About Margaret R. Somers

Margaret R. Somers, professor of sociology and history, University of Michigan, specializes in political economy, citizenship rights, and the work of Karl Polanyi. She is the author, with Fred Block, of The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Harvard, 2014), named “Book of the Year 2014” by Economic Sociology and Political Economy (economicsociology.org). Her previous book, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to have Rights (Cambridge, 2008), winner of the Giovanni Sartori Award from the American Political Science Association, is a study of how market fundamentalism transformed large sectors of the American population from rights-bearing citizens into internally stateless surplus peoples. Her work in-progress focuses on the moral economy of market justice, the hidden powers of predistribution, and the Polanyian vision of a predistributive democracy.