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Robert Castel's Les métamorphoses de la question sociale (1995)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2016

Marcel van der Linden
Marcel van der Linden*
Affiliation:
International Institute of Social History
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Extract

In the scholarly debate about the increasingly flexible, informal, and precarious nature of employment relations, it is often suggested that these trends are new. This is especially true for the advanced capitalist countries. “Previously,” employees had permanent jobs, with good social benefits and a vast array of rights, whereas “nowadays” they are losing these forms of security and are more vulnerable to market whims. These observations do not take into account that standard employment relationships in fact came about relatively recently. In the past, insecurity and absence of rights were at least as prevalent as they are today. Standard employment appears to have been generalized rather briefly in a small part of the world. The crucial question is not why the old lack of security is returning, but why it was possible to reduce such insecurity for a small share of the world population for a few decades. While the answer to this crucial question remains unclear; studies reconstructing the course of events over several centuries will clearly be necessary to solve this problem.

Type
Classics Revisited
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 89: Precarious Labor in Global Perspectives , Spring 2016 , pp. 153 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2016 

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References

NOTES

1. His L'Ordre psychiatrique. L’âge d'or de l'aliénisme (Paris, 1977) was published in English as The Regulation of Madness: The Origins of Incarceration in France, trans. W.D. Halls (Berkeley, 1988).

2. Les métamorphoses de la question sociale, une chronique du salariat (Paris, 1995); English edition: From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question, trans. and ed. Richard Boyd (New Brunswick, NJ, and London, 2003).

3. Michel Aglietta and Anton Brender, Les métamorphoses de la société salariale: La France en projet (Paris, 1984).

4. Castel, 13; Boyd, xv.

5. Alain Caillé, Splendeurs et misères des sciences sociales. Esquisses d'une mythologie (Geneva and Paris, 1986), 363–75. In 1981 Caillé (b. 1944) founded the Mouvement Anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (MAUSS), an interdisciplinary movement that opposes economic and instrumental rationalism in the social sciences.

6. Castel, 54; Boyd, 27.

7. Castel, 151; Boyd, 121–22.

8. Castel, 213; Boyd, 191.

9. Castel, 207–208; Boyd, 180.

10. Castel, 200; Boyd, 203.

11. Castel, 221; Boyd, 198.

12. Eugène Buret, De la misère des classes laborieuses en France et en Angleterre, vol. 2 (Brussels, 1842), 16, 29, 86, 89, 104.

13. Castel regards the emergence of the French social sciences in response to pauperism as a parallel with the Chicago School of the 1920s, which was based “on a questioning of the fragility of the social bond and on the risk, carried by the existence of ‘deviant’ immigrant groups” (Castel, 265; Boyd, 245).

14. Castel, 224; Boyd, 201.

15. Castel, 268; Boyd, 247.

16. Castel objects to the term “welfare state” (État providence) because it (i) suggests that the state is the active party and that recipients of benefits, etc., are the passive element; (ii) is originally a polemic term of the adversaries; and (iii) is an ideological construction (Castel, 280–83; Boyd, 246–49).

17. Castel, 268; Boyd, 247.

18. Castel, 269; Boyd, 248.

19. Castel, 300; Boyd, 274.

20. Castel, 316; Boyd, 287.

21. Castel, 317; Boyd, 288.

22. Castel, 391; Boyd, 372–73.

23. Castel, 392; Boyd, 373.

24. Castel, 395; Boyd, 375.

25. Castel, 367; Boyd, 338.

26. Castel, 370; Boyd, 341.

27. Castel, 385; Boyd, 367, translation adapted.

28. Castel, 402; Boyd, 381.

29. Castel, 409; Boyd, 387.

30. Castel, 402; Boyd, 381, translation amended.

31. Castel, 409; not in English translation.

32. Castel, 412; Boyd, 390, translation corrected.

33. Castel, 453; Boyd, 423–424.

34. Castel, 454; Boyd, 424.

35. Castel, 414; Boyd, 391.

36. Castel, Robert, “The Roads to Disaffiliation: Insecure Work and Vulnerable Relationships,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24 (2000): 519–35, at 525CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. See, for example, the review essays by Dewerpe, Alain, “Genèse et crise de la société salariale,” Le Mouvement Social 174 (1996): 7–14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lepetit, Bernard, “Le travail de l'histoire,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 51 (1996): 525–38Google Scholar. For a review of the English translation, see Friedman, Gerald in Industrial and Labor Relations Review 58 (2004), 157–59Google Scholar.

38. Robert Castel, L'insécurité sociale: qu'est-ce qu’être protégé? (Paris, 2003); La discrimination négative. Citoyens ou indigènes? (Paris, 2007); La montée des incertitudes. Travail, protections, statut de l'individu (Paris, 2009). See also Robert Castel and Klaus Dörre, eds., Prekarität, Abstieg, Ausgrenzung. Die soziale Frage am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, 2009).