This broad-ranging text offers an analysis of the idea of citizenship and its relevance to social problems and social policies in advanced industrial societies.

Twine demonstrates that two concepts are essential to an understanding of the issue of citizenship: the socially embedded nature of human agents, and their interdependence both with each other and with the natural and social worlds they inhabit. Twine emphasizes the social nature of individual needs and individual rights. He shows that interdependence is not limited to the mutual linkages within advanced industrial societies, but extends both to the relations between advanced and developing nations and to the environmental contexts of human existence.