This study focuses on the problem of homelessness, though it is not an empirical study designed to propose particular policies to tackle the plight of the homeless and the dislocation of immigrants. The issue of homelessness is used to illustrate some deep-seated difficulties in the modern concept of citizenship and the political identity offered by the contemporary nation-state. The core argument of the book is that modern citizenship rests on a two-fold criterion of work and national identity. Citizens are those who contribute productively through their work and thus can claim to be economically independent. Citizenship is also dependent on membership of a national community. The ideal citizen thus has a home, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense: Such citizens are economically independent through their work, and have a home in a more abstract sense of being part of a territorially based nation-state.

The interesting and critical argument of the author is to “deconstruct” and criticize this concept of citizenship, and to show that “the nation-state offers an ideal of membership that cannot be realized” (p. 48). This task is done with considerable skill and theoretical sophistication. The norms of citizenship that are exemplified by membership in the national community and by the criterion of economic independence are achieved at the cost of exclusion and construction of an “Other.” It is the figures of the homeless and the immigrant or stateless person who represent this “Other,” excluded from the community of citizens. Kathleen Arnold uses Freud's concept of “the uncanny” (das Unheimliche) to good effect to suggest that the homeless are those by definition who do not have a proper home. In that sense they are the opposite of those who are heimlich, who do have a home of their own. Yet heimlich also means “secret,” so that the homeless represent the secret or uncanny face of contemporary citizenship in the nation-state. The homeless are assimilated as objects of state policy, at the expense of their autonomy as full citizens. Alternatively, they are criminalized, deprived of whatever property they have, or merely expelled from one city or area to another. In both cases, the homeless become objects of the “prerogative” power of the modern state, which is incompatible with notions of democratic politics and full citizenship. They have lost full citizenship rights. This is a matter of the utmost significance, since loss of one's home in the sense of full membership of a national community means dehumanization and a lack of the identity necessary for survival in contemporary society.

Modern citizenship thus rests on a false binary divide, between “home,” conceived in idealized terms as a conflict-free sphere of harmony, opposed to what is seen in equally monolithic terms as the dangerous Other of the homeless, or the immigrant. These figures are seen as the antithesis of the ideal citizen. The homeless person is presented as parasitic, as owing a debt to society. Arnold makes much of the notion of Schuld, meaning both debt and guilt. Early liberal thought, she suggests, contained the idea of society as a whole owing a debt to those in poverty, to ensure subsistence for all. Yet this has been inverted, and the homeless are seen as indebted to, or dependent on, those who have a home and are full citizens. This in turn makes it easier for the homeless to be stereotyped as feckless individuals who are themselves responsible for their situation, so that homelessness is presented as an individual problem and not the social problem that it really is. The homeless are subjected to the kind of disciplinary surveillance evoked by Michel Foucault in his model of “Panopticism.”

These are all interesting and challenging ideas, which make this a stimulating study. However, the discussion is often presented at a very abstract level. The theoretical “tool kit” of Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity uses ideas of Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, and Freud, among others, but they are often presented in quite condensed form. There are also some problems with the concluding arguments, which seek to offer an alternative to contemporary concepts of citizenship and identity, which are seen as defective because of the exclusions to which they give rise. Arnold argues that the alternative has to involve recognition of difference and the Other without seeking either to essentialize difference or to assimilate or criminalize those who are different. But how is this to be done, in concrete terms? A number of suggestions are offered, in line with the author's argument that “modern citizenship must be transcended for a more open type of political identity” (p. 19). What is offered towards the end of the book is a rather diverse list of ideas, which include a form of cosmopolitan politics and what is called an “agonistic patriotism,” though it is not really made clear what this latter would involve. Arnold calls for recognition of “multiple attachments and identities” (p. 159), and it is suggested that the global city, rather than the nation-state, could be the basis for these more open and cosmopolitan forms of political identity. Ideas of democratizing borders and decentering the nation-state are thrown in, but without much discussion of what that might mean in practice. Some of the allusions to European politics (p. 158) seem very sweeping. The reference to “the constant protests, strikes, and marches in European cities” suggests that these cities witness citizens constantly out on the streets, which is hardly the case.

Arnold may well be right to call for recognition of multiple attachments and identities, and to argue that the logic of the nation-state may not be very open to such recognition, but there is little discussion of what kind of institutional reform could open the way to recognizing difference without “essentializing” it. Some of the key ideas in the books are repeated too often, without being developed and explored at sufficient length. But it is an important and suggestive study, which brings together a wide range of ideas in a powerful critique of modern concepts of citizenship.