II. Democracy Against the Welfare State?

Within any modern state, citizens are structurally related to state authority in three basic ways. Citizens are collectively the sovereign creators of state authority, they are potentially threatened by state-organized repression and coercion, and they are dependent upon the services and provisions organized by the state. The notion of citizenship within liberal-democratic welfare states involves all three aspects: citizens are conceived of as (1) the ultimate source of the collective political will, in the formation of which they are called upon to participate in a variety of institutional ways through the institutional devices of territorial and functional representation; they are also (2) the “subjects” against whom this will can be enforced and whose civil rights and liberties impose, by constituting an autonomous sphere of “private” social, cultural, and economic action, limits upon the state’s authority; and finally they are (3) clients who depend upon state-provided protection, services, opportunities, and collective goods for securing their material, social, and cultural means of survival and well-being in society.