| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State. By Michael B. Katz. (New York: Metropolitan, 2001. 469 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8050-5208-9.)

Michael B. Katz is one of a small group of historians whose scholarship on poverty and welfare in the United States has defined the field. The Price of Citizenship brings together some of his classic insights with his views on the latest transformations within the U.S. welfare state and its consequences for citizenship. 1

The interior chapters contain individual studies that explain what Katz describes as a reversal of a collective commitment to social citizenship and the reification of market models in social welfare policy. The examples include the Family Support Act (1988), governor-led state welfare reforms during the 1980s, the mixed economy of public-private charity, and the debacle of health care policy during the 1990s. Yet the central message one takes away from the book rests within the beginning and end sections. Here, Katz lays out the questions and problems posed by this latest transition in the modern welfare state. 2

In defining the welfare state, Katz goes beyond the antipoverty policies about which he has often written to describe the massive system of tax-supported programs that include Medicare, publicly funded private charities, farm subsidies, taxation policies, and others. These are the benefits that continually expanded over the past four decades, despite public attention to the cost of poverty programs. They are also the benefits that increasingly use market models as justification for their existence. Some may argue with Katz's broader definition. I think it is essential to understand the transition underway in the economy and its costs for us as individual citizens and as a national community. . . .

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