The Origins of Social Citizenship in Pre-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

South Africa's 1996 Constitution promises a measure of ‘social citizenship’ alongside formal political and legal equality. South Africa's public welfare and social policies may be less effective in ensuring social citizenship, through reducing insecurity and inequality, than those of the more established democracies, but they are far more effective than those of other ‘developing’ countries. The origins of social citizenship in South Africa lie in the early and mid-1940s, when the state first assumed responsibility for the welfare, broadly understood, of all South Africans. The most significant achievement was the introduction of a universal old-age pension system. The importance of these initiatives has been largely overlooked. This has been in part because later scholars largely ignored the heterogeneity of liberal thought in South Africa in the mid-twentieth century, as followers of the ‘New Liberalism’ broke with the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill and argued for a range of state interventions in social and economic life. In South Africa, as elsewhere, the Second World War provided a context in which revised liberal thought gave rise to major policy reforms, some of which were to survive even the election of a National Party government in 1948.