The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic by Patrick Weil (review)

Naturalization and denaturalization, the legal pivot of debates over who gets to be an American, thread throughout our history. We are once again in a moment when naturalization (and thus denaturalization, Esau to its Jacob) is a contentious and charged issue. These debates over citizenship have been perhaps especially visible in the United States because that nation came into existence when the nation-state comes to be the dominant, even hegemonic, political formation, a formation that raises the question whether nationality is a natural (i.e., ethnic, racial) category or a cultural one (i.e., ideological). At various times this question has been answered differently in the US, a problematic visible from the first immigration law (1790) that restricted the path to citizenship to white Europeans.

Patrick Weil’s The Sovereign Citizen offers a necessarily partial answer to this question, focusing as it does on the legal, administrative, and judicial history of one key component of citizenship: the rules governing when a naturalized citizen can be deprived of his or her citizenship. Although rules governing naturalization were established at the very beginning of the republic, denaturalization did not become a formal legal category until the Naturalization Act of 1906. That allowed for loss of citizenship for several reasons—expatriation and political views prominent among them. Even then, denaturalization was seldom simple and not always a priority. The willingness of the government departments (at various times, Justice, Labor, and/or Commerce) charged with enforcing the law varied considerably. Perhaps the greatest if perhaps unintended result of the new law was to accelerate the shift in granting citizenship from the states to the federal government.

Weil notes such aspects but focuses elsewhere, offering a well-researched legal history that traces changes in the legal basis of citizenship in the United States from the concept, ascribed here to Hannah Arendt, that being a citizen means having the “right to have rights” to making citizenship the basis itself of sovereignty. He uses a “micro-historical approach” (6) to show how the Supreme Court altered its decisions and reasoning about denaturalization and denationalization. Thus, being a citizen of the United States came to mean the citizen was himself or herself the source of sovereignty; hence the government, a creature of the sovereignty of each and every citizen, could only denaturalize and/or denationalize citizens who had themselves clearly renounced any claim to American citizenship and/or committed fraud. How this transformation came about over the course of a little more than 60 years is a fascinating if somewhat disjointed tale, an instructive one especially for readers interested in the workings of the Supreme Court between the 1930s and the 1970s.

This is a valuable book, but I would offer two caveats. The subtitle is misleading since the book has no interest in the “origins” of the republic. As well, Weil’s history is perhaps more a Whig history than it would seem to others who might choose different dates to tell this story. Regardless, one has to admire the research, intelligence and value of The Sovereign Citizen.