Thomas Humphrey Marshall

Biography

T. H. Marshall was born in London on 19 December 1893 to a wealthy, artistically cultured family (a Bloomsbury family). He was the fourth of six children. His great-grandfather acquired an industrial fortune and his father, William Cecil Marshall, was a successful architect, giving Marshall a privileged upbringing and inheritance. He attended Rugby School, a public boarding school and then read history at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Marshall was a civilian prisoner in Germany during the First World War. In October 1919 he gained a fellowship at Trinity College, becoming a professional historian. This was interrupted when he became the Labour candidate for Farnham in the 1922 election. Despite being unsuccessful, Marshall found the experience beneficial because it brought him into close contact with working-class people and exposed him to the injustices and prejudices within the British class system. In "A British Sociological Career," he recounts that he "knew nothing of working-class life" growing up, suggesting this experience was transformative for his later work.

Marshall became a tutor in social work at the London School of Economics in 1925. He was promoted to reader and went on to become the head of the Social Science Department at LSE from 1944 to 1949 and Martin White Professorship of Sociology from 1954 to 1956.

Marshall worked for UNESCO as the head of the Social Science Department from 1956 to 1960, possibly contributing to the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which was drafted in 1954, but not ratified until 1966.

He was the fourth president of the International Sociological Association (1959–1962).

His papers are held in the Archives of the London School of Economics, along with an oral history interview he gave to the historian, Brian Harrison, in July 1978 about his niece, the suffragist Catherine Marshall.

Marshall died on 29 November 1981 in Cambridge.

Academic research

Citizenship and Social Class

T.H. Marshall wrote an essay on citizenship – which became his most famous work – titled "Citizenship and Social Class." This was published in 1950 and was based on a lecture given the previous year. British citizenship was originally bestowed upon those of a higher status group with their own civil, political, and social privileges. Yet Marshall argued that, with the expansion of capitalism, a "new kind of citizenship slowly pulled apart the package of privileges hitherto enjoyed exclusively by the well-born." He analysed the development of citizenship as a development of civil, then political, then social rights.

Marshall defined the three aspects of citizenship as follows:

Civil rights are "the rights necessary for individual freedom-liberty of the person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to justice."

This concept of individual civil rights "also undid statutes and customs that constricted the 'right to work.'" Working people could now legally pursue employment, which corresponds with the need of capitalism for labor markets.

Marshall also argued that "the principle of civil citizenship contains within itself...a 'drive' toward further equality - political equality."

Political rights refer to "the right to participate in the exercise of political power."

Universal Suffrage

Electing representatives to Parliament

Social rights include as "the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the fuIl in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being." Social rights are usually understood as benefits associated with the modern welfare state and positive freedoms such as welfare rights.

Marshall also argued that these three aspects of citizenship developed in England in a certain order. Civil rights are broadly assigned with the eighteenth century, political to the nineteenth, and social to the twentieth century. There is a complex interplay between these conceptions of citizenship. According to Marshall, "once citizens are recognized as full members of society, they also receive undeniable social rights, such as protection against poverty."

Sociology at a Crossroads and Other Essays

In 1963, Marshall published another work, Sociology at a Crossroads and Other Essays, which includes a collection of sixteen essays modeled on the work of Max Weber. He structured the essays under three main titles: "Sociology of Today and Tomorrow", "Social Class", and "Social Welfare".

The first several essays focus on the problems facing Sociology in the present day. Marshall sees the discipline as being at a crossroads where several paths meet. The first leads to "universal laws and ultimate values," whereas the second "leads to a collection of a multitude of facts." Finally, the third is one that Marshall recommends as the ideal direction for Sociology. This path "'leads into a country where sociology can choose units of study of manageable size – not society, progress, morals and civilization – but specific social structures in which the basic processes and functions have determined meanings.'" After indicating this path for Sociology, Marshall goes on to define the discipline as the "analytical and explanatory study of social systems" on a larger-scale, such as nations or states and also smaller systems that function within those societies.

Marshall also elaborates on concepts of "class," "social class," "status," "social status," "prestige," "position," and "role," all of which develop his analysis of social stratification. In writing about social conflict, he encourages reserving the term "conflict" for "'cases in which the common interest shared by the rivals dwindles to vanishing point' and 'little regard is paid even to the accepted rules of warfare.'"

The final essays are dedicated to analyzing the concepts and problems of the Welfare State and Affluent Society in England, France, and Germany.

Marshall's analysis developed a deeper understanding of social phenomena and identified the "time and space limitations of concepts," namely what he refers to as the first and second paths in the crossroads of sociology.

There is some disagreement regarding Marshall's very broad definition of "social systems," as some find that it covers too many different entities and therefore blurs "the distinction between society and state, and between the whole and the part."

Philosophy of social science

Modern political science pioneer Seymour Martin Lipset argues that Marshall proposed a model of social science based on the middle-range theory of social structures and institutions, as opposed to grand theories of the purposes of development and modernisation, which were criticised by modern sociologists such as Robert K. Merton for being too speculative to provide valid results. By using such a middle-range approach, Marshall and his mentor L. T. Hobhouse believed that rigid class distinctions could be dissolved and middle-class citizenship generalised through a careful understanding of social mechanisms. He also believed this would allow sociology to become an international discipline, helping "to increase mutual understanding between cultures" and further international co-operation. While employing some concepts from Marxist conflict theory, such as social class and revolution, Marshall's analyses are based on functionalist concerns with phenomena such as "consensus, the normal, and anomie; co-operation and conflict; structure and growth," within self-contained systems. Rather than studying "society," which may include non-systemic elements, Marshall argues that the task of sociology is:

the analytical and explanatory study of social systems....a set of interrelated and reciprocal activities having the following characteristics. The activities are repetitive and predictable to the degree necessary, first, to permit of purposeful, peaceful and orderly behaviour of the members of the society, and secondly to enable the pattern of action to continue in being, that is to say to preserve its identity even while gradually changing its shape. Since his work centers around functionalism, Marshall "uses a top-down perspective, by describing how political systems allocate social and political rights to citizens and develop institutions that are in charge of administering these rights."

Whereas Marxists point to the internal contradictions of capital accumulation and class inequality (intra-systemic), Marshall sees phenomena that are anti-systemic as partly "alien" to the social system. Anti-system refers to one of the three branches of social phenomena that Marshall defines in Sociology at a Crossroads and Other Essays. It posits that conflict is incompatible with the operation of a social system yet is simultaneously an inevitable part of that system. The other two branches are known as "non-system" and "pro-system."