Genealogies of Citizenship
Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights

This book is an ambitious intertwining of multidisciplinary themes about citizenship, social recognition and rights.

Margaret R. Somers (Author)

9780521793940, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 24 July 2008

362 pages, 8 b/w illus.
22.7 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.57 kg

'Somers has provided us with a broad, multi-faceted and immensely inspiring provocative account of modern 'western' societies' problems in combining citizenship rights and market principles which should be required reading not just for those of us interested in such questions, but for anyone who intends to use the words 'social capital' or 'civil society' in future.' Andreas Fahrmeir, Sehepunkte

Genealogies of Citizenship is a remarkable rethinking of human rights and social justice. As global governance is increasingly driven by market fundamentalism, growing numbers of citizens have become socially excluded and internally stateless. Against this movement to organize society exclusively by market principles, Margaret Somers argues that socially inclusive democratic rights must be counter-balanced by the powers of a social state, a robust public sphere and a relationally-sturdy civil society. Through epistemologies of history and naturalism, contested narratives of social capital, and Hurricane Katrina's racial apartheid, she warns that the growing authority of the market is distorting the non-contractualism of citizenship; rights, inclusion and moral worth are increasingly dependent on contractual market value. In this pathbreaking work, Somers advances an innovative view of rights as public goods rooted in an alliance of public power, political membership, and social practices of equal moral recognition - the right to have rights.

1. Theorizing citizenship rights and statelessness
Part I. Citizenship Imperilled: How Marketization Creates Social Exclusion, Statelessness, and Rightlessness: 2. Genealogies of Katrina: the unnatural disasters of market fundamentalism, racial exclusion, and statelessness
3. Citizenship, statelessness, nation, nature, and social exclusion: Arendtian lessons in losing the right to have rights
Part II. Historical Epistemologies of Citizenship: Rights, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere: 4. Citizenship troubles: genealogies of struggle for the soul of the social
5. What's political or cultural about political culture and the public sphere? Toward a historical epistemology of concept formation
Part III. In Search of Civil Society and Democratic Citizenship: Romancing the Market, Reviling the State: 6. Let them eat social capital: how marketizing the social turned Solidarity into a bowling team
7. Fear and loathing of the public sphere: how to unthink a knowledge culture by narrating and denaturalizing Anglo-American citizenship theory.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], Sociology [JHB], Social issues & processes [JFF], European history [HBJD]