French Revolution Blog Assignment

French Revolution Blog Assignment

In the essay “Citizenship and Social Class”, T.H. Marshal draws the conclusion that attaining citizenship, or being a fully-fledged member of society, makes one equal with respect to rights and duties.  Social class is, by definition, based on inequality, and both citizenship and social class are influenced together by a capitalist economy.  To make this relationship more clear, he explains that citizenship is composed of civil rights, which provide allows a person to take control of their own destiny in a free economy and to “deny him social protection on the ground that he was equipped with the means to protect himself” (150).  He makes a great point when he explains that civil rights confers the legal capacity to attain anything, but does not guarantee the possession of anything.  He says:

A property right is not a right

to possess property, but a right

to acquire it, if you can, and to

protect it, if you can get it.  But, if

you use these arguments to explain

to a pauper that his property rights

are the same as those of a million-aire,

he will probably accuse you of quibbling (151)

This holds very true today.  Class distinction used to play an enormous roll on how much members of society were limited to what they could or could not achieve in their lifetimes (particularly in the industrial age).  Today, it seems that everybody who is a citizen enjoys the same rights as each other and has the same opportunity by law to achieve anything that anybody else can.  But this is not the reality.  The reality is that there is still a massive, and growing class distinction between the upper class and the rest of society.  Besides the fact that the wealthy have easier access to better education and more job security, in 2008 only 19%  of the income of the wealthiest 1% of America came from wages and salaries (Domhoff, http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html). 

There are some protest movements today that aim to draw attention to this disparity of wealth, but it is harder to gain attention today (rather than Revolutionary France, for example) because as citizens we are all afforded the same rights by the government and have an equal representation in our day to day lives.  There is no longer that (legally speaking) presupposition of our destinies based on class, which makes it harder for those unsatisfied with the wage disparity in the U.S. to draw attention to anything in particular that needs to be changed in order to create a level playing field for the competition of high paying jobs. 

The idea that basic human rights are very powerful, and easily understood by people during the Enlightenment Age to be a better way of governing than an absolute monarchy since each person should be equally protected and represented in the government.  A society given these freedoms lends naturally to a capitalist economy, as everyone is theoretically the same in the protection of the government.  Hard work and innovation are supposedly what separates the wealthy from the poor.  Marshall finishes his essay with the question of whether there are “natural limits to the contemporary drive towards greater social and economic equality” or if there is an ultimate aim in the economic structure that can be accomplished (153-154).  We continue to live in a society that touts freedom from economic oppression, but it seems there will always be those who are oppressed despite the freedoms the law bestows.