Giovanni Sartori Book Award, Qualitative Methods and Multi-Method Research Section, American Political Science Association 2009 - Winner

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.

• Margaret R. Somers is a leading figure in historical, political and cultural sociology and social theory
• A unique perspective on citizenship as `social recognition` and the `right to have rights`
• Introduces a novel theoretical analysis of Hurricane Katrina with a unique focus on citizenship rights and market fundamentalism

Contents
1. Theorizing citizenship rights and statelessness; Part I. Citizenship Imperiled: 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.

"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)

"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)

"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)