interest through the intervention of the State. It is an issue which has come to distinguish the postwar social democratic alliance from the neoliberalism of the New Right, and one which raises wider questions of individual freedom, social justice and the boundaries between the private and public domain. These issues have now returned to the public agenda under the unlikely guise of ‘citizenship’. Not since the Second World War has citizenship been so vigorously promoted by any government, or been subject to so much theoretical speculation and debate.1 In this concluding chapter, we shall briefly consider the context of this current revival against the aspirations and ideals of citizenship that emerged from the Second World War.
