Naissance du chomeur: 1880-1910.

Historians are turning increasingly to metaphors of birth, invention, and construction to connote the centrality to the historical project of studies of the creation, dissemination, legitimation and eventual naturalization and assimilation of fundamentally new ways of conceptualizing and organizing experience. When attached to something to which common sense attributes a kind of ahistorical permanence, these terms are telltale signs of a work of "new cultural history," as surely as the subtitle "class and community" was of a new social history study a generation ago.(1) While new social histories showed how classes and communities came into being as the result of large-scale sociological processes and came to consciousness of their ability to affect these processes, "birth" studies generally eschew such narratives in favor of the complicated creation and negotiation of identities and conceptual delineations as exercises of power by both social authorities and those whom they seek to classify. Exemplary in this genre are Michel Foucault's genealogy of the criminal and Judith Walkowitz's study of the creation and imposition of the legal category of the prostitute against the norms and practices of the poor in Victorian England.(2) Christian Topalov's excellent study of the "birth" of the unemployed in France, Great Britain, and the United States in the decades before World War I reveals once again what the new cultural history project has to offer.

Naissance du chomeur is far from the first major historical study of unemployment. Reviewing briefly a few other histories of the subject, we can see what sets apart Topalov's account. John Burnett's Idle Hands: The Experience of Unemployment, 1790-1990, seeks to capture "the experience" of unemployment as recorded primarily in workers' memoirs.(3) He finds the concept of unemployment to be unproblematic - "It is not too difficult to arrive at a commonsense meaning of the term which carries general acceptance" (p 3) - and assumes that a single definition can be used to organize and give meaning to workers' experience over two centuries. The problem faced by a reader of Burnett's study is that the meanings and definitions of being without a job themselves have histories which it is impossible to extricate from recountings or analysis of "the experience of unemployment."

The best social history of unemployment to date is Alexander Keyssar's path-breaking Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts.(4) Keyssar places the origins of modern unemployment within a narrative of economic and social change. He is more concerned with the changing problems which being out of work raised for workers than with the problems which delineating and conceptualizing unemployment posed for bureaucrats and social scientists. Yet, while Burnett's methodology leads him to interpret unemployment as a series of comparable individual experiences, Keyssar rightly understands unemployment to be an analyzable, quantifiable, chronologically located sociological phenomenon, with a history that differs from a cumulation of life stories.

Finally, we turn to John Garraty's acclaimed Unemployment in History: Economic Thought and Public Policy.(5) On the surface, Garraty's project resembles Topalov's. Garraty eschews a social history of unemployment for a study "of how the idea 'unemployment' has been understood and evaluated, both before and after the term itself was invented" (p. xi) at the end of the nineteenth century. Yet this similarity is only apparent: Garraty's sense that the idea of "unemployment" has long been with us lends itself to a "history of ideas" interpretation in the tradition of A. O. Lovejoy which differs radically from Topalov's "birth" study. Garraty combines this belief in a core idea inherited from the past with a belief in a social reality waiting to be found by economists and social scientists. The chapter of Unemployment in History which covers the period Topalov discusses is tellingly entitled not the "birth," but "the discovery of unemployment" - the Hegelian moment when the appearance of the term "unemployment" and the revelation of a corresponding social reality came together.

There is a second and equally important way in which Garraty's and Topalov's studies differ. Garraty's history of an idea focuses on discrete accounts of thinkers with the most to contribute to the narrative of a fuller and more complete understanding of the idea of unemployment. Topalov is primarily concerned with the political and social struggles among individuals and groups to define, classify, and treat the "unemployed." Social and legal identities are never simply the product of better observation of social phenomena or clearer thinking about them, but of contests over who has the power to determine and impose their understandings of these social phenomenon. Therefore, the perceptive writings of the outsider economist John A. Hobson receive more sustained attention in Garraty's study than in Topalov's much longer and much more chronologically limited work. From Garraty's perspective of discussing figures in the past who raised issues and questions which help us to put together a logical progression to our contemporary understanding of unemployment, a focus on Hobson is crucial; in Topalov's problematic, Hobson's marginality - no matter how perceptive he was - renders him a secondary figure.

Topalov's study differs radically from those of Burnett, Keyssar, and Garraty. He argues that the twentieth-century idea of the unemployed was not the direct product of either economic crisis or of the development of a theory of periodic depressions, but of a crisis in the mechanisms of social representation based on the individual and moral systems of classification which private charities had used to guide their actions in the nineteenth century. The opportunity for change occurred not because these mechanisms were internally contradictory - they always had been - but because the potential for shifts in the exercise of social, economic, cultural, and political power at the end of the nineteenth century allowed new understandings of society, of the possibilities for social action, and of systems of social representation to come into play.

In the late 1880s, Charles Booth broke with the dominant paradigm by explaining unemployment as due only secondarily to undeserving individuals and primarily to the casual labor market. Others, culminating most famously with William Beveridge, developed the idea of structural unemployment, a social fact independent of whatever moral characteristics might be ascribed to the unemployed. This much can be found in any history of unemployment. Two elements differentiate Topalov's book - and make it a "new cultural history."

First, Topalov's careful study of the tortuous development of the modern concept of the unemployed and in particular of widespread resistance to use of the term by those who believed classification of the jobless required individual moral evaluations make clear that neither the particular meanings which the concept had nor its widespread acceptance were foregone conclusions (as in the "discovery" model). Development, dissemination, and legitimation of the concept were the result of conflicts and compromises among unions, philanthopists, social reformers, bureaucrats, social scientists, and other interested groups. Shifts in the balances of power among such groups in the three nations affected these developments and created different opportunities for the conceptualization and implementation of state reform in the decade before World War I.

Second, the "birth" of the unemployed was inseparable from the quest for ways to measure and represent them. In the past, histories of statistics have generally been predicated on the idea that over time statistical measures have been developed to determine social phenomena more accurately; "new cultural histories" argue that statistics themselves contribute to constituting what they measure. And, in turn, measures of unemployment took the forms they did because they were the product of various state reform projects which became conceivable at different times in the three nations. While measurement of unemployment in terms of those who qualify for state unemployment benefits in states with such programs is an obvious example, one of Topalov's most interesting sections concerns the development of unemployment indices based on unemployment statistics the state encouraged unions to collect (although the unions' understanding of unemployment differed significantly from that of state officials). As reformers began to consider the possibility of using counter-cyclical spending to reduce unemployment, they used compilations of these "faulty" statistics to create serviceable retrospective unemployment indices to reveal trends which could be used to guide government action. In sum, systems of unemployment insurance were not born of insights derived from analysis of the kind of statistics available today; identification of the "unemployed" and statistical measures of unemployment were, on the contrary, the fruit of these state reform projects. The contemporary notion of the unemployed was created by reform policies which were in turn only conceivable and defensible in terms of this new conception of the unemployed.

In concluding, one is tempted to apply the kind of "new cultural history" criteria Topalov uses to his own study. The French historical and sociological community is far less roiled by debates over race and gender than their British and American counterparts. While Topalov's account does not concentrate on France - Great Britain is the primary focus - the book's failure to examine the way in which conceptions of gender and, especially in the United States, race, functioned in the delineation of social categories like the unemployed clearly reflects its origins.

Topalov has written what in the United States would be considered a "new cultural history," in which ideas and categories are the product of intellectual projects, social conflicts, and reform politics and in turn offer possibilities for the reorientation of laws, state policy; social identity and social movements. To find that things we thought were always there or at least were the fruit of a long social, political, or intellectual evolution had births and were the product of the dismantling of old categories and the construction of new ones suggests that while we can never have unmediated access to social reality, we can, if we are conscious about the ways in which the categories of analysis we use have been constructed, begin to think our way out of the conundrums in which dependence upon them may place us.

Donald Reid University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

ENDNOTES

1. Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989). It should be pointed out that Topalov has probably never thought of himself as a"new cultural historian," although the journal with which he is associated, Geneses (another birth metaphor) shares many of the concerns of the new cultural history.

2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979). Judith Walkowtiz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, 1980).

3. John Burnett, Idle Hands: The Experience of Unemployment, 1790-1990 (New York, 1994).

4. Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1986).

5. John A. Garraty, Unemployment in History: Economic Thought and Public Policy (New York, 1978).