Unemployment and Government: Genealogies of the Social By William Walters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 240p. $64.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Extract

William Walters probes understandings of the concepts of unemployment that developed and, to an extent, succeeded one another over a hundred years in British history. The British case has its own unique trajectory but parallels developments elsewhere, so the book's interest is not confined to specialists in British politics or social history. Walters applies a Foucauld-inspired governmentality perspective to unemployment in order both to overcome the routine and familiar understandings that have become attached to the concept and, more broadly, to contribute to what he terms a genealogy of the social. The latter refers to a particular sphere of governance as exemplified by the practices, techniques, and institutions devised to govern processes and problem populations, in this case the unemployed. Genealogical approaches are suspicious of generalization and systematization and hold that “we can learn from the particular and the contextual” (p. 8). Thus, Walters argues, the government of unemployment will be instructive for understanding social governance generally.