Margaret Somers

Margaret Somers retired from the University in 2016.

Professor Somers is a social theorist and comparative historical sociologist specializing in political economy, social change, and historical epistemology, as well as political, legal, and cultural sociology. Exploring and elaborating the work of Karl Polanyi, one of the most important political economists of the twentieth century, has been a through-line of her scholarly career.

Her book Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to have Rights (Cambridge 2008), was awarded the 2009 Giovanni Sartori Award for Qualitative Methods by the American Political Science Association, which honors Giovanni Sartori's work on qualitative methods and concept formation, as well as on problems of context for concepts in new spatial and temporal settings.  The book focuses on how decades of market fundamentalism have transformed increasing numbers of rights-bearing citizens into socially excluded internally stateless persons.  With Hurricane Katrina’s racially-inflected catastrophe as a demonstration case, the book warns us that the growing moral authority of the market is distorting the meaning of citizenship from noncontractual shared fate to conditional privilege--making rights, inclusion and moral worth dependent exclusively on contractual market value.   

Her most recent book (co-authored with Fred Block), The Power of Market fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Harvard 2014,16), is an intellectual archeology of Polanyi’s thought. The book aims to generate a repertoire of concepts, theoretical insights, and a usable social theory that can help to explain why in the 1970s market fundamentalism revived from disrepute in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, to become the dominant economic ideology of our time. The Power of Market Fundamentalism asks what it is about free-market ideas that give them tenacious staying power despite such manifest failures as dramatically widening inequality, persistently low-growth, and the severe financial crises that have stressed Western economies over the past forty years.

She is currently working on a new book, The People and the Law: The Making of Modern Citizenship Rights, a work of comparative historical sociology with a focus on English legal, social, and economic history.