The problem of citizenship has re-emerged as an issue which is central, not only to practical political questions concerning access to health-care systems, education institutions and the welfare state, but also to traditional theoretical debates in sociology over the conditions of social integration and social solidarity. Citizenship as an institution is thus constitutive of the societal community. These sociological debates typically start with an analysis of the conceptual framework of citizenship in the work of T.H. Marshall. This article reviews the standard objections to Marshall's concept of citizenship and the hyphenated society, and develops a critique of the unitary character of the concept of citizenship in the Marshallian tradition. There are in fact, as the etymological development of the concept itself demonstrates, several distinct forms of citizenship. In reply to a recent contribution by Michael Mann to the theory of citizenship, the article contrasts the history of citizenship in Germany, France, Holland, England and the United States; on the basis of this overview, we can identify two crucial variables. The first concerns the passive or active nature of citizenship, depending on whether citizenship is developed from above ( via the state) or from below (in terms of more local participatory institutions, such as trade unions). The second dimension is the relationship between the public and the private arenas within civil society. A conservative view of citizenship (as passive and private) contrasts with a more revolutionary idea of active and public citizenship. By combining these two dimensions, it is possible to produce a historically dynamic theory of four types of democratic polities as societal contexts for the realization of citizenship rights.

The concept of generation within sociology has until recently been a marginal area of interest. However, various demographic, cultural and intellectual developments have re-awakened an interest in generations that started with the classic essay by Karl Mannheim. To date, the sociological literature has generally conceptualized generations as nationally bounded entities. In this paper we suggest that the sociology of generations should develop the concept of global generations. This conceptual enhancement is important because the growth of global communications technology has enabled traumatic events, in an unparalleled way, to be experienced globally. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the era of international generations, united through print media, and the mid-twentieth century saw the emergence of transnational generations, facilitated by new broadcast communications. However, the latter part of the twentieth century is the period of global generations, defined by electronic communications technology, which is characterized, uniquely, by increasing interactivity. The 1960s generation was the first global generation, the emergence of which had world-wide consequences; today with major developments in new electronic communications, there is even more potential for the emergence of global generations that can communicate across national boundaries and through time. If in the past historical traumas combined with available opportunities to create national generations, now globally experienced traumas, facilitated by new media technologies, have the potential for creating global generational consciousness. The media have become increasingly implicated in the formation of generational movements. Because we are talking about generations in the making rather than an historical generation, this article is necessarily speculative; it aims to provoke discussion and establish a new research agenda for work on generations.

Over the last two decades there has been growing interest in the sociology of the body, as illustrated by the publication of The Body (Featherstone et al. 1991), The Woman in the Body (Martin 1989), Five Bodies (O'Neill 1985), The Body and Social Theory (Shilling 1993), and The Body and Society (Turner 1984). Three philosophical works were particularly important in initially stimulating sociological analysis of the human body. First, The Absent Body (Leder 1990) was critical of Cartesian dualism that separates mind and body. Employing a phenomenological perspective, Leder studied the absence of the “lived body” in everyday life, and showed how disruptions of illness bring the body into focus. Second, The Body in Pain (Scarry 1985) explored the problem of physical pain in torture and war, and demonstrated the centrality of the body to contemporary moral issues. Third, Michel Foucault's historical studies of medicine in The Birth of the Clinic (1973) and sexuality in The History of Sexuality (1978) generated interest in the interaction between the body, medical practice, and systems of belief. Foucault opened up new ways of thinking about how bodies are imagined, constructed, and represented. Georges Canguilhem's important work on The Normal and the Pathological (1994) influenced Foucault's approach to the history of systems of thought, including our knowledge of the human body. Foucault has remained central to research on power and the body as a representation of society. For example, Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex (1990) demonstrated major historical changes in the anatomical representation of the sexual organs, reflecting different theories of gender. This general interest in the sociology of the body has seeped into medical sociology by suggesting innovative theoretical frameworks and new topics of empirical inquiry (Turner 2004).

This essay takes stock of our editorial collaboration in the past decade and outlines those ideas that we find most promising and approaches that are most fruitful in investigating citizenship. We offer it as an agenda; not so much a dogmatic sequence of principles as an ethos toward conceiving democratic citizenship as a cosmopolitan virtue. We propose a cosmopolitan mobility tax and a cosmopolitan goods and services tax to illustrate how that cosmopolitan virtue must find a practical expression.