"In The Price of Citizenship, the culmination of twenty years of research and writing, the historian Michael B. Katz traces the evolution of the welfare state from Colonial relief programs to the War on Poverty to our own age, marked by "the end of welfare as we know it." He argues that in the last decades, three great forces - a ferocious war on dependence, which has singled out the most vulnerable; the devolution of authority within both government and the private sector; and the application of market models to social policy - have infiltrated and revised all aspects of the social contract even as they have redefined both Republican and Democratic policy and rhetoric. Katz shows how these changes are propelling America toward a future of increased inequality and decreased security as individuals compete for success in an open market with ever fewer protections against misfortune, power, and greed. And he shows how these trends are transforming citizenship from a right of birth into a privilege available only to the fully employed."--BOOK JACKET.