Abstract
During the summer of 1985, Loïc Wacquant flew from France to the prestigious University of Chicago to start a PhD in sociology under the direction of William Julius Wilson, to whom the book is dedicated. Being a newcomer to the North American sociological field, the young sociologist was struck by how quickly the ‘underclass’ was adopted, not only by social scientists but also by journalists and policymakers as an analytical category. Wacquant sketched an outline of a study of this notion but quickly gave up as he was also busy translating Pierre Bourdieu’s pieces and immersing himself in a Chicago gym for his PhD. A few decades later, Wacquant found the draft of the abandoned study and decided to start back where he left off. The Invention of the ‘Underclass’ thus aims at documenting and explaining the career of a notion that once thrived in North American learned discourses. Theoretically speaking, Wacquant draws on two main sources, Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history) and Pierre Bourdieu’s théorie des champs (field theory). According to this conceptual frame, Wacquant’s structural hermeneutics’ goal is first to empirically map the uses of the word in specific parts of the social space but also to understand its different conceptual meanings. The first part of the book tells the tale of the ‘underclass’, while the second develops a larger set of epistemological reflections on the basis of the previous findings.
The first four chapters help to examine the main uses and meanings of the word. After a few isolated uses of ‘under-class’ – for instance under the pen of the Scottish socialist John Maclean in 1918 – it was not until the 1960s we witnessed its larger circulation. In his 1963 book Challenge to Affluence, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal challenges Daniel Bell’s and John Galbraith’s idea of a class-neutral process of modernization. Myrdal thus analyzes the emergence of a new social group of marginalized people that he calls the ‘under-class’ (drawing on the Swedish word ‘under-klass’). Myrdal is careful with this lexical invention and brackets the word. This structural line of analysis is then appropriated by some English-speaking sociologists, such as Anthony Giddens and John Rex. They thus start a small circulation of the word in the anglophone social sciences during the 1970s. In the meantime, the category is also appropriated in different ways by American philanthropical groups such as the Ford Foundation, who seeks to legitimize its political action vis-à-vis American ghettos. But this first structural understanding of the ‘under-class’ is soon challenged by what Wacquant calls the ‘behavioral’ and ‘neo-ecological’ versions of the word and its concept. The behavioral variant first appears on both the covers of the Time Magazine in 1977 and of Ken Auletta’s book The Underclass in 1982. During a political sequence of direct attacks on the welfare state by the Ronald Reagan administration, both texts popularize a vision of a social group that is not characterized by its position in a social structure but rather by its inherent properties. This journalistic idea of a group solely responsible for its own fate has a huge impact on other parts of social space as it starts to shape the ‘poverty knowledge’ programs in the 1980s. After this journey in different parts of the field of power (the philanthropical, journalistic, and political ones), the term starts to be widely used by North American social scientists in a neo-ecological variant (basically a compromise between the first two versions). The publication of The Truly Disadvantaged by William Julius Wilson in 1987 can be considered as a strong indicator of this trend, even if Wilson quickly distanced himself from the category. If the word steadily started to be questioned by European scholars during the 1990s, its widespread use in North America is abandoned after the adoption of the ‘welfare reform’ by the Clinton administration in 1996, which ends the poor’s right to assistance. In essence, the main story of the ‘underclass’ is one of a racist behavioral a priori that prospered in various parts of the North American field of power between 1977 and 1997.
The rest of the book reflects on this story. Chapter five centers on its implications regarding the subfield of urban sociology. Wacquant underlines the weak empirical rooting of what he names a ‘speculative conceptual bubble’ that has mainly been elaborated in ignorance of social scientists’ problems and findings. Part two of the book, which could be considered as an essay in sociological epistemology, simultaneously details and expands this line of reasoning. Wacquant first reflects on the ambiguous implications of naming social groups and processes, and then establishes a set of criteria to hierarchize ideas employed by social scientists. Considering that the ‘underclass’ does not satisfy them, he suggests replacing it with ‘precariat’. Because of its previous usage in different groups of Italian, French, and English activists and social scientists, the word may be more suited to describe and explain the existence of dispossessed groups living in the relegated urban neighborhoods of advanced societies. Coming back to the subfield of urban sociology, Wacquant then lists a set of questions left unanswered by the behavioral version of the ‘underclass’. He explains the social successes of this concept by linking them to three social processes: the bandwagon or lemming effect, the conceptual speculative bubble, and the turnkey problematics. This examination leads him to give a set of useful recommendations to evaluate other ideas employed in the social sciences, and to suggest that ‘we should give up the search for the ‘one perfect concept’ and seek instead to craft good-enough concepts, or better concepts than the ones we inherit and find at hand’. In coda, he self-applies this piece of advice by conceptualizing – in a Bourdieuian-inspired sense – the concept of ‘race’ as a classification struggle associated with ethnicity.
Reviving a tradition of a theoretically oriented and empirically grounded line of analysis of words and ideas initiated by Henri Berr and continued by scholars like Émile Benveniste, Robert K. Merton, Elinor Barber, Quentin Skinner, Reinhart Koselleck, or Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant’s work is without doubt the more in-depth examination of the ‘underclass’ available to this day. As valuable as this inquiry may be, one might argue that Wacquant universalizes a particular part of the history of the word and idea (its North American uses from 1977 to 1997) as the ‘underclass’. Indeed, it is in a short appendix separated from the first part of the book that Wacquant only briefly studies the transatlantic travels of the world after 1997, quickly concluding that the concept has died after this year. Still, graphics show that the uses of the word are increasing from 1990s onward in various regions such as Europe, Australia, and Asia, and in fields such as the journalistic and the social sciences ones. More empirical work about this part of the story and its relation to the American one may therefore have increased our knowledge of this object. As previous studies on different notions have shown (for instance ‘French theory’), it is indeed the circulation between different nations that seem to fully explain the national social success of symbolic goods. However, one can but recommend the reading of this very well-conducted piece of reflexive work.