From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers

Transformation of the Social Question

Robert Castel

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351518611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this monumental book, sociologist Robert Castel reconstructs the history of what he calls "the social question, " or the ways in which both labor and social welfare have been organized from the Middle Ages onward to contemporary industrial society. Throughout, the author identifies two constants bearing directly on the question of who is entitled to relief and who can be excluded: the degree of embeddedness in any given community and the ability to work. Along this dual axis the author locates virtually the entire history of social welfare in early-modern and contemporary Europe.This work is a systematic defense of the meaningfulness of the category of "the social, " written in the tradition of Foucault, Durkheim, and Marx. Castel imaginatively builds on Durkheim's insight into the essentially social basis of work and welfare. Castel populates his sociological framework with vivid characterizations of the transient lives of the "disaffiliated": those colorful itinerants whose very existence proved such a threat to the social fabric of early-modern Europe. Not surprisingly, he discovers that the cruel and punitive measures often directed against these marginal figures are deeply implicated in the techniques and institutions of power and social control.The author also treats the flipside of the problem of social assistance: namely, matters of work and wage-labor. Castel brilliantly reveals how the seemingly objective line of demarcation between able-bodied beggars those who are capable of work but who chose not to do so and those who are truly disabled becomes stretched in modernity to make room for the category of the "working poor." It is the novel crisis posed by those masses of population who are unable to maintain themselves by their labor alone that most deeply challenges modern societies and forges recognizably modern policies of social assistance.The author's gloss on the social question also offers us valuable perspectives on contempo

Part 1
From Tutelage to Contract

Introduction to Part 1:
From Tutelage to Contract

The “social question” may be characterized as a concern about a society’s ability to maintain its own cohesion. This threat of breakdown is borne by groups whose very existence shakes the cohesion of the whole collectivity. Who are these groups? The problem here is complicated, due in part to the conceptual fuzziness that accompanies the term “social.” We will explicitly consider one by one its different accepted usages. But we must begin with a major distinction, even if it will have to be qualified later on. The populations who benefit from different social interventions differ fundamentally according to whether they are or are not capable of working, and they are treated in a totally different ways according to this criterion.

One kind of population falls back upon what we might call a handicapology, in the widest sense of the term. Elderly poor, children without parents, cripples of all sorts, the blind, paraplegics, scrofulous, and madmen—the whole ensemble is as heteronomous as a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. But all these sorts share in common the fact of not being able to satisfy their own basic needs on their own because they cannot work. From this fact they are relieved of the obligation to work. The problem can be posed—and indeed is posed at every instant—of knowing where precisely to draw this dividing line between the capacity and incapacity to work. This decrepit old man, can’t he nonetheless manage to survive by his own means? The unfortunate will always be suspected of wishing to live at the expense of the wealthy. Nonetheless, there exists a certain core of circumstances of recognized dependency, based around the inability of entering into the order of work because of physical or psychological defects manifested due to age (children or the elderly), infirmity, sickness, and which may even be extended to some familial or burdensome social conditions, like that of the “widow with children,” to invoke an expression frequently encountered in the regulations of assistance. “Handicapology” must then be understood in the metaphorical sense: this category is heterogeneous with respect to the conditions that have given birth to it; on the other hand, the criteria assume a greater coherence within the context of the relationship of work that it designates.

These groups exonerated from the obligation of working are potential clients of the social-assistantial. Such a responsibility may pose difficult financial, institutional, and technical challenges. However, it does not cause any problem of principle. So long as the indigent manages to communicate his incapacity he can be assisted, even if in practice this treatment ends up being inappropriate, insufficient, condescending or even humiliating. But if the existence of this kind of population is still a source of embarrassment, it does not fundamentally call into question the social organization itself. One of the main issues involved (cf. chapter 1) is sorting out those who are truly handicapped, in this sense, from another category of indigents who pose the “social question” in its most acute form. This distinction between a problematic of relief and a problematic of labor represents one of the axial points of my analysis. Although this distinction has eluded the majority of historians of social assistance, I hope to demonstrate that it is not at odds with what they have written.

Entirely different from the condition of those who are truly incapable of working is the situation of those who can work, but who do not. This appears mainly in the form of the able-bodied indigent. These latter, impoverished, and consequently dependent on relief, cannot however partake directly of the provisions established for those who have been exonerated of the responsibility of supporting themselves. In violation of the obligation to work, he is most often the one repulsed beyond the zone of assistance. Thus he will come to be placed, and for a long time, in a paradoxical situation. Particularly if he is a stranger, a “foreign” without attachments, he cannot take advantage of the networks of proximate protections that assure, however poorly, the indigenous of at least some minimal relief of their basic needs. His condition will be literally unlivable. It is that of the vagabond, the disaffiliated par excellence.

This was foreseeable, and thus my first intention was to analyze the basic questions posed by this wayward relationship to labor in preindustrial society, beginning with the treatment reserved to this most stigmatized fringe.¹ For it is in this way that the problem is posed in its most graphic form, and the determined efforts brought to bear in trying to eradicate vagabondage aptly demonstrate the decisive importance of this question for several centuries.

However, the question is complicated when one conjures up the sociological reality that falls under the label of vagabond. Most often, this term is merely used to condemn the errancy of a precarious worker in quest of a job that has escaped him. This kind of personage reveals an irreparable break in the dominant form of the labor system. It is the inability of this system to make room for social mobility that feeds and dramatizes the question of vagabondage. This is only the paroxystic form, then, of a conflict that runs throughout large sections of the social system. It is indeed the question of wage-labor itself that is posed here. That is to say, at the same time the growing necessity of recurring to wage-labor, and the impossibility of regulating the condition of wage-earning due to the persistence of traditional tutelages that surround labor with rigid networks of obligation that are social, and not at all economic.

From tutelage to contract: the pathway is long and culminates, at the end of the eighteenth century, in liberal modernity. If one is resolved to follow this trail, it is necessary to penetrate the complex modes of organizing labor in preindustrial society: regulated labor, forced labor, the development of a core, sketchy and fragmentary, but always circumscribed and contained, of “free” wage-labor. Then it appears that the condition of the majority of those who lived by the labor of their hands is not in any way guaranteed by the protections associated with regulated labor. They are characterized by a mass vulnerability, engendered by the fact that labor can not be regulated on the model of the market.

I have finally resolved myself to following these long trails. It was necessary to reconstruct the gradual emergence of a new formulation of the social question: the question of the free access to labor, which is imposed in the eighteenth century and has at that time a singularly revolutionary impact. The establishment of free access to labor is a juridical revolution perhaps as important as the industrial revolution that is its counterpart. Indeed it seems to have a fundamental importance with respect to everything that precedes it. It breaks the secular forms of organizing the trades and turns forced labor into a barbaric atavism. The encouragement of free access to labor thereby closes a long cycle of conflictual transformations by putting an end to the blockages that have discouraged the dawning of the wage-earning condition. But this revolution is also decisive with respect to that which follows. For this process itself in turn relaunches the social question on an entirely new basis at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Under the reign of tutelage, wage-labor was stifled. Under the system of contract, however, it flourishes but, paradoxically, the working condition becomes vulnerable at the very moment when it is liberated. Thus we discover that liberty without protection can give rise to the very worst of servitudes, that of need.

The process that will be reconstructed in this first section may be summarized as follows. At the beginning were tutelages and constraints, which the absolutist State and the traditional system of the trades conspired to maintain. Afterword—at the end of the eighteenth century—came contracts and the entrepreneurial liberty that the liberal principle of governmentality fashioned by the Enlightenment imposed in fact through political revolution. Thus, the succession of these episodes will serve as a basis for understanding the vagaries of the following section. Indeed the task of a social policy beginning in the nineteenth century will be to scrutinize this excessively tenuous structure of the free contract of labor. Such a liberty that too strongly favored business was too strong, too savage, for those who could only submit themselves to it. Triumphant liberty and individualism have a darker face, the negative individuality of all those who find themselves without belongings and without support, deprived of any protections or recognition. The Social State was constructed as an answer to these circumstances. It imagined itself able to dispel the risk of this by weaving around the relationship of labor a solid system of guarantees. If this is so, then following these developments, or rather these ruptures and recompositions, truly represents the best way, if not the shortest, then at least the most rigorous, of arriving at the contemporary problematic. This is true insofar as this contemporary crisis stems mainly from the fact that these regulations woven around labor have begun to lose their integrative power. Thus from preindustrial society to postindustrial society we have witnessed a total reversal. Vulnerability was born from an excess of constraints, whereas it now appears to be nourished by the enfeeblement of protections. So we must now examine the entirety of the circumstances of this reversal. They delimit the edges of the social question within the framework of a similar problematic that began to take shape in the middle of the fourteenth century.

Note

1. We will call here “preindustrial society” the historical period which, in the Christian West, runs from the middle of the fourteenth century to the profound transformations that intervene at the end of the 18^th century. Its relative unity will be deployed mainly in terms of the perspective of forms of organizing labor that pertained to it before the “industrial revolution.” It is not that this sequence of more than four centuries does not know important social and economic transformations. To the contrary. But they run up against a system of constraints which gives these centuries a large degree of permanence. It is this tension between the constraints of an “embedded society,” a society of orders and status, and the factors of change, that will serve as a guide for our analysis of the first four chapters.

1
Protections of Proximity

Of the two sides of the social question whose transformations we will explore, that of social assistance can least be said to have enjoyed a distinctive history. It is organized according to formal characteristics whose equivalents will undoubtedly be found in every historical society. “To assist” includes an extraordinarily diverse group of practices, which are inscribed in a common structure determined both by the existence of certain categories of disadvantaged populations and by the necessity of caring for them. In the first place, then, a tentative effort must be made to bring to light those characteristics that compose the very essence of assistance.

However, this cannot be done by purely formal models alone: for the constellation of assistance has obviously taken on distinctive forms in each social milieu. The form that has prevailed in the Christian West is particularly deserving of our attention for two reasons. First, because it remains part of our own heritage: the stakes of contemporary welfare are still constituted by its influential lines of force whose full meaning can never be understood unless we compare them to the historical situations at the heart of which they have been formed since the Middle Ages. The second reason is found in the fact that these patterns of welfare have interfered and continue to interfere (both to adopt as well as to overshadow) with the other great side of the social question which arises primarily from the problem of work, and which will emerge only much later (in the middle of the fourteenth century). In order for us to appreciate the originality of this conclusion (cf. chapter 2), we must situate it against the backdrop of a kind of welfare that was even then already formed in its essential characteristics.

Primary Sociability

The “social-assistential” can be formally characterized in opposition to modes of collective organization that economize such means. This is the case because there are some non-social societies. Indeed the social should not be understood here as the collection of relationships that distinguish humanity as the species for whom it is fitting to live in society. Undoubtedly, “man is a social animal,” but so too is the bee. But in order to avoid being burdened by a simple matter of vocabulary, one will term as “societal” this general feature of human relations, insofar as it refers to all forms of collective existence. The “social,” on the other hand, is a specific configuration of practices that is only found in certain human collectivities. We must first determine the preconditions for its emergence.

A society lacking the social would be entirely regulated by primary sociability.¹ I understand by this the systems of rules linking directly the members of a group on the basis of their familial belonging, locality, work, and by weaving networks of interdependence without the mediation of particular institutions. It is first a matter of permanent societies, at the heart of which the individual, embedded since birth in a tightly constrained network, simply repeats the injunctions of custom and tradition. In these formations, there is no more “social,” than there is an “economic” or “political” or “scientific,” in the sense that these terms might refer to identifiable domains of practices. Ancestral rules are imposed on the individual in a synthetic and directly normative way. Stable...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Translator’s Preface
• Preface
• Part 1 From Tutelage to Contract
• Part 2 From Contract to Status
• Conclusion Negative Individualism
• Number Index