educational purposes

1. .

2. citizenship, relationship between an
individual and a state to which the individual
owes allegiance and in turn is entitled to its
protection. Citizenship implies the status of
freedom with accompanying responsibilities.
Citizens have certain rights, duties, and
responsibilities that are denied or only
partially extended to aliens and other
noncitizens residing in a country

3. In general, full political rights, including
the right to vote and to hold public office,
are predicated upon citizenship. The usual
responsibilities of citizenship are
allegiance, taxation, and military service.

4. Citizenship is the most privileged form
of nationality. This broader term denotes
various relations between an individual and a
state that do not necessarily confer political
rights but do imply other privileges,
particularly protection abroad.

5. It is the term used in international law to
denote all persons whom a state is entitled to
protect. Nationality also serves to denote the
relationship to a state of entities other than
individuals; corporations, ships, and aircraft,
for example, possess a nationality.

6. The concept of citizenship first arose in towns
and city-states of ancient Greece, where it generally
applied to property owners but not to women,
slaves, or the poorer members of the community. A
citizen in a Greek city-state was entitled to vote and
was liable to taxation and military service.
The Romans first used citizenship as a device to
distinguish the residents of the city of Rome from
those peoples whose territories Rome had
conquered and incorporated.

7. As their empire continued to grow, the
Romans granted citizenship to their allies
throughout Italy proper and then to peoples in
other Roman provinces, until in
212 CE citizenship was extended to all free
inhabitants of the empire. Roman citizenship
conferred important legal privileges within the
empire. (See civitas.)

11. Social Classes
Of the Society

12. Social class, also called class, a
group of people within a society who possess
the same socioeconomic status. Besides being
important in social theory, the concept of class
as a collection of individuals sharing similar
economic circumstances has been widely used
in censuses and in studies of social mobility.

13. History and usage of the
term

14. The term class first came into wide use in
the early 19th century, replacing such terms
as rank and order as descriptions of the major
hierarchical groupings in society. This usage
reflected changes in the structure of western
European societies after the industrial and
political revolutions of the late 18th century.

15. Although the term class has been applied to
social groups in a wide range of societies,
including ancient city-states, early empires,
and caste or feudal societies, it is most usefully
confined to the social divisions in modern
societies, particularly industrialized ones.

16. Social classes must be distinguished
from status groups; the former are based
primarily upon economic interests, while the
latter are constituted by evaluations of
the honour or prestige of an occupation,
cultural position, or family descent.

17. Early Theories of Class

18. Henri de Saint-Simon
Theories of social class were fully elaborated only in
the 19th century as the modern social sciences,
especially sociology, developed. Political philosophers
such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau discussed the issues of social inequality and
stratification, and French and English writers in the late
18th and early 19th centuries put forth the idea that
the nonpolitical elements in society,

19. such as the economic system and the family, largely
determined a society’s form of political life. This idea
was taken farther by the French social theorist Henri
de Saint-Simon, who argued that a state’s form of
government corresponded to the character of
the underlying system of economic production.

20. Karl Marx’s social theory
of class
For Marx, what distinguishes one
type of society from another is its
mode of production (i.e., the nature
of its technology and division of
labour), and each mode of
production engenders a distinctive
class system in which one class-

21. controls and directs the process of
production while another class is, or other
classes are, the direct producers and
providers of services to the dominant
class. The relations between the classes
are antagonistic because they are
in conflict over the appropriation of what is
produced, and in certain periods.

22. when the mode of production itself is
changing as a result of developments in
technology and in the utilization of labour,
such conflicts become extreme and a new
class challenges the dominance of the
existing rulers of society.

23. Contemporary Theories
of Class

24. Subsequent theories of class have been
chiefly concerned with revising, refuting, or
providing an alternative to Marxism. Early in the
20th century, German sociologist Max
Weber questioned the importance of social
classes in the political development of modern
societies, pointing out that religious
mores, nationalism, and other factors played
significant roles.

25. Weber proposed limiting the concept of
class to impersonal income distinctions
between groups, thereby distinguishing
class from social status, collectivities, or
political hierarchies.

26. .

28. Lower Class
When used by social scientists, the lower
class is typically defined as service employees,
low-level manual laborers, and the
unemployed. Those who are employed in
lower class occupations are often colloquially
referred to as the working poor.

30. Middle Class
The middle class is a socio-economic
strata that falls in between the working class
and the upper class. Those in the middle
class have enough disposable income to afford
minor luxuries like vacations or restaurants,
but also rely on borrowing for big-ticket items
like homes and cars.

32. What Is the Upper Class?
The term upper class refers to a group of
individuals who occupy the highest place
and status in society. These people are
considered the wealthiest, lying above the
working and middle class in the social
hierarchy.

33. Individuals who make up the upper class
have higher levels of disposable income and
exert more control over the use of natural
resources. While the upper class makes up
a small percentage of the overall
population, it controls a disproportionately
large amount of the overall wealth.