Illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labour ideology in American culture

This essay analyzes changes in the U.S., Germany, and Israel over the past three decades in the content of, access to, and significance of citizenship. It also attempts a normative argument for a conception of citizenship that is plausible and just, historically and culturally embedded, and redistribution-centered. The essay examines the import of the shift from sovereignty to governance and related neo-liberal developments on the solidarities, good and bad, created in and by three very different nation-states: the U.S., Germany, and Israel. Overall, there has been a decline in the content of citizenship and an easing of access to it. Both the horizontal and the vertical dimensions of citizenship have been weakened. In all three countries, it has become easier to become a member of the community: the horizontal, inside/outside border of citizenship has become easier to cross. More or less at the same time, the vertical bonds of social solidarity have become weaker as the programs of social democracy and social citizenship have been attenuated. In part, these developments are a response to a nearly unprecedentedly high level of migration throughout the world. In part, they have come to pass because rights struggles domestically have focused on individual equal protection rights - anti-discrimination - and multiculturalism. In part, however, these developments point to the neo-liberal reduction in solidarity within these societies and the decline in the power of citizenship as a political and socioeconomic category. The decline of the Keynesian welfare state and the Soviet Union and the rise of international human rights discourses have also played their parts. The result has been a gain in recognition and non-discrimination but at the expense of redistribution. In many ways, there is greater receptivity toward migrants in all three of these societies, but less and less readiness to extend the bonds of full-fledged membership, above all redistribution. Instead of solidarity, live and let live is the cultural and legal leitmotif of the day.Along with documenting the forces to which all three societies have been subjected, the essay assesses whether the resulting changes contribute to a greater measure of social justice and individual freedom. The answer remains a highly contingent and uncertain matter.

How the American government has long used financial credit programs to create economic opportunities Federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities have gained widespread attention in recent years because of the 2008 financial crisis, but issues of government credit have been part of American life since the nation’s founding. From the 1780s, when a watershed national land credit policy was established, to the postwar foundations of our current housing finance system, American Bonds examines the evolution of securitization and federal credit programs. Sarah Quinn shows that since the Westward expansion, the U.S. government has used financial markets to manage America’s complex social divides, and politicians and officials across the political spectrum have turned to land sales, home ownership, and credit to provide economic opportunity without the appearance of market intervention or direct wealth redistribution. Highly technical systems, securitization, and credit programs have been fundamental to how Americans determined what they could and should owe one another. Over time, government officials embraced credit as a political tool that allowed them to navigate an increasingly complex and fractured political system, affirming the government’s role as a consequential and creative market participant. Neither intermittent nor marginal, credit programs supported the growth of powerful industries, from railroads and farms to housing and finance; have been used for disaster relief, foreign policy, and military efforts; and were promoters of amortized mortgages, lending abroad, venture capital investment, and mortgage securitization. Illuminating America’s market-heavy social policies, American Bonds illustrates how political institutions became involved in the nation’s lending practices.