Institutional underpinnings, global reach, and the future of ordinal citizenship

Abstract

I had the opportunity to attend Marion Fourcade's highly stimulating 2019 BJS lecture on the transformations of liberal citizenship in the digital age. Between then and its printing in these pages (Fourcade, 2021), a big chunk of our lives indeed moved online. The Coronavirus pandemic has not only accelerated the great digital drive but also laid bare the vulnerabilities of core citizenship institutions such as education, health, work, and democracy. If technological systems are "sticky" (Castaldi et al. 2018), we should expect that the current shift to digital existence and its challenges are likely to be a long haul.In Ordinal Citizenship Fourcade offers us the conceptual tools necessary to grasp these transformations and their economic, social, political, and psychological consequences for the ordinary citizen. Reading it in juxtaposition with the broader trajectory of citizenship in the last half century, I find myself greatly affined with her conceptual analysis and reflections, although with different observations on the broader institutional context, comparative reach, and possibilities of ordinal digitality. My comments are written to elicit further clarity and discussion of these points. | PROLIFER ATI ON OF SO CIAL CITIZEN S HIPSFourcade's starting point, as it is for many of us who write on citizenship, is TH Marshall, and particularly social citizenship. For Marshall, social entitlements and welfare rights constituted the "inevitable capstone" of citizenship development necessary in order to prevent the social and economic exclusions that earlier provisions of civil and political rights, of their own volition, could not. This consequently would ensure social cohesion and solidarity, as well as a productive economy and market. Although Marshall saw social citizenship as a means for full inclusion in society, he regarded formal equality of citizenship and class-based inequalities as compatible; thus, he is often described as a liberal egalitarian.Fourcade references the liberal theory as an umbrella framework in anchoring her arguments (e.g., Somers, 2008). I find it instructive to keep in mind the partly overlapping, partly conflicting trajectory of politicalThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.