Currently reading: Genealogies of Citizenship by Margaret Somers

Margaret Somers  book Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness and the Right to Have Rights is one of the finest books of contemporary social and political analyses I have read for a long time.

The book describes and analyses how decades of market fundamentalism have transformed increasing numbers of rights-bearing citizens into socially excluded internally stateless persons.  Somers argues us that the power and authority of the market is distorting the meaning of citizenship from non-contractual shared fate to conditional privilege, making rights, inclusion and moral worth dependent on contractual market value.

I rank it with Sheldon Wolin's remarkable book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism  as among the most prescient and significant diagnoses of our social, economic and political current malaise.