Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies) Review

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Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies) ReviewUntil 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...Read more›Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies) OverviewGenealogies 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.

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