The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State (review)

In 1996, President Clinton made good on his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it,” signing Republican-backed reform legislation that many on the left condemned. The bill ended the longstanding entitlement to cash assistance, replacing it with tough work requirements and strict time limits. The welfare rolls plummeted and, within a few years, stood at roughly half their peak level. The law’s supporters had radically transformed a highly visible component of the American welfare state.

The enactment of welfare reform is the signal event around which Michael B. Katz’s panoramic new book revolves. Katz, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and noted expert on the American welfare state, offers an accessible survey of recent developments in nearly every area of U.S. social policy, from antipoverty programs to government social insurance to private benefits provided by employers and nonprofits. Nonetheless, Katz’s major focus is policy toward the poor, especially the urban poor. Based on his formidable knowledge of this contested sphere, Katz spins out a big readable history of bright colors and sharp lines, tracing the push to restructure social benefits across an enormous range of settings. The Price of Citizenship is an important book—a prodigious work of scholarship driven by a bold thesis and strong sense of social justice. It is also, given the obvious range and depth of Katz’s knowledge, a book surprisingly lacking in nuance—a showcase both for the real power of Katz’s unifying themes and for their real limits as a guide to recent policy changes.

At more than 450 pages, The Price of Citizenship is not a slim volume. Yet Katz gives cohesion to its prologue, epilogue, and twelve economically written chapters by orienting them around two core goals. The first is to paint an encompassing picture of U.S social policy that includes not only public social programs, but also such private social benefits as employer-sponsored health insurance and charitable assistance. Although close observers of the American welfare state have long argued that private social benefits need to be taken into account, the point has seeped slowly into mainstream scholarship and popular consciousness. Katz’s valuable attempt to link public and private social benefits may well signal that the topic can no longer be ignored; even as the book’s two chapters on the subject, which focus on the post-WWII period and are based on secondary sources, leave considerable room for future research.

The second goal of Katz’s exposition, perhaps even more ambitious than the first, is to provide a “master narrative of policy reform” that describes the progress of conservative attacks across all these diverse realms of public and private action. The features of this narrative, argues Katz, “are the discovery of a crisis of numbers and cost (rising rolls); the assignment of blame to morally suspect persons (the undeserving); the reduction of program size through controlling eligibility more than reducing benefits (reform); the measurement of achievement by fewer beneficiaries (success); and the failure to track the fate of those denied help (willful ignorance)” (p. 197). Linking the conservative assault on the welfare state to the globalization of business, the growing influence of the Sunbelt and evangelical Protestantism, and the activism of conservative think tanks, Katz sees his master narrative playing out across areas as disparate as public assistance and Social Security. Welfare reform was not an isolated event, Katz contends. Instead, it “signaled the victory of three great forces—the war on dependence, the devolution of public authority, and the application of market models to public policy—that redefined not only welfare but all of America’s vast welfare state” (p. 1).

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the centrality of welfare in this formulation, Katz is at his best in describing the conflicted evolution of U.S. antipoverty policy. He has written a remarkable, if unsettling, chapter on the “new American city,” which describes the contradictory tides that have...