Inequality is a fundamental reality of the modern world-system as it has been of every known historical system. What is different, what is particular to historical capitalism, is that equality has been proclaimed as its objective, and indeed as its achievement—equality in the marketplace, equality before the law, the fundamental social equality of all individuals endowed with equal rights. The great political question of the modern world, the great cultural question, has been how to reconcile the theoretical embrace of equality with the continuing and increasingly acute polarization of real-life opportunities and satisfactions that has been its outcome.

For a long time, for three centuries from the sixteenth to the eighteenth, this question was scarcely mooted in the modern world-system. Inequality was still considered natural, indeed ordained by God. But once the revolutionary upsurge of the late eighteenth century transformed the language of equality into a cultural icon, once challenges to authority everywhere became commonplace, the disparity of theory and practice could no longer be ignored. The need to contain the implications of this cultural claim, and thereby to tame the now “dangerous classes,” became a priority of those who held power. The construction of the liberal state was the principal framework that was built to limit the claim. The elaboration of modern ideologies was in turn an essential mechanism in the construction of the liberal state.

The great symbolic gesture of the French Revolution was the insistence that titles no longer be used, not even that of Monsieur and Madame. Everyone was to be called “Citoyen” (Citizen). This gesture was intended to demonstrate the repudiation of traditional hierarchies, the incrustation of social equality in the new society that was being constructed. The French Revolution came to an end. Titles were reinstituted. But the concept of “citizen” (if not its use as a title of address) survived. It did more than survive—it thrived. It became adopted everywhere, to the point that by 1918 the world found it necessary to invent the concept of “stateless” persons, to describe the relatively small portion of humanity who were unable to claim citizenship anywhere.

The concept of citizen was intended to be inclusive—to insist that all persons in a state, and not just some persons (a monarch, aristocrats) had the right to be included in the process of collective decision-making in the political arena and the right to receive the social benefits the state might distribute. Since that time, the existence of rights that are guaranteed to citizens has comprised the minimal definition of what constitutes a modern “democratic” state, which virtually every state now claims to be.

But the other face of the inclusiveness of citizenship was exclusion. Those who were not citizens of the state had become by definition aliens—citizens, perhaps, of some other state, but not of this state. Still, for any given state, even the exclusion of aliens within their boundaries did not limit very much the number of persons theoretically included. In most cases, more than 90 percent of the residents of the country were citizens—legally citizens, that is, for citizenship had now become a matter of legal definition.

And this was precisely the problem faced by the states after the French Revolution. Too many persons were citizens. The results could be dangerous, indeed.¹

The story of the nineteenth century (and indeed of the twentieth) has been that some (those with privilege and advantage) have been attempting to define citizenship narrowly and that all the others have been seeking to validate a broader definition. It is around this struggle that the intellectual theorizing of the next 200 years centered. It was around this struggle that the social movements were formed.

The way to define citizenship narrowly in practice, while retaining the principle in theory, is to create two categories of citizens. The effort started with Abbé Siéyès, just six days after the fall of the Bastille. In a report he read to the Constitutional Committee of the National Assembly on 20–21 July 1789, Siéyès proposed a distinction between passive and active rights, between passive and active citizens. Natural and civil rights, he said, are rights “for whose maintenance and development society is formed.” These are passive rights. There also exist political rights, “those by which society is formed.” These are active rights. And from this distinction, Siéyès drew the following conclusion:

On 29 October 1789, the National Assembly translated this theoretical concept into a legal decree that defined active citizens as those who paid a minimum of three-days wages in direct taxation. Property became the prerequisite of active citizenship. As Rosanvallon (1985:95) points out, “If reason is sovereign, men cannot invent laws. They must discover them. . . . The notion of capacity finds its logic in this framework.”

The attempt to circumscribe the meaning of citizenship took many forms, all of them necessarily involving the creation of antinomies that could justify the division into passive and active citizens. Binary distinctions (of rank, of class, of gender, of race/ethnicity, of education) are ancient realities. What was different in the nineteenth century were the attempts to erect a theoretical scaffolding which could legitimate the translation of such distinctions into legal categories that served to limit the degree to which the proclaimed equality of all citizens was in fact realized.

The reason is simple. When inequality was the norm, there was no need to make any further distinction than that between those of different rank, generically between noble and commoner. But when equality became the official norm, then it was suddenly crucial to know who was in fact included in the “all” who have equal rights, that is, who are the “active” citizens. The more equality was proclaimed as a moral principle, the more obstacles—juridical, political, economic, and cultural—were instituted to prevent its realization. The concept, citizen, forced the crystallization and rigidification—both intellectual and legal—of a long list of binary distinctions which have formed the cultural underpinnings of the capitalist world-economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: bourgeois and proletarian, man and woman, adult and minor, breadwinner and housewife, majority and minority, White and Black, European and non-European, educated and ignorant, skilled and unskilled, specialist and amateur, scientist and layman, high culture and low culture, heterosexual and homosexual, normal and abnormal, able-bodied and disabled, and of course the ur-category which all of these others imply—civilized and barbarian.

To be sure, the concept of citizenship was meant to be liberating, and it did indeed liberate us all from the dead weight of received hierarchies claiming divine or natural ordination. But the liberation was only a partial liberation from the disabilities, and the new inclusions made sharper and more apparent the continuing (and new) exclusions. Universal rights turned out in actual practice to be somewhat of a linguistic mirage, an oxymoron. The republic of virtuous equals turned out to require the rejection of the non-virtuous.

Liberalism, which would become the dominant ideology of the modern world, preached that virtue could be taught, and it therefore offered the managed progression of rights, the managed promotion of passive citizens to the status of active citizens, a road for the transformation of barbarians into the civilized. Since the process of legal promotion was thought to be irreversible, it had to be handled carefully, prudently, and above all gradually. On the other hand, those social movements that were being created to champion the interests of those whose rights were not fully recognized were always debating what might be done to end this. There were those who insisted that the movements should be antisystemic, that is, that they must seek to destroy the existing historical system which made possible the travesties of equality. And there were those who were essentially integrationist, that is, who believed that the role of the movements was to speed up the liberal program of managed acquisition of rights.

The story, as we have already seen, began with the French Revolution itself. The National Assembly and then the Convention were faced with three concrete issues about citizenship: women, Blacks, and workers. The record of the French Revolution was mixed, but in each case, there were exclusions that left bitterness.

In the case of women, the whole matter started out badly. The royal decree summoning the Estates-General edicted that women who held seigniorial fiefs had to choose male proxies to represent them in the Electoral College—nobles for lay women, clergy for nuns (Landes 1988:232, fn. 5). It is well known that women played a major role in various popular demonstrations during the French Revolution, most crucially in the so-called October days in 1789, when the Parisian market women (along with national guardsmen) marched on Versailles and forced the royal couple to come to the capital to reside. But a mere two months after these riots, on 22 December 1789, the National Assembly formally excluded women from the right to vote.²

The Constitution of 1791 renewed the exclusion, and this was reiterated in a vote of the Convention on 24 July 1793, specifying that women were excluded from all political rights.³

Some improvements in women's rights were instituted, it is true. Marriage and divorce became civil processes. Primogeniture was abolished, and the rights of illegitimate children and their mothers to financial support created. A law was passed permitting women to be witnesses in documents related to the état civil, although this matter continued to be controversial (Abray 1975:55). And in the heated atmosphere of the Jacobin period, women began to organize. They began to play a much larger role in the popular societies. They stood outside the doors of the Convention, trying to control who would enter. They packed the galleries and shouted their views (Landes 1988:139–40).

On 5 May 1793, the Society of Republican-Revolutionary Women was formed. They pushed vigorously the demands of women for bread. Their language had distinctly feminist overtones. They were allied to the enragés (George 1976–1977:420), who were critical of the Jacobins from the left. But above all, they were women, organized women, who insisted on being heard. When women in one Paris section petitioned for the right to bear arms, Fabre d'Eglantine sputtered in the Convention: “After the bonnet rouge, which the Républicaines wore during their meetings, comes the gun belt, then the gun” (Abray 1975:56). The Committee on Public Safety appointed a committee, headed by André Amar, to consider whether women should exercise political rights and whether they should be allowed to take part in political clubs. The answer to both would be no. The committee deemed that they did not have the “moral and physical qualities” to exercise political rights, and furthermore, it was the aristocracy which wanted women to have these rights “in order to put women at odds with men” (George 1976–1977:434).

As for participating in political associations, Amar was quite explicit as to why women should not be allowed to be members:

To be sure, the exclusion of women was often put forward as a temporary provision. An earlier report by Lanjuinais in April 1793 called for the exclusion of women from political rights “for the time that it will take to remedy the vices of women's education.” As Cerati remarked acerbically: “[These vices] must have been terribly tenacious since it took a century and a half to overcome them” (1966:170).⁴

The story of Blacks was not too different. There were of course few Blacks in France proper at the time of the Revolution. But there were the colonies, and above all St.-Domingue, and this was the subject of a major debate in Paris. St.-Domingue had had a clear system of social stratification before the Revolution. There was a small White stratum, most of whom were planters. There was a stratum of free mulattos. But the largest group were the Blacks, and the Blacks were almost all slaves. This was an ordinal social ranking. But none of these groups had political rights. The French Revolution was thus received enthusiastically by all three strata, because they all hoped for political liberation. However, the Whites did not wish social equality to be granted to the free mulattos, and neither the Whites nor the free mulattos wanted the enfranchisement of the slaves. Once again, the norm of equality raised the question of who is to be included.

The emancipation of the slaves in 1793 was not the fruit of the egalitarian impulses of the French revolutionaries. It was imposed by the power of Toussaint L'Ouverture, leader of the slave rebellion in St.-Domingue, and merely ratified by the Convention (Decree No. 2262 of 4 Feb. 1794), a decree that would be revoked by Napoleon in 1802 after Toussaint had been imprisoned (and not reenacted until 1848). What is more revealing, however, is the prior debate on the rights to be accorded to free mulattos. Pushed by the Amis des Noirs and opposed by the Club Massiac, which represented the interests of the White planters, the Assembly decided “unanimously” on a curious compromise. After the adoption of the decree granting the vote to free men of color, Dupont de Nemours presented a “declaration” of the Whites explaining their assent on the grounds that the vote was only being given to “qualified mulattos of free parents” and was not being accorded, could not be accorded, “to unfree persons, or freedmen, since these were members of a ’foreign nation'” (Blackburn 1988:187–88). The poor Whites on St.-Domingue opposed any property qualification, since that would give the vote to some free mulattos while not to them. They used the same argument, that the free mulattos were “a species of foreigner with no entitlement to political rights” (Blackburn 1988:177). Thus what was being argued is that not only slaves but even the free mulattos were by definition not part of the “nation”; they could not therefore be citizens.

As for French workers, the concept of active citizenship, by creating a property-based definition of political rights, resulted in excluding them, was intended to exclude them. In the heady revolutionary atmosphere, however, workers began to seek improvement of their situation by organizing. The Assembly had abolished the guilds. The rapid rise of prices plus the collapse of the paper money, the assignats, fueled worker effervescence, peaking in the spring of 1791 just before the flight of the king and the enactment of the Constitution. Strikes and disorders seemed beyond the control of the Paris municipality, and led to calls for action by the Assembly. While maintaining the inegalitarian standards for voting, the Assembly sought to use the ideology of equality against the possibility of workers to organize by enacting an “anti-cabal” law. The notorious Loi Le Chapelier, adopted on 14 June 1791, outlawed any workers' combination, and on 20 July this proscription was extended to the compagnonnages, the mutual benefit societies (Wallerstein 1989:107, and fn. 248).

The French Revolution appealed to nature, which was a universal phenomenon, belonging to everyone. But it also appealed to virtue, which was only a potential (but not necessarily the actual) characteristic of everyone. From these concepts, it derived the existence of human rights. Since there could be multiple capacities and then for some multiple “natures,” the discourse had an “ambivalent quality” (Landes 1988:123). Scott sums up “the persistent question of the relationship of specific, marked groups to the embodied universal” quite well: “how could the rights of the poor, of mulattos, blacks, or women be figured as the rights of Man? The general answer is: with difficulty” (1989:2).

The great socially unifying concept of the citizen thus led to the formalization of multiple cross-cutting binary categories and to the binary tension of political life—the split between right and left, the Party of Order and the Party of Movement—a split that centrist liberalism would devote all its efforts to minimize. The result was an intense zigzagging of public life, energized by the juggernaut of a belief in progress, and distorted by the continuous and increasing social and economic polarization of real life within the world-system.

In the nineteenth century, the so-called middle classes came to dominate the Western world, and Europe came to dominate the world. When one has achieved top position, the problem is no longer how to get there but how to stay there. The middle classes nationally, and the Europeans globally, sought to maintain their advantage by appropriating the mantle of nature and virtue to justify privilege. They called it civilization, and this concept was a key ingredient of their effort. In the Western world, it was translated into education, and education became a way of controlling the masses.⁵

And on the global scene, starting with Napoleon (but adopted subsequently by all the other European powers), “the concept of civilization as an ideology . . . became unashamedly a form of cultural imperialism” (Woolf 1989:119).

The French Revolution would come to a definitive political end and become thereafter merely a political symbol and a cultural memory. It left however a legacy to the whole world-system: Sovereignty now belonged to the people, the nation; and political debate and political change were their normal consequence. The privileged strata of the world-system had to come to terms with this legacy, to try to incorporate it institutionally in ways that would contain its potential for the radical dislocation of existing hierarchies.

This process of containment took three forms. The first was the crystallization of what came to be called ideologies, which claimed to be philosophical constructs but were actually primarily political strategies (Wallerstein 1995). The second was the elaboration of conceptual categories as a new discourse with which to describe the world. This was initially and primarily, as we have said, the work of the dominant strata, who hoped thereby to frame the debate and justify the limiting of citizenship. Eventually, this work of creative conceptualization became transformed and institutionalized in the structures of knowledge known as the social sciences (Wallerstein et al. 1996:ch. 1). And the third was the establishment of a network of social movements, initially primarily the work of the dominated strata, which were to serve however not only as agents of furthering change but also as mechanisms of limiting change.

From this time forward, those who were not considered active citizens demanded to become so. And they encountered resistance every step of the way. But it is also true that those who created the organizations with which to demand this inclusion always themselves resisted the concepts of “citizens all.” They promoted the rights of the particular group they represented and tended to be silent about, often directly opposed to, the struggle of other excluded groups, seeing them as rivals, at least as rivals in priority. They tended to act as though they wished to secure a place on a lifeboat called citizenship, but feared that adding others after them would overload it. The nineteenth century would see this melodrama acted out in the principal liberal states of the world-system by the three main groups that organized in this period—the workers, the women, and the Blacks.

The conflicts of the social movements—not only with the powers that be but also with each other—occurred within the context of the crystallization of ideologies that occurred after 1848. The period from 1815 to 1848 had been one in which all and sundry seemed to be moving uncertainly in this transformed political terrain. The reactionaries tried to turn the clock back, to undo the cultural earthquake that was the French Revolution. They discovered that this was not really possible. The dominated (and repressed) strata, for their part, were in search of appropriate and effective modes of organizing. And the emergent liberal center was unsure of how it should, or could, construct the appropriate political base to get the turmoil under control. They concentrated on constructing liberal states, first of all, and most importantly, in the most powerful countries, Great Britain and France.

It would be the world revolution of 1848 and its immediate aftermath that would require resolving these uncertain searches and efforts, in order to stabilize the world-system and restore a certain degree of political equilibrium. The movement for socialism⁶

would now separate itself clearly from centrist liberalism (Lichtheim 1969:vii; Lehning 1970:171; Bruhat 1972:505; Kocka 1986:333). The revolutions of 1848 constituted the first world revolution of the modern world-system. It is not that it occurred in all parts of the world-system, since it did not. Nor is it that the revolutionaries achieved their objectives, since everywhere the revolutions were defeated politically. It is that the multiple revolutions centered around the same issue, the issue of exclusion, exclusion from the benefits of citizenship. It was in 1848 that we first see clearly that there would be two kinds of antisystemic movements, two separate ways of dealing with this exclusion in terms of immediate objectives: more rights within the nation (the social revolution); separating one ethno-national group from another dominant one (the national revolution). Whether overcoming the exclusions was a sufficient objective or whether they should be truly against the (modern world-) system as such would of course become a continuing internal debate of these movements.

And it was in 1848 that the question of long-term strategy first became clearly posed. From 1815 to 1848, the ideological struggle had been considered to be one between liberals and conservatives, between the heirs of the spirit (if not of all the tactics) of the French Revolution and those who fervently sought to restore the order derived from an older way of viewing the world. In this struggle, “democrats” and “radicals” had little place. Anathema to the conservatives, an embarrassment to the liberals, they played a gadfly role, pressuring the liberals to be more daring (without much success, be it noted). What the revolutions of 1848 did was to open up the possibility that these democrats/radicals would do more than be a gadfly, that they would organize mass action separate and distinct from the liberal center.

This was a terrifying prospect not merely to the conservatives but to the liberal center. And both reacted accordingly. Suppression became the order of the day, not merely in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, and among the various regimes in the Germanies and Italies, but in the liberal states of France and England. The suppression would be effective, but not long-lasting, for all these movements would re-emerge in a decade or two, and in far stronger forms. What was lasting were the conclusions that the proponents of the three classical ideologies of the nineteenth century—conservatism, liberalism, and socialism—would draw as the lessons of 1848.

The liberals drew two lessons. One was that they were in many ways closer to the conservatives than they had thought, and that alliances with radical elements were often dangerous to their interests. But secondly, they determined that they had to elaborate better theoretical justifications of the distinctions that they continued to wish to make among the citizenry, between the active and passive citizens à la Siéyès, if they wished to sustain this distinction.

The conservatives drew a different lesson. The strategy of Metternich (really of de Maistre, Bonald, et al.) would not work. They were impressed that only Great Britain did not have an uprising, even though it had been the country where radical forces had been the strongest. They noticed that Great Britain had been the only country where conservatives had followed a more centrist path, ready to make some concessions, in order to absorb and co-opt at least middle class forces into the arena of political decision-making. And they noticed that this policy had succeeded, by cutting “the very ground from under democracy,” as The Times put it.⁷

The conservatives would now be ready to go down the path of pursuing some version of centrist liberalism, albeit a somewhat more conservative one, what historians have come to call “enlightened conservatism.”

Socialists and nationalist-revolutionaries (erstwhile democrats and radicals) drew a still different conclusion. It was that spontaneity was not enough.⁸

What was needed was systematic and long-term organization, in order to be in a position to have a major political impact. This would lead the “movements”—an ephemeral concept—down the path of bureaucratic organizations, with members and officers, with finance and newspapers, with programs, and eventually with parliamentary participation. What 1848 led the movements to see was that the “people” were unlikely to do anything that mattered to the state without their prior uniting in organizational form. This would inevitably make them focus on the state, the national political level. It would also eventually and inevitably call into question the degree to which these movements continued to be antisystemic and not simply a variant of centrist liberalism, albeit a somewhat more impatient one.

The story of the rest of the nineteenth century, and indeed of a good part of the twentieth century, was that the centrist liberals would theorize, the anti-systemic movements (both of the socialist and the national liberation variety) would organize, and the enlightened conservatives would enact the compromises.⁹

And in the process, they seemed to compromise the antisystemic movements. It was, however, the theorizing of the liberals about citizenship that would make this scenario possible. It is this story we shall now tell.

In the liberal states, the strongest demand for inclusion in citizenship came from the urban working classes. Neither bourgeoisie nor proletariat are eternal essences. They were social creations, reflecting to be sure a certain social reality, but reified. And as with all such concepts, it was the dominant not the dominated stratum that began the process of reification, contrary to subsequent beliefs. Even before the July monarchy, Guizot elaborated the concept of class, a concept he had taken from Saint-Simon. He did this, of course, in order to justify the political role of the bourgeoisie as opposed to the aristocracy. But he did this as well, in order to situate the bourgeoisie (which he felt would in time assimilate the aristocracy) vis-à-vis the proletariat, and to distinguish between the two (Botrel and LeBouil 1973:143). If he was seeking droit de cité for the bourgeoisie, and ultimately total political control, he was specifically opposed to the inclusion of the proletariat. The droit de cité was to be reserved to active, that is, propertied, citizens.¹⁰

As the bourgeoisie slowly became that much vaguer and more inclusive category of the “middle class” or “classes,” so eventually the proletariat evolved into that vaguer and more inclusive category of the “working class” or “classes.” There was a great deal of resistance to explicit class language by many politicians and social scientists, because the use of such language came to be identified with a particular political position, that of Marxism, and using it therefore came to signify for many people accepting Marxist analysis and politics.¹¹

But the retreat to vaguer language did not eliminate the antinomy. If anything, it strengthened it, by making it easier for individuals to pass quietly over the line, while at the same time maintaining the line firmly. For those who passed, the important thing was that there be a line, one that might keep others from passing as well and thereby undermining the newly-acquired privileged position of full citizenship of those who managed to pass.

During all this time, as indeed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “fear of the masses, the concern with order, was the motif . . . always underlying the actions of the ruling class” (Moorhouse 1973:346). The question always remained for the dominant strata as for the working classes: which tactics were optimal? From the point of view of the dominant strata, repression had its merits, but it also stoked the fire that was brewing, and eventually would breed revolt. So, in the late 1860s, both Napoleon III and the British Conservative Party felt the need to loosen the constraints, to make it more possible for there to be workers' organizations and perhaps to expand a bit the de facto definition of citizenship.

The situation would evolve in the last third of the nineteenth century. There seems to have been a considerable “radicalization” of class conflict, starting with the Paris Commune, and followed by the rise of socialist parties and trade-unions, at least in all the more industrialized, wealthier zones of the world- system. “In 1880 [socialist parties] barely existed. . . . By 1906 they were . . . taken for granted” (Hobsbawm 1987:116–17). But is now also a truism that, after 1890, there was a general deradicalization of these movements (Geary 1981:109), culminating in 1914 with the war votes of all the socialist parties (with the notable exception of the Bolsheviks).¹²

The picture that is offered us by most historical writing on the subject is one of a curve of militancy that went upward via popular mobilization and then downward via reformist sagacity (or betrayal, if one prefers that rhetoric). This is undoubtedly true in its crude outlines, although the upward part of the curve may never have been as great as some believe.¹³

The question is where lie the roots of this so-called radical political upsurge that, in the end (by 1914), no longer seemed to threaten any of the encrusted social structures of the modern world-system. It seems reasonable to interpret this as a clash about citizenship, that is, about who is to be included in the privileges and derived benefits of being designated the kind of citizen (active) who had these rights. It was a material issue, to be sure, but it was also a question of identity and identification. The narrowness of the prevailing definitions of real citizenship in the period 1815–1848 (justified by the premise that the workers were uneducated and propertyless, and therefore could have no reason to maintain social order) provoked a “world revolution,” which appalled the middle strata (since it threatened to go too far), and led to repression. When the pluses of repression were exhausted in twenty years, there came to be more political space for popular maneuver. On the one hand, the liberal center urged the “education” of the working classes. And on the other hand, the working classes pushed for their own “education.”

This is turn led to the creation of serious organizations which sought to force the pace of inclusion of at least the male, urban working classes. These organizations had to make their demands somewhat loudly in order to be taken seriously, both by the dominant classes and by those they were hoping to mobilize politically. Thus we heard a “radical” rhetoric. This rhetoric was effective, and the dominant strata reacted by various kinds of concessions—extension of the suffrage, the expansion of economic benefits (including the nascent welfare state), and inclusion in the “nation” via the exclusions resulting from racism and imperialism. Of course, this gave the results intended—the maintenance of the system in its major outlines, and the “moderation” of the workers' rhetoric. One does not need to intrude concepts of errors of judgment (false consciousness), self-interest of a leading, bureaucratic stratum (betrayal, the iron law of oligarchy), or the special interest of the better-paid workers (aristocracy of labor) to account for a process which seems more or less pandemic, more or less inevitable in retrospect, and which occurred in quite similar form throughout the world (the more industrialized, richer parts of the world) in the period 1870–1914, despite all the national variations in the details, variations that proved ultimately to be of minor importance.¹⁴

The period running from the 1870s to the First World War saw the first substantial organization of the working classes into political movements (primarily socialist and anarchist) and into trade-unions. It therefore became the period of a major debate about strategy. The question that preoccupied all those who organized was how the working classes might achieve their goals, and in particular how they should relate to the existing states and parliaments. This was the debate between Marxists and anarchists. The heart of it was that the anarchists regarded the state as an implacable enemy, with which there could be compromise, whereas the Marxists essentially had a two-stage theory of social transformation: obtain somehow state power, and then transform the world. There was the cross-cutting debate between so-called revolutionaries and so-called reformists, which came to divide the Marxist camp severely. These were real debates, and absorbed a good deal of organizational energy and time. What is striking, when one reviews the debates in the various countries, is how amazingly similar they were, despite all the important and oft-noted historical specificities of each national situation, and despite the differences in rhetorical labels which are usually used to describe them. In the end, however, these debates turned out often to be less consequential debates than people at the time and even since have usually assumed.

The “model party”¹⁵

in the world social/labor movement would now be, up to the First World War, the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD). It was the most powerful party in the Second International. It was the only party with a true mass base. It was the party of the most intense theoretical debates. When in 1877, the SPD was able to get sixteen deputies elected to the German Reichstag, this resulted in increased repression (the anti-socialist laws of 1878) but at the same time in the deflation of the anarchist case (Ragionieri 1961:57–62), and in the acceptance at the Erfurt Congress in 1891 of Marxism as the official doctrine of the SPD.¹⁶

From this point forward, the SPD became the locus of the grand debate between Bernstein and Kautsky. How important was this theoretical debate? The result of the debate in the end was “radical theory and moderate practice” (Roth 1963:163). And the basis of it was “deterministic Marxism,” in its two variants (Bernstein and Kautsky).¹⁷

The key shift was not in the terminology, but in the fact that, from the 1870s on, the socialists began to demand protective legislation. After 1871, the working classes “entered into a close relationship with the nation-states” (van der Linden 1988:333). Nolan calls this a shift from “politics to social policy” (1986:386). In Germany, they were responding to “an agenda that Bismarck had set.” This had to lead over time to “a general integration of the working-class into the state” (Mathias 1971, I:181).¹⁸

What was crucial to all the social/labor movements in the end was their drive to participate in the nation. The workers regarded themselves as the working classes. The upper strata tended to think of them as the dangerous classes. A large part of the tactical struggle on the part of the workers revolved around how they could lose the label of “dangerous” and acquire that of citizens. In Germany, after 1871, the Social-Democrats had been accused on being “enemies of the nation” and “Vaterlandlose” (without a fatherland) (Groh 1966:17). They needed to overcome this label. One key, widely used mechanism was to distinguish between workers by the categories of ethnicity or of nationality. Racism internally and imperialism/colonialism externally served the function of displacing the label of dangerous to a subcategory of workers. To the extent that this was persuasive, some workers could become active citizens whilst others remained passive citizens or even non-citizens. Once again, inclusion was being achieved by exclusion.

The story of the feminist/women's movement in the nineteenth century is similar in very many ways to the story of the social/labor movement. There were of course a few voices who saw the two struggles as not merely compatible but intertwined. Flora Tristan in the pre-1848 period spent her life preaching this. She was, it must be said, a voice in the wilderness.¹⁹

The problem, from the point of view of the male worker in urban wage-work, was quite straightforward. Women were paid less, before 1914 “considerably” less (Guilbert 1966:21), and this posed a threat to the level of wages in general. The issue was raised in meeting after meeting (Guilbert 1966:188). The First International was divided on the question. At the first congress in Geneva in 1866, the final resolution compromised by saying that women's work was to be regarded positively, but criticizing its conditions under capitalist production (Frei 1987:39). The workers' organizations would now push on three fronts: equality of wages, the family wage, and dangerous workplace conditions.

Equality of wages (for equal work) is a standard and obvious demand of trade unions. But it was frequently the secret hope that, if wages were made equal (for women, for minorities and immigrants, for workers in other countries), the hierarchically dominant worker (the male citizen worker of the ranking ethnic group) would then be employed in preference, if only for cultural-historical reasons.²⁰

The “family wage” became a central demand of the trade-union structures. The family wage was a simple idea. The minimum wage an adult male should receive for his waged work should be a sum sufficient to sustain him, his wife, and his non-adult children. This concept had wide appeal. It was strongly endorsed by the labor movement (Lewis 1984:49). It appealed to many employers, since it seemed to promise stability of the work force (May 1982:418). It fit in with the nineteenth-century value of the “responsibility” of men to care for their family (Evans 1983:281). It appealed therefore not only to the labor movements but to centrist politicians of all stripes. Only feminists objected to the concept (Offen 1957:183).²¹

From 1890–1920, feminists and socialists remained “at arm's length,” and indeed “became bitter enemies” (Kennedy and Tilly 1985:36). For working-class women the basic choice seemed always to be: “Sisters or citizens?” (Sowerwine 1982:1). And in the end, working-class women who were politically active were not allowed to refuse the choice.

The women's/feminist movement must not however be seen primarily through the prism of the social/labor movement. It had its own dynamic, albeit one that was parallel in many ways. Still, the story didn't really start with the women, but with the men. As O'Neill says of Victorian men (but was more generally true throughout the nineteenth-century European world), the men “taught women to think of themselves as a special class. . . . [They] created The Woman, where before there had only been women” (1971:6).

In 1848, feminism reasserted itself as part of the social revolution in France and elsewhere. But with the exception of a few tiny Communist groups, these demands were met by a “wave of puritanism” (Devance 1976:92). In the United States, the only expression of the world revolution was the Seneca Falls Convention, generally regarded as the founding moment of U.S. feminism. Its famous Declaration of Sentiments of 19–20 July 1848, echoing the Declaration of Independence, begins: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” Among the grievances listed on 18 August were that women were deprived of “the first right of a citizen, elective franchise,” a franchise that was given (this complaint foreshadowing future conflicts) to “ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners” (Rossi 1973:416).

In Europe, after the June Days in France, repression was severe, not merely of the socialists but of the feminists as well. This did not however draw the two “pariah” groups together. Rather, they would now go, for the most part, their separate organizational ways. The housewife had now become the dominant cultural image of the role the woman was supposed to play in the modern world. In the nineteenth century, the distinction between public and private spheres of life became central to the geoculture. It was being hailed as one of the great advances of modernity, and was the logical consequence of the demand for rationality, in which “good social organization” seemed to require “a stricter definition of spaces, roles and tasks” (Perrot 1986:35), which in turn “served as a justification for the assignment of personal characteristics and social roles to males and females” (Allen 1991:29). This has been called the “gendering of the public sphere” (Landes 1988:2).²²

Feminist movements were from the beginning caught in the conceptual dilemma that had been created for them. On the one hand, they were heirs to the universalist, and individualist, tradition enshrined in the French Revolution. But when they asked for their full rights as active citizens, they found these refused on grounds of their difference from men in some important ways. On the other hand, when they decided alternatively to seek “equality in difference,” they were fitting in with the “new scientific representation of the body” that saw male and female bodies “as a series of binary oppositions” which were incommensurable (Poovey 1988:6). In doing this, they were in effect acceding to their role as passive citizens, accepting if you will the role men had assigned themselves of “benevolent patriarchs” (Offen 1983:257).

Navigating the channel between Scylla and Charybdis was not, is not ever, easy, and it is rarely done successfully. Feminism had to make its way in a world in which sexism was not merely legitimate but openly and aggressively argued, and therefore had an impact on any and all potential allies.²³

Neither the scholars²⁴ nor the publicists nor the political leaders were of much help. The search for political integration into the states became virtually the only political issue of a movement that had an “overwhelmingly middle-class composition” (Evans 1977:34). How does one demand to be an active citizen? The answer seemed simple enough: organize, ask that laws be changed, lobby for these changes. And that is what feminists did. And if one asked why was it important to become a citizen? The answer would be parallel to the two-stage theory of Marxism: first the vote, then everything else.²⁵

The question was how to get the vote. It required organization, organization as women. The French feminists called the two possible alternative tactics the “politics of the breach” and the “politics of the assault.” The issue was whether to give priority to civil emancipation or to political emancipation (Bidelman 1982:chs. 3, 4). As a debate about tactics, this was not too different from the reformist-revolutionary debate among the German social-democrats. In general, the politics of the breach was dominant.²⁶

The usual explanation of the moderation of feminist movements is that they were dominated by middle-class women with bourgeois values (Hause with Kenney 1981:783; Rover 1967:61; Evans 1976:272). But some feminists did move on to more radical tactics. The aggressive tactics took hold particularly in Great Britain and the United States.²⁷

The feminists who led the struggle for suffrage were faced with groups of organized women who placed other objectives ahead of suffrage, either as a goal or as a priority. The suffragists saw these other movements as essentially less militant, more socially conservative.²⁸ The social feminists were in fact as concerned with political questions (that is, questions of the law), as were the political feminists who concentrated on suffrage. For the law impinged on women's rights and possibilities in countless ways.²⁹

We have seen that the social/labor movements had great difficulty in accepting the legitimacy of the women's/feminist movements in their demands for the rights of active citizenship. In a similar manner, the women's/feminist movements had great difficulties in accepting the legitimacy of the ethnic/racial movements in the latters' demands for the rights of active citizenship. It was as though there were not enough room on the ship to accommodate every one. Or perhaps the better metaphor is the unwillingness to accept the idea of a one-class ship—citizens all, citizens equal. In the nineteenth century, this second organizational conflict was to be found primarily in the United States, where the oppression of the Blacks played such a central role in political tensions and therefore gave rise to Black social movements.³⁰

The first formal exclusion of women from the vote was in the Reform Bill of 1832, which was intended to enfranchise some who did not have the franchise before. But in doing this, the bill specified “male persons,” a phrase that had never before been found in English legislation. This phrase “provided a focus of attack and a source of resentment,” (Rover 1967:3) out of which British feminism would grow. This was the kernel of the debate over the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution following the end of the Civil War. President Lincoln had emancipated the slaves on 1 January 1863 (actually not quite all the slaves, but most of them). The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868, said that if the right to vote were denied in any states to citizens over twenty-one who were “male inhabitants” of that state, the basis of representation of that state would be reduced in Congress. The feminists saw the Fourteenth Amendment as a “political setback” because, for the first time the word “male” was included, parallel to what had happened with the Reform Act of 1832. The women of course argued that extending the suffrage should be done for all that were excluded. But Wendell Phillips, one of the leaders of the U.S. abolitionist movement said in May 1865 that the demands of women's suffrage should not be pressed at the moment, for “this is the Negro's Hour.” The women suffragists did not stand by mute. Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony supported the campaign of George Francis Train, a known racist, who however advocated women's suffrage.³¹

Not all women leaders took the Stanton-Anthony position.³² The outcome was a profound split in the feminist movement. As the women's movement became more conservative on all social/labor issues in the second half of the nineteenth century, so did it on all ethnic/racial issues within countries (as in the United States)³³ or colonial issues (as in Great Britain).³⁴ In the course of this conservative shift, many feminists abandoned the natural rights argument. In the United States, they began to argue that women be given the vote “to balance the impact of the foreign born” (Berg 1978:269). When the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1903 came out for an “educational requirement” for the vote (to the notable but lonely dissent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman), they had shifted from campaigning to extend the franchise to a proposal “to take the vote away from some Americans—Negroes in the South and naturalized citizens in the North” (Kraditor 1965:137; see Flexner 1975:316).³⁵ At the height of this tension, some suffragists resorted to crude racism. For example, they issued a poster of a “brutish-looking Negro porter sitting next to a refined-looking White lady” with a caption that read “He can vote; why can't I?” (Kraditor 1965:31).

If citizenship—that is, active citizenship—was difficult to achieve for workers and women, it was even more difficult for persons of color (or other groups defined by some status-group characteristic and treated as somehow inferior). The intellectual justification for this had been building up since the beginning of the capitalist world-economy (Poliakov et al. 1976:52). But it was only in the nineteenth century that the theme of superior and inferior “races” was constantly elaborated and considered by Whites to be virtually self-evident.³⁶

The racial divide was made almost inevitable from the beginning by the forms in which class ideology evolved (Balibar in Balibar and Wallerstein 1988:chs. 12, 13). When commoners asserted their rights to citizenship both in England and in France, one of the arguments they sometimes used was that the aristocrats were “strangers” and not of native origin. This was the theory of the Norman Yoke, put forward in England since the seventeenth century³⁷

and the theory of the distinction between the “race gauloise” and the “race franque” in France, which had been bruited for some time but became prominent during the French Revolution.³⁸ A parallel argument emerged in Italy with Etruscomania (Poliakov 1974:65–66). But if the aristocrats were to be excluded from active citizenship on the grounds of their foreign origins, how much more obviously would persons of color be so excluded? Jus sanguinis as opposed to jus soli is by definition exclusionary and inevitably racist.³⁹

If race became a theorized concept in the nineteenth century, and racism an institutionalized practice, it was the result primarily of the centrality of the concept of citizenship. For citizenship as a concept had two logical consequences. It led states to emphasize and to predicate and insist on homogeneity as the only sound basis on which to justify the theoretical equality of all citizens. And it led states to justify their political domination of other states on the grounds that their particular homogeneous quality incarnated a higher degree of civilization than that of the dominated state, equally homogeneous but inferior.

The organic quality of the nation is inherent in what we have come to call Jacobinism, the key concept of which is that there should exist no intermediary bodies between the state and the individual. All individuals being equal, they have no public (or state-relevant) qualities other than that of being a citizen. Groups, however formed, no matter what their basis, do not have legal or moral standing as such. It would not be difficult or even illogical to transform the concept of organic qualities into different ones for each nation, and more generally, for the civilized (European) nations taken together versus all the others. The slide from a created homogeneity to a culturo-genetic organic reality, which could not be easily changed, was not difficult either.⁴⁰

Thus did we go from an organic whole that legitimated the equality of all citizens to an organic reality that justified a hierarchy among these citizens. Once again, from citizens all to an active/passive distinction. At which point, those excluded had the choice of insisting on inclusion or embracing the negatives—as angry riposte, rhetorical ploy, or organizer of identification.

The nineteenth century was the apogee of Europe in the world. “[N]ever did white men of European descent dominate [the world] with less challenge” (Hobsbawm 1975:135).⁴¹

This was based on their military power, no doubt, but it was secured by their ideological constructs. “Europe had been ’Europeanized' by the construction of a unifying grid of civilization, against which all other cultures could be measured and classified” (Woolf 1992:89). As the states sought to create homogeneous nations of citizens, they simultaneously sought to create a White (European) race, in the “crusade against the backward areas of the world” that had already been advocated by Saint-Simon (Manuel 1956:195). The concept of a racial hierarchy received the legitimation of science, itself the great cultural icon of the nineteenth century. Science did this by the “confusion of sociological reality and biological reality,” (Guillaumin 1972:24),⁴² egregious for avowed racists like Gobineau but equally evident, if in milder form, among centrist liberals.⁴³ As the European powers moved into a more active imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century, the racist ideas that had previously supported slavery were “dressed up in a new pseudo-scientific garb and given a popular mass appeal” (Davis 1993:73). The concept of the Aryan now became the justification of European domination of the non-European world. The concept of the Aryan then met up with the concept of the Oriental.

Racist theorizing bred anti-racist movements. But it must be admitted that such movements were in fact quite weak in the nineteenth century, much weaker than the social/labor movements and the women's/feminist movements. And, in the end, they got even less support from the liberal center than did the other kinds of movements. In part, this may reflect the even greater strength of racist ideology than of ideologies of bourgeois or male dominance. In part, it reflected the numerical weakness of those at the bottom of the racial hierarchy in Western countries. The only country of which this was not true was the United States, precisely where racist ideology was most deeply rooted, because it was the country first of slavery and later of Jim Crow.

The difficulty of the centrist liberals in confronting racism was their acceptance, fundamentally, of the active/passive distinction, which they framed as the difference between the inherent potential of all humans to be civilized (hence active citizens) and the current level of those who had not yet achieved their potential (hence passive citizens). They assumed that those with potential would take “generations—even centuries—to catch up, even given the most careful, paternalistic attention from benevolent Anglo-Saxons” (Bederman 1995:123).⁴⁴

Difference and inequalities of persons of different social origins—orders (Estates), class, gender, race, and education—were not invented in the nineteenth century. They had long existed and had been considered natural, inevitable, and indeed desirable. What was new in the nineteenth century was the rhetorical legitimacy of equality and the concept of citizenship as the basis of collective governance. This led as we have seen to the theorizing of the binary distinctions, the attempt to freeze them logically, to make de facto transiting across the boundaries not merely against the rules of society but against the rules of science. What was new as well was the social movements created by all those excluded by these binary reifications in order to secure their liberation, or at least a partial liberation, from the legal constraints. Each success of a particular group seemed to make easier by example and more difficult in practice the attempts of the next claimants of liberation. Citizenship always excluded as much as it included.