ABSTRACT
Inegalitarian liberals have claimed that freedom is the check on the egalitarian claims of democracy. Democratic citizenship depends neither on the freedom from labor nor the freedom to labor. Antipoverty programs undermined their chances for success by targeting the nonworking poor. By focusing on personal responsibility and paid employment, the new welfare law also seems to suggest, again following the lead of the New Right, that poverty by itself presents no problem for citizenship. Democratic citizenship, and its call for public assistance, is equally aware of and responsive to the problem of working poverty. At the end of the twentieth century, the ideal reflected by the new welfare law is that citizenship is integrally related to the willingness to work, under any conditions. The new welfare law seems to reflect the expectation that good citizens will be economically independent of the state—good citizens will typically be workers.
