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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.
- Sales Rank: #684948 in Books
- Published on: 2008-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.98" h x .79" w x 5.98" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 362 pages
Review
"In eloquent essays Margaret Somers sheds new light on citizenship as a central concern of modern political life. She shows the tensions, aporias, repressed possibilities, and potential vitality in everyday usage and scholarly conceptualization alike. This is a book scholars have been waiting for and one that should be widely read."
-Craig Calhoun, University Professor of Social Science, NYU
"Genealogies of Citizenship might well provide the definitive sociological and political critique of the era of market fundamentalism. Building on the insights of Karl Polanyi, T.H. Marshall, and Hannah Arendt, Margaret Somers demonstrates that civil society rests on the 'right to have rights'. But this right has been swept away by three decades of market-dominated discourse and policies. Somers brilliantly shows how Hurricane Katrina's devastating impact on New Orleans' African American community was the culmination of this dynamic."
-Fred Block, Professor of Sociology, University of California at Davis
"Margaret Somers has an astonishing variety of disciplinary competences and constantly poses new questions and working on parallel fields in order to build a network of concepts and arguments. The strong connection that she establishes between conceptual analysis and a practical commitment to the emergence of new democratic forms and republican citizenship is an essential aspect of the creative character of her work."
-Etienne Balibar, Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy, Université de Paris X Nanterre, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities, University of California, Irvine
"In these wide-ranging essays, glistening with brilliant turns of phrase about our contemporary social condition, Margaret Somers brings together normative citizenship theory, sociological analysis, history and political economy at the highest level of synthesis. Citizenship is not only a boundary-marker between polities; the loss of 'the right to have rights' does not only mark the refugee, the asylum seeker and the undocumented worker, it also stigmatizes the others within societies by social exclusion. Focusing on the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina, Somers shows how 'statelessness' became the condition of citizens of the USA at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To retrieve 'the right to have rights' for all means going beyond the 'romance of the market' and 'reviling the state.'"
-Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University
"Genealogies of Citizenship offers many intellectual rewards. Somers provides, at once, an incisive analytic for approaching the internal exclusions of liberal democratic societies, a sophisticated meditation on the career and meanings of the citizenship concept in social theory, and an eloquent indictment of a 'market fundamentalism' which, she shows, ultimately subverts citizenship's highest aspirations."
-Linda Bosniak, Professor, Rutgers University School of Law
"Margaret Somers is a renowned polymath, and in Genealogies of Citizenship she obliterates common divisions among sociology, history, moral philosophy, and politics to fashion an exhilarating new form of social inquiry that simultaneously advances core debates long-standing in social theory and offers a searching mediation on contemporary citizenship in extremis."
-Charles Camic, Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University
"Genealogies of Citizenship is a stunning achievement that confirms what we have long known - Margaret Somers is a brilliant social theorist of extraordinary distinction, one of the best thinkers of her generation. The originality and ambition of her commitment to rebuilding social theory grows from the most careful and searching of contextual knowledge. Likewise, she challenges historians of citizenship, democracy, and political economy to think their projects anew. Individually the chapters are a dazzling series of interventions; together they compose an extraordinary corpus."
-Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
"With extraordinary erudition and theoretical acuity, Margaret Somers examines the dominant ideas that link many of us together as a community, and marginalize others of us. She argues that the rise of the ideology of market fundamentalism is an assault on democratic rights. Nor is the assault a mere abstraction. Political ideas are embedded in legal practices and economic and social relations. Market fundamentalism is thus a profound threat to democratic possibilities."
-Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Graduate Center of the City University of New York
"The contributions Margaret Somers has made to our understanding of citizenship and rights are legion. Written with a sense of urgency, and directed to publics beyond her discipline, Genealogies of Citizenship continues her quest to build knowledge that is historical and analytical, empirical and ethical. Concerned with current threats to the standing of citizens, the book offers a timely plea to appreciate and defend the public sphere against depoliticization and market pressures, lest democratic institutions and human dignity erode."
-Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University.
"We don't need to rush to Tibet to find a socially-excluded citizenry struggling for basic human rights. Margaret Somers reveals many examples right here in the U.S. Gulf Coast after Katrina, in the dismantling of the welfare state, in the complicity of capital and public policy. A brilliant work of theory and history, Genealogies of Citizenship re-examines the shifting relationship between state, civil society, the market, and ideology through the analytic of race, gender, and class to produce the most provocative, comprehensive, and original contribution to a social theory of citizenship and rights since Hannah Arendt."
-Robin D. G. Kelley, Author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"Margaret Somers has written a profoundly important book. One of the great achievements of the past two centuries is the expansion of democratic citizenship. Apologists for market fundamentalism treat its erosion as a minor detail and even a benefit. Somers' book is a brilliant corrective."
-Robert Kuttner, Co-Editor, The American Prospect and author of Everything for Sale.
"This book is required reading for anyone interested in the consequences of neo-liberalism for the redefinition of social boundaries. With characteristic elegance, breadth, and theoretical mastery, Somers develops a detailed and complex analysis of processes of social exclusion and inclusion. Knowledge cultures, narratives and the law figure prominently in this new account of the redefinition of social citizenship. A tour de force that will be long remembered..."
-Michele Lamont, Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Professor of Sociology and African and African-American Studies, Author of The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration.
"Disinterring histories of the market-fundamentalist present, this is a devastatingly trenchant, yet profoundly creative, critique of privatized citizenship. Reclaiming the right to have rights, Somers puts critical social theory to work in what amounts to a radical new vision for social justice and progressive politics."
-Jamie Peck, Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy, University of British Columbia
"Margaret Somers' Genealogies of Citizenship is a profound and original defense of the moral ideal of socially inclusive democratic citizenship. It combines a sophisticated theoretical and philosophical defense of the normative foundations of this ideal with a range of compelling sociological explorations of the conditions for its robust sustainability. The book's central provocative thesis - that under-regulated, expansionary markets constitute a deep threat to this form of citizenship - is powerfully and convincingly argued. It deserves to be widely read and debated by anyone worried about the future of democratic society."
-Erik Olin Wright, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"...it's a stellar analysis and one can only hope that in book it will circulate more widely than journal articles tend to. She provides a complex theoretical apparatus that can deal with political economy and citizenship, ontology and epistemology, and the present as well as the past. In our current state of crisis, Somers reminds us there is more to worry about than the state and the government - that any economic fix needs to stimulate a robust civil society built on substantive citizenship rights." - Accounts: American Sociological Association Economic Sociology Section Newsletter
"This book is an exhaustive history of Anglo-American citizenship theory. It should be stressed that this is very much a theory work. Alongside the more traditional sources of political philosophy she interweaves the work of Karl Polanyi, Hannah Arendt, and T.H. Marshall to provide an genealogical history of the diverse forms of citizenship theory." - Alan Hunt, Carleton College, Canadian Journal of Sociology
In Genealogies of Citizenship Margaret Somers provides a vigorous and passionate defence of citizenship as the necessary foundation of democracy and our best hope of sustaining social solidarity, equality and mutual trust. Through a series of brilliant expositions of classical liberalism, Hannah Arendt, T.H Marshall, Jürgen Habermas and Robert Putnam, she unpacks the genealogies of the concept to develop a critical understanding of the modern crisis of citizenship." - Bryan S. Turner, Wellesley College, Cultural Sociology
"....one of the most thoughtful and incisive critiques of American democracy to have appeared in recent years." -Erik Olin Wright, Trajectories
"There is much to appreciate in Margaret Somers's Genealogies of Citizenship. As she rightly notes, sociologists have been reluctant to theorize citizenship and rights, seeing normative political theory as the domain of political scientists and philosophers." -Irene Bloemraad, International Journal of Comparative Sociology
About the Author
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.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A Worthy, but Misdirected, Response to the Ills of Contemporary Capitalism
By Herbert Gintis
Until the elections of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States, along with the collapse of Communist parties throughout Europe in the wake of the success of the European Community, intellectuals from all sides of the political spectrum considered to see socialism as a viable alternative to capitalism. Until the rise of Amnesty International and other Human rights groups, as well as the emergence of the civil right and feminist movements and the resurgence of ethnic nationalism, the central political opposition was the class struggle between the rich and privileged on the one hand and the industrial working class on the other. It was then realistic to see the central political battle in the world economic system to be that between liberal democratic capitalism and democratic socialism.
The civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, and gender equality movements of the period starting in 1965 marked the collapse of the intellectual Left, as well as dissolution of the working class as a primary agent of social change. This dissolution was not accomplished through coercion, but rather through a change in the structure of the labor force and a concomitant change in the political understandings and commitments of working class men and women. The conservative counterrevolution was, if anything, spearheaded by working class voters who failed to see the traditional left unionism as relevant to their welfare and capable of realizing their aspirations. To add to the woes of the Left, the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980's and China embraced the market economy after 1979, inspired by the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping's. Finally, Third World socialism, never very hearty, withered as well during this period, in the face of the success of the Pacific Basin countries, as well as the Latin American capitalist successes in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and elsewhere.
In the wake of these massive social changes, the intellectual left has abandoned the vision of fundamental social change. Capitalism is with us for the foreseeable future, and the best that progressives can hope for is to render the system the least destructive as possible for its victims. It has also become clear that the major economic victims in the contemporary world economies are those condemned to penury by corrupt and despotic states rather than the capitalist fat-cats of the past. For this reason, most progressive intellectuals today are emphatic supporters of political democracy and extensive civil liberties. In a sense, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other civil liberties groups have become the leading edge of progressive social change. Moreover, it has become equally clear that a major enemy of human emancipation throughout the world is the patriarchal family, embedded either in tribalism or predatory statism. Thus, movements embracing cultural alternatives to patriarchal ideology, including feminism, gay and Lesbian rights, and alternative family organization have become especially successful in dissolving the traditional forms of patriarchal oppression around the world. Finally, it is clear now that liberal democratic capitalism is capable of meeting the needs of the vast majority of its citizen, the major group left out being the poor, who are often in intolerable and lamentable straits even in the affluent liberal democratic capitalist countries.
All this is clear, but the intellectual left has not developed a unified and coherent political philosophy attuned to the current state of economic affairs in the advanced capitalist countries. In Genealogies of Citizenship, Margaret Somers, who is Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Michigan, has taken on the task of supplying such a political philosophy. I am certain many people will find her political ideas attractive. Indeed, she recently received the Lewis A. Coser Award for Innovation and Theoretical Agenda Setting, and additional awards will be forthcoming.
Somers is inspired by three great thinkers, Karl Polanyi (the embeddedness of markets in social life), Hannah Arendt (the right to have rights), and T. H. Marshall (social citizenship). Somers takes as given that we live, and will continue to live, in a liberal democratic capitalist society, but the current society suffers from an excessive expansion of the market sector into traditional civil society, thereby undermining the legitimate rights of citizens. "Whether these conflicts result in regimes of relatively democratic socially inclusive citizenship rights or regimes of social exclusion and statelessness largely depends on the ability of civil society, the public sphere, and the social state to exert countervailing force against the corrosive effects of market-driven governance (p. 1).
Somers is not an enemy of the market, but rather an enemy of its hegemonic tendencies. "Disproportionate market power, " she says "disrupts this carefully constructed balance, as the risks and costs of managing human frailties under capitalism once shouldered by government and corporations get displaced onto individual workers and vulnerable families." (p. 2) This and similar statements point clearly to the central problem with disproportionate market power is that it overwhelm "the frail," who are not capable of competing in the competitive marketplace. The traditional welfare state, she maintains, was the fallback for such individuals, who were afforded a decent way of life by virtue of income and social services supplied by the state, under the banner of "citizen rights." This system disappeared, she maintains, through the process of "contractualizing citizen rights," by which she means transforming inalienable citizen rights into "conditional privileges" contingent upon successful labor market performance. The delegitimation of the traditional social welfare system was due to a shift in "public discourses" from attributing social problems from "structural conditions" to "alleged defects of individual moral character." (p. 3) To counter this tendency, Somers proposes that "the right to have rights" should be reaffirmed by a "robust social sphere," and that these rights include social support independent from success in the market economy. She singles out the "basic income right," which is a guaranteed income by virtue of citizenship rather than performance in the economy, as an inalienable "citizen right," as well as payment for "devalued labor (e.g., raising children, doing household work, unpaid child care)." (p. 44)
Somers' analysis is well worth reading as she is full of interesting ideas and insights. But, I am afraid her proposed agenda does not have much chance of success, and it should be decisively rejected by those seeking to solve the problems of poverty and dependency. The main reason is that the voting public is not likely to embrace the notion that people deserve support independent of their personal behavior and the particular reasons for their dependent condition. In our study of the welfare revolt in the United States ("Reciprocity and the Welfare State", in Jean Mercier-Ythier, Serge Kolm and Louis-Andre (Eds.) Handbook on the Economics of Giving, Reciprocity and Altruism, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2002), Christina Fong, Sam Bowles and I found that most voters are quite willing to support those who are incapable of supporting themselves because of mental or physical illness or defect, but consistently withdrew this support from those who they felt were capable in principle of acting prosocially, but in fact used their welfare dependency to act in selfish and socially pathological ways. I the work since then that I have been involved with concerning social cooperation and altruism, my coworkers and I have found that the central principle that induces people to cooperate is a sense of community (not democracy or civil status), and most people are what we call "strong reciprocators:" they prefer to cooperate altruistically, but react to free-riding and defection on the part of others by withdrawing their cooperation, and even punishing the miscreants if they are capable of doing so, and even when carrying out this punishment is personally costly. Moreover, we have found this pattern of behavior to occur in many different economics and cultural settings, although of course the norms of proper prosocial behavior differ from society to society, and the "community" that people recognize as worthy of support is culturally specific.
It may seem that the moral values underlying "strong reciprocity" are inherently inimical to the solution of social problems surrounding poverty and dependency. This impression is incorrect. People generally identify with their social community as are willing to help community members who are in trouble (citizenship is not central here, although illegal status may be in certain situations). These communitarian moral values include helping those whose distressed position is no fault of their own, and even include giving second and third chances to community members who have brought on their own misfortune. However, it does not extend to unconditional support for those who habitually exhibit socially pathological behavior by not contributing to the cooperative process through which society reproduces itself. Thus, unconditional income grants are likely to be rejected by voters as immoral and unjust.
Somers suggests that in a liberal community tolerance for diversity should be the rule, and hence she supports a notion of multiculturalism in which culturally distinct groups tolerate their differences. However, multiculturalism cannot be invoked to justify why one cultural group should be taxed to support the anti-social behavior of another group in the name of "tolerance." Indeed, every community has a set of core values that it expects all members to uphold, and exhibits limited tolerance for deviation from these values. This is why it is important for a group to struggle for acceptance by asserting the good moral standing of its basic principles. Thus, for instance, gay persons do not simply want to be left alone; they want to be legitimized by being able to marry and to openly profess their sexual orientation. The notion that we should confer moral value on all groups independent of their behavior or their manner of contributing to the social good is not part of a feasible moral system for advanced liberal democratic capitalist society.
I do not have a comprehensive alternative to Somers' well thought-out system, but I think a few facts should be kept in mind in working out such a system. First, the major cause of poverty and dependency in the world today is the predatory state, monopolizing a country's valuable resources on behalf the rich and powerful, at the expense of economic development. The major instruments for dismantling such regimes are the ideals of democracy, civil liberties, and market competition, which forces the rich and powerful, who prefer the ease of monopoly profits, to compete to the benefit of the public. Second, in the United States and many other advanced capitalist countries, the poor are overwhelmingly new immigrant groups. In the United States, with its competitive labor markets, most immigrant groups integrate almost perfectly after two or three generations. In other advanced countries with large immigrant populations, we should advocate competitive labor markets on the grounds of fairness. If competitive labor markets lead to excessively low living standards for the poor, we should advocate higher minimum wages, earned income tax credits, job training, and other measures that reward people for prosocial behavior, and hence are highly attractive to voters. Third, if there are groups that do not assimilate economically, such as American black males, we should advocate redressing the social conditions that reproduce such groups' chronic dependency.
I would give this book five stars for thoughtful exposition, but the realizability of Somers' vision takes away two stars. If you disagree with my analysis, her book might be just right for you.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Complex but Worth It
By J. Lotus Seeley
Reprinted by author from the Economic Sociology Section Newsletter of the American Sociological Association.
In the course of the debates over the last few months about bailouts and tax cuts one familiar face has raised its head: the anti-statist conservative out to warn us that social provision is a helping hand onto the path to dependency and total lack of responsibility for the self. It's an argument so hackneyed that one is tempted to ignore it, but Margaret Somers' new book Genealogies of Citizenship frames such arguments as emblematic of a larger set of discourses about citizenship and statelessness, the perils and promise of the free market, and the possibilities of civil society. Somers' project is intended as a contribution to public sociology as well as a foundation for a new sociology of rights. An avowedly political book that rejects the binary of normative, ethically prescriptive scholarship and apolitical "empirical" social science, it is a clarion call for us to see how letting market logic colonize the state and civil society leads to "citizenship betrayed" and imperils the foundations of democracy. To take the place of hegemonic market logic she provides an ideal of democratic socially-inclusive citizenship rights that draws its power from a civil society strong enough to maintain a favorable balance of power between state, market, and citizens.
A scholar of history, sociology, and law, Somers' looks back to Locke and Hobbes while remaining firmly focused on the present, especially the lessons to be learned from what she calls Hurricane Katrina's "unnatural disaster. Somers' main analytic mode is her "historical sociology of concept formation," which views concepts as socially-produced artifacts in need of historicization and reflexive examination. Substantively, three theorists are central to her project. Somers draws from Hannah Arendt's formulation of "the rights to have rights" to explain the perils of contractual citizenship, uses TH Marshall's idea of social citizenship, and employs Karl Polanyi's concepts of embeddedness and instituted process as the foundation for her entire attack on market-driven governance.
Somers' central thesis is that society must be fearful of market fundamentalism, an "ideational regime" that sees free market logic as the best way to organize all other realms of social life as well as a political movement spreading the gospel of marketization. This marketization of the public sphere is problematic because then wealth is allowed to be converted into clout in civil society, resulting in the abrogation of social citizenship rights. Marketization is of particular concern for Somers' sociology of rights, because it leads to the contractualization of citizenship whereby rights become conditional upon quid pro quo exchange. Specifically, moral worth and equality are defined by participation in the work force. In a society where full employment is not guaranteed, this produces a superfluous and expendable population who become the internal stateless, denied recognition as moral equals and thus disavowed by the state designed to protect them. This redefinition of citizenship reveals the gravity of Arendt's "right to have rights," which asserts that viewing all members of a society as moral and social equals is a precondition of a democratic citizenship regime. Coupling this with Marshall's idea of social citizenship, leads Somers to promote a "citizenship livelihood" or a basic income right that replaces the social exclusion of poverty with the material foundation necessary for inclusion in civil society.
Underpinning market fundamentalism according to Somers is social naturalism, which uses binary logic to define the natural as good and artifice as bad. This results in epistemological and ontological privilege for those allied with the nature side of the binary. Looking at what she calls "Anglo-American citizenship theory," Somers argues that through Locke's social contract the market is allied with the natural and the state with artifice, which leads to a strong anti-statist current and support for the market as the site of freedom. To take social naturalism's place Somers introduces the idea of historical institutionalism, which illustrates how phenomena only function when embedded in sets of rules and institutions that define that sphere at a particular time. This requires us to embrace artifice, especially the state, as necessary to secure the equal recognition necessary for the equal exercise of rights.
Hurricane Katrina is Somers' central (and sobering) case study of how the contractualization of citizenship produces an intranational version of Arendt's "scum of the earth" by erecting internal boundaries contoured by race and class. She turns on its head any argument that Katrina was a "failure" of the state by recasting it as evidence of market fundamentalism's treacherous success in evacuating any sense of obligation in the state's relationship to its citizens. Somers describes the spectacle of the poor, people of color, and otherwise marginalized individuals stranded at the Superdome as a look behind a "thick curtain of denial" at the unemployed and underemployed were deemed expendable after by being blamed for their own poverty. While more privileged residents were able to flee the city, those whose citizenship contracts had been revoked were left to fend for themselves in the nasty and brutish conditions of New Orleans underwater. Efforts to deem this a "natural" disaster are rebutted by Somers, who takes these claims as an opening to thoroughly deconstruct the nature/artifice binary, which she sees as the base of the problems of statelessness and market fundamentalism.
Somers' hangs her hopes for the slowing of market fundamentalism's colonizing efforts on civil society. She develops the idea of an architectonics of citizenship, where the state, market, and civil society are conceived as parties to a struggle in the public sphere over the site and direction of power. The character of any citizenship regime is determined by the history of those struggles. To create a strong democratic citizenship regime requires a reinvigoration and repoliticization of the public sphere so it can resume its function of buffering the state and civil society from the evangelizing efforts of the market. Through making this argument, Somers criticizes both Jurgen Habermas and Talcott Parsons for evacuating the public sphere of any real oppositional power by collapsing it with the market on the side of the private. She avers that only a public sphere of real debate and a civil society with enough strength to fight off interlopers can move us from a condition of "citizenship imperiled" to democratically-inclusive citizenship regimes. One of her basic prescriptions is that market logic must not be allowed to leave its restricted sphere, and only efforts by both the state and citizens can keep it at bay.
While I generally was impressed by Somers' arguments and analysis, I found her concept of civil society a little underdeveloped in terms of content, specifically how tensions in that sector between ideologically different groups might be resolved. She does admit that there is a dark side to civil society where exclusionary and egalitarian groups must struggle for the position of dominant ethos, but it's never made clear exactly from where the proponents of market fundamentalism are launching their attacks. Are they headquartered in the market with forays into the state? What is market fundamentalists' relationship to civil society other than colonization? Her language of encroachment suggests the market is the home of market fundamentalism, which begs the question of the details of the interrelation of market, civil society, and the state. Somers is conscious that her architectonics of citizenship is a mere heuristic and each overlaps, but that same heuristic keeps her from confronting whether market fundamentalist proponents have any right to a place in the civil sphere, especially when they form a popular movement themselves. Arguing that the state must be involved in protecting the egalitarian and democratic ethos of civil society, she doesn't discuss just how popular yet possibly harmful groups will be allowed space in public debates while at the same time restrained to prevent a regression of civil society to a less robust character. Moreover, she doesn't outline how this will happen if those who are interested in a robust civil society are in the minority. This might merely be the legacy of a larger problem in social movement literature that doesn't tend to conceive of socially conservative mobilizations as social movements in the same way as progressive and Left groups, but it is a problem that must be resolved if her theories are to aid our practices. She provides a theoretical exposition of why society must protect civil society and the public sphere, but the details of that battle are left for others to determine.
Some people might be taken aback by the political and ethically-prescriptive character of Somers' work, and those who hold to the politically disinterested model of social science may view it as an illegitimate line of inquiry that is not excused by admitting up front her political sympathies. For others, though, it will be warmly welcomed as the sort of politically engaged yet theoretically rigorous and complex scholarship for which they have been waiting. Somers' book serves as an exemplar of how to do work that cannot be pegged as either normative or empirical but that draws from both to create a nuanced understanding of theoretical and philosophical issues that set the terms of our current debates. Nonetheless, I wonder if this is really a work of a public sociology. The book is dense and draws on an array of concepts and ideas geared toward a professional audience, and its focus on historicization rather than practice makes it mostly a theoretical tome that may be unnerving to the "public." While everyone, especially policy makers, could benefit from this book, I'm unsure if it will actually find its way into their hands.
Ultimately, though, it's a stellar analysis and one can only hope that in book it will circulate more widely than journal articles tend to. She provides a complex theoretical apparatus that can deal with political economy and citizenship, ontology and epistemology, and the present as well as the past. In our current state of crisis, Somers reminds us there is more to worry about than the state and the government - that any economic fix needs to stimulate a robust civil society built on substantive citizenship rights. Without one, the end of market "failures" and its dangerous fundamentalism is impossible.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
SImply brilliant
By A. Kent
Cannot say enough good things.
Must read for sociologists: this is how excellent research is done in an age where quantitative analyses dominate the field.
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