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

by Margaret R. Somers

• ISBN13: 9780521793940
• ISBN10: 0521793947
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-09-01
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Margaret R. Somers is Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Michigan. A leading figure in historical, political, economic, and cultural sociology and social theory, she recently received the inaugural Lewis A. Coser Award for Innovation and Theoretical Agenda-Setting in Sociology.

Table of Contents

List of figures	p. xi
Preface	p. xiii
Acknowledgments	p. xvi
Theorizing citizenship rights and statelessness	p. 1
Citizenship imperiled: how marketization creates social exclusion, statelessness, and rightlessness	p. 61
Genealogies of Katrina: the unnatural disasters of market fundamentalism, racial exclusion, and statelessness	p. 63
Citizenship, statelessness, nation, nature, and social exclusion: Arendtian lessons in losing the right to have rights	p. 118
Historical epistemologies of citizenship: rights, civil society, and the public sphere	p. 145
Citizenship troubles: genealogies of struggle for the soul of the social	p. 147
What's political or cultural about political culture and the public sphere? Toward a historical epistemology of concept formation	p. 171
In search of civil society and democratic citizenship: romancing the market, reviling the state	p. 211
Let them eat social capital: how marketizing the social turned Solidarity into a bowling team	p. 213
Fear and loathing of the public sphere: how to unthink a knowledge culture by narrating and denaturalizing Anglo-American citizenship theory	p. 254
References	p. 289
Index	p. 332
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