American attitudes toward the homeless tend to shift back and forth between compassion and compassion fatigue, between supporting policies to provide resources to the homeless and supporting punitive policies to exclude them from public spaces. This ambivalence is often explained by invoking “economic functionality” and/or “a cultural logic” (p. 5), but neither of these approaches is adequate. Rather, Leonard Feldman argues, we should see the problem of homelessness as a “problem of sovereign state power” (p. 18). Citizenship, and political life generally, are defined in opposition to “bare life,” or “mere physical existence”: Citizenship as full membership is constituted as the exclusion of bare life” (p. 18). Feldman continues, “Home-dwelling citizen and homeless bare life are political statuses, not social statuses or elements of personal identity” (p. 20), and so an adequate response to homelessness must also be political. He calls for a move toward a “pluralized citizenship” (p. 21), in which we deconstruct “the rigid oppositions between … bare life and citizenship.” Acknowledging a plurality of ways of dwelling, we can then recognize “that those displaced from ‘house’ and ‘home’ must dwell … and that public policy should be oriented toward enabling dwelling, not criminalizing it or reducing it to the stripped down client relationship of the shelter” (p. 147). More specifically, rather than repressing the habitats and networks that the homeless have themselves created, we should recognize these communities, including, in particular, “politicized homeless encampments” (p. 107) as participants in the political processes through which we formulate policy.

Viewing homelessness as a political, rather than a social or economic, problem and its solution in terms of the extension of citizenship and political participation to the homeless represents an original and provocative way of reframing this issue. It is not without its difficulties, however. To start with the idea that citizenship is defined in opposition to bare life: However adequate this may be as an account of the ancient world, it seems problematic in the modern world. “Bare life” today seems very much a concern of the political realm, as all contemporary states mount vast and costly programs to provide for health care and to maintain an income sufficient for subsistence. The state, of course, provides far more than (the resources necessary for) bare life, but in doing so, it does not exclude it but builds on it.

One might also be skeptical of the effectiveness of extending citizenship and including the homeless in political decision making. In spite of his deep sympathy with the homeless, and his hostility to the stereotyping and punitive responses to them that are so prevalent in our society, Feldman tends to treat them in an undifferentiated way, blurring distinctions between poor families who have some member(s) normally employed and single adults who are mentally ill or who face serious substance-abuse problems, or between those whose homelessness is temporary or transitional, and those whose homelessness is more or less permanent. By all means, we need to attend to the “agency of homeless persons” (p. 24), but their capacities for agency appear to be quite diverse, and in some cases it seems a mockery to call on them to become politically active on their own behalf.

Nonetheless, it is easy to see why Feldman is searching for a new conceptualization of the problem of homelessness. Much of the book wrestles with what we might think of as the central dilemma of the welfare state, arising from its commitment to welfare or positive rights. On the one hand, it is easy to see how access to certain resources and opportunities is necessary for equal citizenship, since the exercise of agency—and there is no citizenship without agency; at best there can be only subjection—is impossible without those resources. On the other hand, to utilize those resources or take advantage of those opportunities requires that one be capable of certain functionings. One must have certain skills (say, literacy) and capacities (say, some ability to control one's impulses). And so we find that the provision of welfare carries with it various normalizing measures. This dilemma appears in a particularly acute form in the context of homelessness, as the author shows with great clarity and power. The seemingly opposed policies of compassion and repression turn out to be complements, as the creation of shelters, to take one example, legitimizes the state in banning public sleeping, and so in effect criminalizing the homeless. Shelters, particularly when they are part of an integrated program to address rather than simply ameliorate the problem, make demands on those who use them, such as that they be free of drugs or alcohol, and that they participate in job training or counseling programs. The flipside of compassion is compulsion.

The usual approach to this kind of problem is to develop standards to assess and balance the conflicting values involved. If we grant, for example, that prohibiting people from sleeping or meeting other essential bodily needs on the street is unjust unless they have “adequate” alternative places to meet those needs, the problem becomes one of specifying what is “adequate.” Feldman is deeply critical of “shelterization,” and it is easy to see the point of his criticisms, since shelters are too often dangerous, crowded, and unsanitary. Similarly, he heaps scorn upon policies intended to exclude the homeless from public spaces for the animus they show against the homeless. What he does not do is offer a careful examination of the harms (if any) that, say, public sleeping imposes on others, nor to set out the criteria that a housing program would have to meet to provide a reasonable alternative to the street, in light of those harms. And it is easy to see why one might want to resist that exercise, since it is far from clear how these values are to be assessed and weighed against one another. Instead, he attempts to reconceptualize the problem as one of enlarging political spaces so that the homeless become participants in the process of dealing with this issue. Although I am skeptical of the adequacy of that approach, Citizens Without Shelter makes an important contribution by exposing the limits of our current frameworks and by boldly proposing a new way of thinking.