What happens to a free people when their work is no longer needed, and the belief that their rights come before government begins to fade?

Two forces are arriving in the same decade. The first is the Technology Convergence: artificial intelligence, agentic systems, humanoid robotics, and vast computing power advancing together, able for the first time to produce wealth without human labor. The second is the Civic Schism: a widening break between the American Premise, the Founders' conviction that rights precede government, and the Alternative Premise, which holds that rights are whatever the state chooses to grant.

Either force alone would test the Republic. Citizens or Subjects? argues that their Collision is something new. It strikes at the precise point where the citizen's independence has always lived: his necessity to the economy and his sovereignty over the state. A population that is no longer needed, and no longer believes it holds rights the state cannot revoke, can be kept comfortable. It cannot remain free.

Drawing on four decades inside the boardrooms and institutions that shape American life, Gerald M. Czarnecki traces how this is already happening: how the institutions that credential, narrate, and enforce fuse with corporate power; why a managed society of generous benefits is still a society of clients rather than citizens; and why the answer is not a larger check from the state but a genuine claim of ownership in the productive economy itself.

The book proposes concrete remedies, from Citizen Capital and a Human Displacement Dividend to the disaggregation of concentrated power and a Restoration Alliance of free citizens, all measured by a single test: does the citizen own something, or merely receive something?

It closes with an Epilogue unlike any other: a chapter on whether artificial intelligence could threaten humanity itself, written entirely by an AI in the author's voice, checked against its sources by two AIs, and openly disclosed as such.