From Liberal to Neoliberal Citizenship: A Commentary on Marion Fourcade

I argue that Marion Fourcade's “ordinal citizenship”, which is an obsession with scoring and ranking, is part of a larger change of citizenship, from liberal to neoliberal. This is a citizenship whose equality promise has been hollowed-out by the inequalities of global capitalism, and in which not only redistributive benefits (once called “social rights”) but even the access to citizenship itself (qua naturalization) are tied to individual merit and performance. If T.H. Marshall had hailed the evolution of liberal citizenship, with its social rights crown, as one from “contract to status”, thus reversing H.S. Maine's famous “movement of the progressive societies”, the arrival of neoliberal citizenship marks the “reverse reverse”, back from status to capitalism's original position of contract.