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 contemporary debates over
who should receive social assistance and whether this entitlement
should be linked to the obligation to work. Castel's rich insights
and brilliant generalizations are invaluable for anyone concerned
with what he describes as the "new social question" of work and
social welfare in contemporary society.
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