Over the course of the 19th century, European societies started thinking of themselves as “civilisations of work.” In the wake of the political and industrial revolutions, labour as a human activity and condition gradually came to embody a general principle of order, progress, and governance. How did work become so central to our systems of citizenship and social recognition?
The book addresses this question by considering the French context in the long transition between the 1789 and 1848 revolutions and focusing on a specific “fragment” of history in the early 1830s marked by a pandemic crisis and the first consequences of industrialisation. It combines the analysis of both political institutions and social movements to retrace the rise of a labour-based social contract revolving around the “citizen-worker” as the quintessential subject of rights.
The first part of the book highlights the role played by the genesis of the modern social sciences and analyses it as a political process that established work as an “object” of governance and scientific investigation, thus fostering pioneering measures of welfare centred on work conditions. The second part focuses on the emergence of the concept of “working class” and the modern labour movement, which structured the world of work as a collective political “subject.”
Author(s): Federico Tomasello
Series: Routledge Studies in the Modern History of France
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 170
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 1848 and the meaning of labour
2 Work and the production of subjectivity
3 The social sciences and the working classes
1 The post-revolutionary context
1.1 The 1831–32 fragment
1.2 Completing the French revolution
1.3 The rise of the “social question”
1.4 Doctrinaire liberalism
1.4.1 Social powers
1.4.2 Capacity-based government
1.5 Saint-Simonianism: between sociology and socialism
1.5.1 The sociology of association
Part I Objects: Work and the social sciences
2 Epidemics and subaltern classes
2.1 The new barbarians: genealogy of a metaphor
2.2 A different race: the dangerous classes
2.3 The disease of civilisation
2.4 Cholera and the genesis of the social sciences
2.5 The epidemic as a social question
2.6 The moral and political sciences
3 Liberalism and the science of society
3.1 The development of social research
3.1.1 Poverty: work as the limit of charity
3.1.2 Pauperism and the British hell
3.1.3 Tocqueville and the new “industrial class”
3.1.4 Work as punishment and reward
3.2 The dangerous class and the working one: producing a labour force
3.2.1 Separating the wheat from the chaff
3.2.2 From charity to patronage
3.3 Doctor Villermé and the epistemology of the social sciences
3.3.1 The public health movement and the “work” of cholera
3.3.2 The “physical and moral conditions” of the working class
4 Towards the “citizen-worker”
4.1 The employment record book and the governing of manpower
4.1.1 A passport within national borders
4.1.2 Policing workers’ mobility
4.2 The birth of labour law
4.2.1 The law on child labour
4.2.2 The juridical codification of wage labour
4.2.3 The “objectivation” of the working subject
4.3 From liberal enquiries to working-class and socialist ones
Part II Subjects: Work as politics
5 The rise of the working class
5.1 The labour movement’s first word?
5.2 Ouvriers
5.3 The artisans’ last stand
5.4 Fragments of a working-class discourse
6 The political subjectivation of labour
6.1 Republican-social discourse: the “popular class”
6.2 The Société des amis du peuple: “professional” proletarians
6.3 The Écho de la fabrique and the language of association
6.4 The Saint-Simonian movement and the “poorest and most numerous class”
6.5 The work of utopia
6.6 The labour movement and the borders of politics
Conclusion
Index
