The ‘triadic’ model of society in Somers’ Genealogies of Citizenship

The standard criticism on the left of neoliberalism, whose ideological core is what Somers aptly calls ‘market fundamentalism’, is that it harms the economic interests of most people and is bad for the overall functioning of the economy. On the one hand, market fundamentalism leads to a rejection of the affirmative state and thus the massive under-provision of a wide range of public goods; on the other hand, weakly regulated markets generate sharp increases in inequality, environmental destruction, risky speculative behaviour and economic volatility. In the end, the argument goes, market fundamentalism is both bad for the well-being of most people and bad for the capitalist economy itself. That is the standard criticism. Margaret Somers adds a critical additional argument: market fundamentalism is deeply corrosive of the foundations of citizenship. The argument is subtle and powerful. Citizenship, she argues, is not simply a question of formal rights inscribed in the legal rules of the state. Effective citizenship also depends upon a process of social inclusion as a member of a social and political community, for without such inclusion there can be no robust mechanism for translating formal rights on paper into substantive rights in practice. The core of her argument, then, revolves around an investigation of the conditions for sustaining such inclusive social membership, and the key to understanding this problem, she argues, is understanding the relationships among the state, the market and civil society. The basic punchline of the analysis is that market fundamentalism weakens civil society by undermining reciprocities and solidarities, contractualizing human relations and making social inclusion dependent upon successful participation in market transactions. The result is a transformation of citizenship itself, from an unconditional status of membership to a contingent accomplishment. Increasingly, a significant proportion of people who are formal citizens in the USA become effectively stateless persons, equivalent in Somers’ analysis to the stateless refugees after World War II. These are compelling arguments which I find interesting and broadly persuasive. There are, however, a number of theoretical issues in the conceptual framework used in the analysis that I think are underdeveloped or, in some cases, Genealogies of citizenship 405