Sociology and Its Poor

GIOVANNA PROCACCI

Je viens de fonder sous la devise Ordre et Progres une societe politique, destinee
a remplir envers la seconde partie essentiellement organique de la grande
revolution un office equivalent a celui qu’exerca si utilement la societe des
1
Jacobins dans la premiere partie, necessairement critique.
-A. Comte, &dquo;Le Fondateur de la Societe Positiviste a quiconque desire s’y
incorporer.&dquo; Paris, le 8 mars 1848.

This essay was mostly written during the year I spent at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton and was presented there to the Social Science Seminar in May 1987. I am very grateful to
all members and staff of the school, and especially grateful for helpful comments on this paper to
Wolfgang Fach, Albert Hirschman, Sandy Levinson, Carole Pateman, Peter Sahlins, and Joan W.
Scott. Previous versions have been presented to the Seminar of the Committee on Conceptual
Foundations of Science, University of Chicago, and the Staff Seminar of the Sociology Department,
New School for Social Research, New York. I am indebted to all of the participants-in a special way
to Arnold Davidson and Jan Goldstein, to Ira Katznelson, Charles Tilly, Arthur Vidich, and Ari and
Vera Zolberg. Their comments helped me to reformulate my interpretation. I hope they helped also
to make it less &dquo;obscure&dquo; to an American reader. Michael Donnelly and Michael Hobart took some of
their time to eliminate the heaviest interferences of French writing, but of course they could not
transform it into real English: it might be good to know, however, that without their help it could have
been even worse! Translations of quotations from French are mine.
164

INTRODUCITON

The purpose of the present essay is to analyze the origins of social science as
a means to govern social process, distinct from the legal and economic means.
The French search for a positivistic science of society from the Enlightenment
until the time of Auguste Comte offers especially rich materials for such a study,
since it gathered scattered elements for a critique of the individualistic premises
of juridical and economic arguments. Between the rights of a juridically sovereign
individual, and the interests of an economic subject, early social science inter-
posed techniques oriented to integrate individuals’ interests through a network of
&dquo;duties.&dquo; Elsewhere I have considered these techniques of &dquo;government of the
society.&dquo;2
social&dquo; as directed to the formation of the subject of &dquo;civil Here I shall
deal with a specific moment of such a process: the relation between social science
and social policy during the Revolution of 1848.
Analyses of the origins of social science are often tempted to treat these
origins merely in terms of their intellectual antecedents. The rise of social science
is regarded as fulfilling in one way or another, the achievement of western reason.
Hence the political-theoretical circumstances in which such a thing as a &dquo;social
science&dquo; was bom are dismissed, as are the specific effects of such a process. As
a result, the origins of social science are no longer perceived as a social event.
I am not trying to revive an old debate on the distinctions oetween ideas and
events. As Keith Baker puts it, intellectual history might deal mainly with
meaning, but, after all, &dquo;meaning is a dimension of all social action&dquo;.The work
of Reinhart Koselleck on the relation of conceptual history to social history, and
the work of Michel Foucault on the pratiques discursives have done enough to
set the terms of the whole question in a new light.4 My claim is that to reconstruct
the rise of social science in its proper character as a social event, it is necessary
to reintroduce history into the analysis, in order to grasp the texture of social
conditions and meanings.
The question here is to account for the formation of what Auguste Comte
5
described as &dquo;the universal mental preponderance of a social point of view.&dquo;
Accordingly, something new had occurred when Comte shaped his definition:
namely, a &dquo;social point of view&dquo; had become possible. This is the event. One can
reintroduce history in many ways; my own attempt focuses on understanding the
making of social science through the formation of its own object of analysis. If a
new point of view was to emerge, there had to exist a set of problems and a field

of practices that other points of view, such as the legal or the economic, were
unable to address. This is indeed nothing but a second face of the same event: if
society were to become an object of knowledge, this was at once a condition and
an effect of the rise of a social science.
To regard the problem in this way does demand, however, taking into account
the tensions within those earlier traditions of analysis and their inadequacy for
 165

governing a modern society. The development of a &dquo;social point of view&dquo; was

shaped by the need to counteract unsolved problems raised by the individualistic
premises of the juridical rationality concerning political relations, and the market
rationality concerning economic relations.
The point here is not to contrast continuities with discontinuities-as a
methodological debate about history does only too often-but to restore the
meaning of significant shifts in our way of thinking. No social point of view could
establish itself as an autonomous set of concepts, methods, and practices without
differing in many ways from those main frameworks expressing competing views
of the same problems. I shall argue that among the conditions for such a distinction
were a fundamental fracture opening in the very notion of rights, challenging its

ability to provide unifying political arguments, and a first crisis in classical

political economy’s model from the 1820s-1840s. Behind both problems was the
social question and the need for social reform that it inspired.
Such an argument requires assuming greater interaction between social
problems and social ideas than intellectual history is usually ready to admit, even
in its most interesting contributions. In his remarkable work on legal tradition and
the human sciences, Donald Kelley analyzes the relations between the origins of
sociology and the historical school of law. He stresses the contribution of the jus
positivum to knowledge about society, and yet he limits the &dquo;role for history&dquo; in
the birth of sociology to restoring the &dquo;intellectual continuum&dquo; between sociology
and the legal tradition. The historical and political conditions that made these
connections effective do not enter into his analysis. Then he can describe the birth
of sociology as a primacy of economics on one side and the &dquo;fulfillment of legal
tradition&dquo; on the other. The interesting point he makes in presenting the positive
side of jurisprudence, oriented toward &dquo;the social as such,&dquo; in the end leads him
to interpret the sociological tradition as turning back &dquo;to an older and more
juridically oriented society.&dquo;6 He misses thus the conflicts opposing juridical and
social rationality.
Keith Baker’s reading of the rise of social science is also interesting for the
purpose of the analysis I present here. From the analysis of the important role that
Condorcet played in the formation of scientific inquiry about social facts, Baker
seems to identify all such developments with the liberal tradition, as opposed to
Jacobin &dquo;socialism.&dquo;7 There is no doubt that the project of a &dquo;social science&dquo; fit
well with a moderate set of interpretations of revolutionary tensions. But is this
enough to reduce the rise of social science to the problems and concerns raised
from within the theoretical and political framework of liberalism? On the con-
trary, the very idea of a science concerned with the happiness of citizens rested
on another set of arguments, stressing the need for models of organization and

patterns of social dependency and integration, which was quite different from
liberal concerns. These different concerns can be recognized in the positivistic
166

primacy of the general interest, in Cabanis’ idea of bien public or in the policy of
assistance toward the poor and in claims for public education. To speak the
language of the Great Revolution, all these concerns were a matter of &dquo;fraternity,&dquo;
more than of &dquo;liberty&dquo;: they expressed a more social, and less negative, interpreta-
tion of the role of the state, deeply rooted in the Great Revolution, and common
in one or another way to all trends involved in it.
This orientation toward fraternity first emerged in the political response to
the so-called social question: the new conception of poverty arising in France
after the Great Revolution of 1789 that replaced the Ancien Regime’s conception
of mendicity. Ishall argue that historically as well as theoretically the formation
of social science was intimately related to the formation of a new point of view
for administering poverty within a society of expanding wealth. The social crisis
opened anew with the Revolution of 1848 offers a crucial view of such a relation,
for political problems and social solutions were to influence each other directly.
A renewed interest in recent years has brought historians to view the 1848
Revolution as a more complex event than the inevitable completion of the Great
Revolution of 1789. From the vantage point of the interaction between social
science and social reform, the Revolution of 1848 rather appears as the explosion
of contradictions inherent in the liberal order: less the fulfillment, perhaps, than
the most revealing moment of such tensions. Thus the 1848 Revolution that
Agulhon described in terms of an opposition between a &dquo;legal socialism&dquo; and a
&dquo;pure constitutional transformation&dquo; of no consequence in terms of social reform 9
would be better understood as a social experiment testing the possibility of
extending a juridical framework of formal equality to a substantive interpretation
of rights. If the notion of natural rights expressed formal equality, rights also
expressed actual social divisions; one of the questions the Revolution of 1848
raised was about the social implications of adopting the language of &dquo;rights&dquo; to
advance popular claims.
In 1848 the revolutionary movement claimed a right to labor as the political
solution to the problem of poverty in the French lower classes. Such a claim
implied an interpretation of poverty as being connected to labor, and the solution
offered was juridical. This revived political dangers already pointed out in the
policy of assistance after 1789: once assistance was connected to labor policy,
both would become individuals’ entitlements vis-a-vis the state. To avoid such
danger, a new orientation had arisen among French liberal economists, the so-
called &dquo;social economy.&dquo; Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, these
economists attempted to oppose a &dquo;social&dquo; conception of poverty against a &dquo;legal&dquo;
one.
The political establishment reacted against the dangers revived by the claim
fora right to labor, denouncing at the same time the inadequacy of social

economy’s response. Such a reaction was a turning point, bringing to an end also
 167

previous strategies of social intervention, which had been unable effectively to

disconnect poverty from labor. Here a role was opened to social science: to
elaborate scientifically the terms of solution to a crucial political problem that
neither the juridical nor the economic frameworks could provide-a role of
knowledge as well as of social policing.
THE RIGHT TO ASSISTANCE

If guaranteeing labor was to be the solution to poverty, then poverty would

result only from a lack of work. One could therefore claim that no assistance to
the poor was needed other than to provide the means to work. In so doing, the
theory of the right to labor reactivated the revolutionary theory of assistance,
formulated already before the Great Revolution of 1789 in the intellectual
atmosphere of the Enlightenment. Labor was viewed as the regulator of an &dquo;ethics
society. 10
of prosperity,&dquo; conceived as a morality for both individual and Accord-
ingly, any kind of assistance other than labor would lead to moral degradation in
a cycle of charity-idleness. In this view, poverty was the effect of irrational social

organization such as the Ancien Regime, which was unable to provide its own
members with sufficient work. The poor consequently had accumulated certain
claims on society to correct such irrationality, and the revolutionary process had
to face the challenge of its long overdue moral obligations to the poor.
From the very beginning of the 1848 Revolution, various committees were
organized by national assemblies to address issues of public assistance. IIn this
context, labor was considered to guarantee the rationality of individual behavior
and to regulate the integration of individual and general interests. Its beneficial
effects had long been described in terms of moralization and civilization against
disorder and the improvidence of poverty. From the optimism of Turgot and the
physiocrats to the pessimism of Sismondi’s analysis of economic crises, labor had
been consistently at the core of any hope for a solution to the problem of poverty.
The idea of extending free contractual labor seemed sufficient to provide a
concrete content for a policy toward poverty, gradually transforming the subjec-
tive conditions of the poor without altering the objective functioning of the
productive system.
It had become clear quite soon, however, that labor could not be so easily
generalized because of economic problems such as the fluctuations of the market,
the unpredictability of crises, and the risks of investments. Even more important,
from the work of the first committees until Barere’s plan and the Grand Livre de
la Bienfaisance (an 2),12 the revolutionary assemblies had pointed out that an
assistance to the poor identified with labor policy might strengthened the statism
that is implicit in the very idea that poverty can be solved by improving social
organization. From this point of view, the positivistic claim to a primacy of the
general interest was equivalent to the physiocrats’ intention to found a political
168

order in which self- interest would promote general interest. Nevertheless in the
actual organization of society the selfishness of the economic subject came into
opposition with the patriotism of the citizen, opening anew a contradiction
between individual and general interests. More than anything else, assistance
referred to the general interest and the public sphere: as Cabanis put it, assistance
had become &dquo;the new state religion.&dquo; 14
It came thus to play a relevant role in this
contradiction.
To make public assistance coincide with a labor policy guaranteed by the state
put the state in a delicate position. It had to play the role of an economic agent,
which contradicted the neutrality toward economic processes required by the
theory of the free market. Even more embarrassing, the state would be considered
as owing to its citizens the material means of their living conditions, or accord-

ingly it would be held responsible for any shortage of such means. Individuals
in turn would be strengthened by the new rights ascribed to their juridical
sovereignty. A state whose power would be diminished by a position of indebted-
ness toward its citizens would have to face individuals with even stronger

sovereign qualities.
All attempts to elaborate a strategy for assistance from 1794 on tried above
all to find a way around such difficulties. From inside the range of liberal
positions, a new direction was pursued in order to police poverty without acknow-
ledging any social debt toward the poor.
SOCIAL ECONOMY

This was admittedly the purpose of the so-called &dquo;social economy&dquo; in its effort
to master the process of social reform. More than an actual school, French social
economy represented at the time a specific orientation in analyzing the social

question within the principles of liberal economy. Particularly during the 1820s-
1840s social economists produced an incredibly large and rich literature on
poverty. Together with the first socialist analyses (but less known), this literature
gave to the French debate on pauperism an original emphasis on its social, rather
than merely economic, implications.
Social economists attempted to establish a middle position between the
rigidity of the economic model inadequate to any reform and the need for social
reform that industrial pauperism demonstrated. They were quite orthodox theore-
tically, close to Adam Smith’s traditional economics. But under the influence of
Malthus’ and Sismondi’s analyses concerning the economic role of the popula-
tion, they tried to correct the most perverse effects of the economic system without
contradicting it. Theiranalysis was thus oriented against two ideas: that the
economic system was responsible for poverty, and that an individual’s right to
labor and assistance was giving an economic role to the state. Alongside the
promise of labor, social economists favored thus a policy toward the poor inspired
 169

by philanthropic and noneconomic, nonjuridical principles. From outside the

economic science, but combined with it, philanthropy was to play a strategic role
for the solution of the most crucial difficulty of economic individualism.
Philanthropy provided another set of principles for intervening in society.
Without denying the individual’s interest as the basis of the economic system, all
philanthropic techniques elaborated a pragmatic reference to some kind of
collective interest. But such collective interest did not lead to any social debt
toward the poor, since philanthropy pointed in a moral community the rationale
for interpreting poverty as a concern for the whole of society. Then it became
possible for a collective agency to intervene; even the state could act (without
denying the neutrality that liberal economy required) and correct the worst effects
of the economic order without contradicting its main principles.
Philanthropy worked to divert social attention from the target of economics:
for social economists, the question of poverty was ascribed altogether to another
grid of analysis. Philanthropy enabled social economists to disconnect the ques-
tion of liberty (individual interest) from that of fraternity (general interest);
assistance could thus shift from a &dquo;state religion&dquo; toward a new status, regulated
by some kind of &dquo;noninterested interests&dquo; (interets desinteresses), which were
expected to smooth the ground for a cohabitation of individual and general
interests.
Philanthropy thus served to separate the problem of poverty from labor, which
the economic system wanted freed from any kind of protection. Labor became
therefore just one among other means of moralizing and pedagogic intervention,
which a philanthropic perspective and not an economic pattern was to organize.
The need to reform the economic system was directed toward a noneconomic
field, the &dquo;social&dquo; one, since the reform was not to modify the industrial system,
but rather to promote those practices of citizenship that fit into it.

THE RIGHT TO LABOR

The claim for a right to labor from the insurgents of February 1848 revived
these issues, since it implied once again a policy of assistance centered on labor
policy. If labor is the only legitimate way to provide a means of living, according
to the liberal creed, assistance identified with labor could not appear simply as
generous help from society; it would inevitably take the form of a right. That is
indeed what the insurgents in February 1848 meant when they stated aloud that
society had a debt toward its poor and the time had arrived to settle it. The balance
was named the &dquo;right to labor.&dquo;
The right to labor was the form that the social question assumed during the
crisis of February 1848. It became the emblem of the popular upheaval, echoing
from the streets of Paris to the National Assembly. As such, it was to convey to
everybody an immediate truth: that economic reform directly entailed social
170

reform. The economy could no longer ignore society’s need for redistributing
social wealth in such a way that would make possible some links of solidarity
among its members, nor would the social costs of economic organization continue
to be neglected.
When the Provisional Government recognized the right to labor under the
pressure of the popular movement, it did so with the understanding that much
more was involved than just an economic claim. Louis Blanc participated in the
committee responsible for the decree. He wrote, in his Histoire de la R,6volution
de 1848:

While writing the decree, I knew the extent it was going to engage the government; I knew
perfectly that it would be applicable only by means of a social reform, having association
as principle and abolition of the proletariat as effect. But in my view, right there
lay the
value of the decree. 20
Already in the intentions of its promoters, the right to labor involved a larger claim
for general social reform, just beneath the surface of the economic claim.
Such an implicit and far-reaching consequence of the right to labor emerged
from its twofold nature. On one side, it expressed a set of claims directed to
problems created by advancing industrialization. It asked for greater access to
productive labor while the concentration of capitalist production was provoking
massive movements of the labor force. It expressed also concrete demands
concerning conditions of work and workers’ security. On the other side, however,
the right to labor was an attempt to subordinate the economic sphere to the same
kind of social reciprocity that was generally agreed to be the basis of social
consensus and hence of stability. The juridical language expressed social consen-
sus in terms of a reciprocity of rights and obligations that the practice of free labor
contract was generalizing in social life. The theory of the right to labor interpreted
such reciprocity following the principle that compensation for labor should be
based on the needs of each one.
To each according to his faculties: here is the duty. But along with faculties, nature endowed
human beings with needs. Now, how could anybody fulfill the function to which nature
prepared him, if social institutions prevent him from a full development, for he cannot
satisfy his needs? Hence a second axiom corresponds and completes the first one: to each
according to his needs. Here is the right.21
To
lay such a reciprocity at the core of economic organization inevitably
implied a new reading of the social question. Identifying once more assistance to
the poor with labor, the right to labor was to revive the same idea of a social debt
toward the poor, that the first assemblies had already faced.22 If any assistance is
owed to the poor to compensate such a debt, then labor must be acknowledged as
a fundamental right.

Yet labor is not exempt from contradictions among the popular classes
themselves. Recent historiography has often centered on the analysis of conflict-
 171

ing elements playing against each other within the strategies of insurgents, in
order to explain above all the failure of insurrection.23 William Sewell has shown
how conflicts of this kind could arise from different conceptions of labor-artisan
versus proletariat-and how the right to labor could emerge as a compromise
between corporate and democratic elements 24
Although such conflicts are crucial to understanding the dynamics of the
popular movement during the months of the Revolution, my own purpose here is
quite different. I am not examining the right to labor from the point of view of the
popular movement that expressed it, but rather from the point of view of the
government that had to face it, first granting it and then strongly fighting against
it. My concern is: why was the right to labor so strongly opposed, in spite of being
already a compromise? What kind of specific problems did such a formula raise
from the government’s point of view? As a consequence, my analysis here is less
centered on labor than on right. By this, I mean to suggest that in spite of
heterogeneous elements coexisting and/or conflicting in the theory of labor
expressed by the popular movement as a whole, some problems were specifically
attached to the claim for labor to be acknowledged as a right. Joseph Gamier
expressed it clearly in his introduction to a collection of documents on the right
to labor:

I think with Malthus that the right to assistance is nothing but the right to labor, and to
establish such right would engage society in the same difficulties. To say a &dquo;right&dquo; means
that the one who has such right, the one to whom assistance is owed, can summon society
and government to give him such assistance. 25

This power to summon lay in the fact that once claimed as a right, the notion
of labor threatened the two key points of social order: the defense of private
property and the autonomy of the state.

The Defense of Private Property

It was a commonplace that property is obviously connected to labor and only
to labor. In this condition, to grant a right to labor would mean, according to its

opponents, that self-interest is no longer the prime mover of individual action

within society, but some sort of right to other people’s property would be
established to the advantage of some. Self-interest was admittedly efficient only
in connection with a regime of protected private property. Even more, property
cannot be considered as an individual fundamental right without recognizing this
natural, psychological basis for property, namely self- interest. In Lamartine’s
words, &dquo;property is not a law but an instinct,&dquo; and as such it marks the extent of
civilization. Rooted in the individual’s self-interest, private property changed
its nature from a source of social inequality to a fundamental right. Yet the theory
of the right to labor regarded this individualization of property as the very origin
172

of social inequality. As Blanc put it, &dquo;Self-interest is legitimate and sacred only if
it is associated with the general interest, with the interest of everybody without
exception.&dquo;2~
It is therefore insufficient to ground property in the individual: it
has to be socialized in order to counter the effects of social inequality. Accord-
ingly, property was conceived as &dquo;what each one owns with everybody’s consen-
sus&dquo; ;
hence its natural basis was social. But this socialization of property
demands that labor is a right, just as property is: &dquo;It would not be true to say that
proletarians can become proprietors through their labor, if they have no right to
labor.29 The idea of socialized property thus expressed a demand for guaranteed
access to property ownership: the way was to promote association. Only then
would it be possible for everybody to consent to the social order: by organizing
the product of work as a socialized property, each one would become responsible
for its output, its technical improvements, its optimal functioning: &dquo;Let us work
for a common profit to share as brothers...then, the one who, while sharing the
common benefits would not contribute with his own work, this one would be
declared infame. ,,30
Association became thus the key element for the social reform
planned through right to labor: it was supposed to apply to the political system
the
through universal suffrage and to the economic system through the reorganization
of labor in workshops run by cooperative capital.

The Autonomy of the State

In the discussion on the right to labor, two different conceptions of the state
faced each other. To the attempt of neutralization that Carl Schmitt described as
a peculiar feature of the liberal theory of the state,31 the right to labor opposed a

conception of the state as protector, organizing what Karl Polanyi called the
&dquo;self-defense of society,&dquo; which only made market society possible. 32
Louis Blanc
described the view of the state implicit in his theory of the &dquo;organization of labor&dquo;:
&dquo;In a democratic regime the state is people’s power served by its representatives,
it is the realm of liberty.&dquo;33Consequently, the state cannot protect every interest
in the same way but must protect, above all, the interests of the weakest among
its members, in order to strengthen the collective organization. The state must
become the protector, the &dquo;banker of the poor&dquo;:
We want a strong government because, in the regime of inequality in which we are still
caught, there are feeble menwho need a social force to protect them. We want a government
intervening in industrial matters, since where only rich people obtain credit, there is a need
for a social banker willing to lend to the poor.&dquo;3
The role of the state in a democratic society is in a way paradoxical, since &dquo;to
command human beings is an insolence, it can be forgiven only because of a desire
of, and an evidence that one is useful to them.&dquo;35 Hence the right to labor promoted
the image of a state establishing its legitimacy on its own usefulness for society,
 173

rather than on force: to be useful, the state must use its own forces for rescuing
society from the weight of antagonisms threatening both order and liberty. Far
from the limits imposed on it by liberal theory, this state concentrated its powers:
unitary, politically centralized, a regulating agent in the economy, it was only
counterbalanced by the &dquo;democratic communal organization&dquo; that should replace
administrative centralization. 36 Democracy could not be just a matter of political
regime, it must be a new organization of social power as a whole. Then, political
power and social reform must be connected: &dquo;It is necessary to show people the
relation between the improvement of their situation and a change of power.&dquo;37
State intervention was nothing but the counterpart of another deep transformation
that democracy had produced &dquo;in people’s tendency to expect their deliverance
less from brute force than from order, debate and science.&dquo;
The theory of the right to labor moved therefore in a twofold direction: toward
a strengthening of society (via associations) and toward a strengthening of the
state (via its protective role). Although seemingly contradictory, these two direc-
tions of social reform were in fact both supported by a similar intention: they
tended to socialize the authority practiced within society whether on behalf of
private property or public functions. Hence the right to labor was to attack both
the economic framework identifying individual liberty merely with free competi-
tion, and the juridical one providing an individualistic basis for rights, since
neither liberal economy nor juridical individualism was able to provide social
authority with any legitimate foundation. Both concealed in effect the more
fundamental question of power behind a veil of juridical contractual relations.
This perspective of socialization allows us to understand why the main
problem raised by the right to labor consisted less in the theory of labor it implied
than in the claim to a right that it advanced. For once expressed in terms of right,
&dquo;labor&dquo; became less the key element of liberal order than the means toward
socialized ownership. Once applied to labor, &dquo;right&dquo; was no longer the in-
dividualistic basis of contractual society; it became instead the proof of what
society owed to the poor, of the protection they needed-a claim for substantive
equality. The poor, formally equal but actually excluded from substantive rights,
had started to talk the language of rights, the language of their own exclusion.
Inevitably the issue became less a matter of rights than of the actual power to use
them. The right to labor exposed thus the double nature of the notion of rights, at
once expressing formal equality and organizing actual inequalities.

THE DOUBLE NATURE OF &dquo;RIGHTS&dquo;

That atheory claiming a right to labor was in fact attacking the juridical
rationality social relations may seem contradictory and needs to be argued
of
further. Such a claim made explicit a fundamental fracture inside the juridical
174

framework, opening a gap in its capacity to provide arguments for organizing and
governing a whole society.
William Sewell has recalled the declaration of the &dquo;Sovereign People&dquo; posted
in the streets of Paris on February 24, 1848, which read as follows: &dquo;All citizens
must remain armed and defend their barricades until they have obtained the
enjoyment of their rights as citizens and as laborers.&dquo;39 Sewell points out that the
Revolution had introduced a separation within the language of rights. More than
a separation, I shall argue, it revealed the contradictory nature of rights, irrevocab-

ly breaking the kind of universality they claimed to represent. The claim for a
right to labor played a crucial role in provoking a specification of the content of
rights, which was ultimately to contradict the unifying vocation of natural rights
to conceal actual inequalities before positive rights.
Since the Great Revolution, rights had been an object of consensus, for they
were directed at abolishing Ancien Regime privileges and at restoring the natural
order that those privileges had destroyed. With the claim for a right to labor came
an utterly different meaning. Here the claim was not directed against some old
and long-standing privilege (for example, the right to a free contract in labor
relations had been stated against the privileges of corporations). 40 For the first
time, a right was claimed that lay entirely inside a new political and social
conception, namely the new definitions of liberty, ownership, and poverty. The
right to labor was directed against the new privileges these entailed, in order to
compensate the disadvantage resulting for the lower classes of the population-
those people whose access to positive rights did not directly follow from the mere
abolition of the old system of privileges under the rule of natural rights. Not-
withstanding, they too had been admitted as members of society.
As for the rights as citizens, their twofold nature had been acknowledged and
taken into account since the first theories of citizenship in liberal society. On one
side, the notion of citizenship was to convey the fundamental equality established
in terms of natural right, against the distinctions of the Ancien Regime. Everybody
was a citizen, the poor included; they could not choose not to be so. This was

actually the only conceivable content for a juridical representation of all members
of a society as equals.
On the other side, however, the same notion of citizenship never worked
politically without introducing distinctions, from Abbe Sieyes’ distinction be-
tween active and passive citizens, to those of citoyen propriétaire, actionnaire,
and capacitaire.4I In all cases, these distinctions regulated the access of citizens
to positive rights. Although these distinctions had juridical effects, they were not
juridical by their nature. They were rather social in nature-a functional and
nonjuridical principle was used to regulate inequality in the actual sharing of
social power. Such functional distinctions played the role of disconnecting a
citizenship as a natural right from a citizenship implying specific positive rights
 175

without having to reintroduce the Ancien Regime’s distinctions of birth or

condition.
But the poor represented a different set of problems. As mendicants, they had
been left outside of any juridical relation, to be inserted in a logic of social custody
(tutelle). The real question then was how to integrate them into the juridical sphere
altogether, long before regulating their access to positive rights. Their integration
was necessary in order to make the question of poverty an object of policy; yet it
could not contradict the equality supposed by such natural rights. The poor thus
raised a problem, not so much because they represented inequality, but rather
because they were assumed to be equal to all other citizens, and yet they made
inequality manifest. In short, the natural right of citizenship set out a kind of
equality that had to be universal and that could not support any exception. The
poor created a politically embarrassing issue: how to justify inequalities under a
condition of basic equality.
Nor could the problem they raised be treated through functional distinctions.
What could be the social function of the poor? The citoyen capacitaire or
propriétaire became the subject of positive rights since he or she exercised
individually a social function. But the poor had to be inserted into the framework
of rights from an asocial background. Their integration into the juridical sphere
supposed them to renounce their identity as poor; only by disappearing could
poverty eventually play a useful role toward society. To integrate the poor meant
to reduce them to a social rationality of mutual rights and duties: the poor must
be given the opportunity to escape poverty.
Labor seemed the best way to organize such reciprocity. Only through labor
could the poor return to society what the latter had given them in terms of rights.
Labor alone seemed able to integrate the poor into a grid of social exchange, where
rights compensated work and vice versa. But to assume labor to regulate the
poor’s integration in a juridical frame of social relations, instead of founding a
social function inevitably meant to acknowledge an individual right to labor.
Rights as laborers were then not only separated from citizens’ rights, but they
were of an entirely different nature. They explicitly lay outside the formal level

of uniform natural rights. The claim for a right to labor was a claim for a potential
equality, based on the natural equality of citizens. Though still expressed in
juridical terms, the right to labor introduced into the juridical sphere nonjuridical
questions: it used a juridical affirmation of equality to make the case for a positive
right, thus demanding far more than formal equality. In so doing, it revealed
beneath the juridical framework the question of power in the exercise of rights.
Ultimately, it raised the question of authority.
The notion of formal right was denounced in 1848 for having been used since
people&dquo;;42
1789 &dquo;to cheat the real liberty did not consist in having a right, but the
power to exercise it.
176

Liberty is not only the right but the power granted to men to develop their faculties under
the authority of justice and the protection of law: since diversity of functions and aptitudes
is a vital condition of society,
develop their unequal faculties. 4
equality consists in the possibility given to all equally to
In claiming a right to labor, the juridical language had only a provisional role: it
was less the aim than the means to attack an entirely juridical conception of liberty
in society.
If the notion of rights lost its capacity to express social consensus, it was not
simply because of the extreme claim the right to labor would have represented as
a way toward a &dquo;communist&dquo; organization of society, as Donzelot put it. 44 The

problem was not the conception of labor implicit in the theory of the right to labor,
but rather the contradictory nature of the rights that it revealed. The separation
between rights as citizens and rights as laborers opened a gap between natural
and positive rights: the idea of a universal citizenship was no longer sufficient. If
all were citizens, each one was a member of society in a different way. The
juridical language of right did not convey a uniform representation of the Nation
as a whole. As a result of the first formulation of the social question in terms of

rights, in 1848 the ability of natural right to found a formal equality that could
conceal inequalities in positive rights was fundamentally challenged.

FROM RIGHTS TO A MORAL DUTY

Such a substantive interpretation of rights attached to the question of poverty

contradicted the main lines along which social economy had conceived social
reform. Social economy had sought to protect both the economic system and the
state from having to assume the weight of a solution to poverty by using

philanthropy as an alternative framework to either the economic or the juridical.

Yet for the insurgents of 1848 poverty was again an economic problem, depending
on a lack of labor, and the solution to the problem had to be economic, transform-

ing the organization of social relations between capital and labor. Moreover, the
claim against the economic system was expressed in terms of a right, conveying
that social reform was no longer a matter of political will but was the proper
compensation for those excluded from a process of expanding wealth. In other
words, inequality was to be treated in the space opened by a norm of social
reciprocity-between the right of each one to equal access to labor and property,
and the duty of society to guarantee such a condition of fundamental equality.
Between February and June of 1848 the institutional response of the Provi-
sional Government to the popular claim was altogether confused. The creation of
Ateliers Nationaux instead of social ones as described in Blanc’s theory of
organization of labor, and the formation of a Commission permanente de gouver-
nement pour les travailleurs au Luxembourg instead of a Ministry of Labor as
 177

demanded by the insurgents, were the major pieces of a political strategy mixing
old policies and new views of the problems.
As most of recent historiography stresses, the National Workshops were far
from being the germ of socialism as was sometimes claimed. In truth, they
scarcely resembled the institution Blanc had in mind with workers sharing profits;
they resembled much more an older policy of state-sponsored public works.45 As
William Sewell and Mark Traugott both recall, a similar institution, the Ateliers
de Charité, had been part of the most traditional political practice of French
governments in periods of sudden dramatic impoverishment.46 One could also
see in the very name of &dquo;national&dquo; instead of &dquo;social&dquo; workshops a political attempt

to avoid confirming the social divisions that the fracture of the juridical frame-
work made explicit. Yet their organization was centered on the right to labor and
no longer on charity. That was new enough to allow workers to look at national

workshops as an irreversible instantiation of the république sociale. Whatever

their relationship to older policies, they gave evidence that the organization of
labor was recognized as a task for the Nation.
The Luxembourg Commission, in turn, was a compromise in the face of the
insurgents’ attempt to force the state to give up its claimed neutrality and to take
the initiative in resocializing the economy through association. Granting a Com-
mission instead of a Ministry declared a political intention to delimit workers’
claim of organizing labor. Indeed, the Luxembourg Commission’s debates did
confine themselves to a technical adaptation of association to workshops. Prag-
matism and the workshops’ narrow dimensions were both to play an important
role in diverting the Commission from its original intentions. Trapped between
economic crisis and masters’ unlimited power inside the workplace, workers’
conception of association reorganizing labor replicated the experience of corpora-
tions.
Sewell has forcefully shown the implicit paradox of a workers’ revolution
occurring mostly within the old frame of corporations. Thus the Commission was
divided between a claim for autonomous decisions on one side and a call for state
protection against masters’ power on the other. But in fact even the latter took the
form of corporations’ practices, as the tarif and placement: the corporative
tradition went along with a statist tendency, this latter more specifically of
revolutionary origins.
In the end, the Commission aided the state, allowing it to keep some distance
vis-a-vis workers’ demand for intervention. It also had another significant effect:
over the course of the few months of its discussions, the claim for association
shifted from the subversive idea of a general reorganization of liberal society to
a technical question concerning the organization of workshops. While the bases
of social order were preserved untouched, it became possible to disqualify the
claim for association because of its &dquo;old&dquo; content. Association was by now suitable
178

to be part of an industrial policy that would integrate it with the very regime of
free competition that it had originally attacked: &dquo;In industrial matters, we must
no longer separate the idea of competition from those of association and solidarity.
Hence, plenty of fruitful and conservative actions will rapidly follow.&dquo;47 From
the Luxembourg Commission’s discussions came the Chambres Syndicales rather
than a new right to labor.48
In Traugott’s analysis of the Provisional Government’s strategic response,
National Workshops and the Luxembourg Commission were to play against each
other in an attempt to neutralize popular movement. Then, somewhat perversely,
they ended up together in radicalizing the popular movement.49 Traugott stresses
the importance of organizational factors in accounting for this shift between
February and June 1848; but he treats organization as an isolated, independent
factor of collective action, assimilated to the structure of &dquo;paramilitary groups&dquo;:
the emphasis is then on authority relations.
It is true that a new political rationality regarded organization as a way for
governing populations. &dquo;Unorganized masses are nothing, organized ones are
everything,&dquo; according to the formulation of Louis Napoleon. The reason was
that organization allowed not only discipline but also &dquo;moral influence,&dquo; as Emile
Thomas clearly saw, and &dquo;moral influence remained the most efficacious lever
upon the opinion and action of people.&dquo;51 One should not take then too literally
this analogy with the military that Traugott emphasizes, since it was used apropos
of a very broad range of institutions: schools, prisons, factories, hospitals. But
more specifically, the organizations created in 1848 by the state for enrolling the

popular movement directed their moral influence less toward a militarization than
a syndication of workers, as a political response to the demand for an individual

right to labor.
For those who opposed the right to labor, the real task was to recast the whole
question in different terms. The response of the National Assembly to the popular
claim was not the right to labor for everybody, as the Provisional Government
had declared, but the moral duty for society to help its members by encouraging
work. &dquo;Such a device of a social duty replacing individual rights had also been
used for the question of labor. On this point, it was even proposed that there are
duties which do not correspond to any rights.&dquo;52
This was a significant shift in liberal political theory, that Tocqueville under-
stood when he stressed the need to avoid &dquo;at any price granting to each man in
particular a general, absolute, irresistible right to labor.&dquo;53 To this purpose he
recommended a strategical separation of legal rights (le droit) and moral duties
(la morale), in order to prevent the state from becoming either an economic agent
providing jobs or a regulator reviving old protectionism and rigidity. This same
separation was celebrated by John Stuart Mill as a courageous position in his
defense of the 1848 revolution:
 179

[With the English poor-laws] the law grants to the poor the right to claim individually work
or assistance. The French government did not grant any similar right; they wished to have
a general influence on production and labor, and not at all to guarantee individual aims.54
Such a separation made it possible for another voice to intervene in the debate
on labor. Immediately after the February insurrection, Auguste Comte founded
his Société Positiviste, with explicit political intentions. The positivist view of the
political challenge emphasized a moral rather than a juridical engagement for
society, as the proper response to &dquo;the serious disturbances recently provoked in
France by a metaphysical tendency to order by law what should be above all
morally established.&dquo;55 Insufficient labor was only a consequence of an irrational
organization that would be overcome by the scientific development of society.
But the crucial problem was a moral one, to assure that intervention &dquo;put social
sentiment in the forefront, and to let a spontaneous, free, permanent, disinterested
surveillance arise, which would not be indifferent.&dquo;56 In the eyes of the positivist,
&dquo;moral&dquo; stood for &dquo;social.&dquo; The lack of social sentiment demanded to promote a
sociability that it would be vain to expect simply from laws and rights. From the
&dquo;moral duty&dquo; of society the way was then opened toward the &dquo;social duties&dquo; of its
members, providing a nonjuridical content to their citizenship.
A &dquo;DEFAULT’ OF SOCIABILITY

The right to labor had another crucial effect vis-a-vis economics because it
inserted into the economic sphere claims expressed in juridical terms. The
insurgency of the poor in the streets of Paris explicitly connected economic and
social reform. In fact, economic reform was conceived as the way toward social
reform. The attempt to reduce the political implications of the question of poverty
through philanthropy had ultimately led to the politicising of economics.
The task of elaborating a reaction was assumed by the Académie des Sciences
morales et politiques, charged by the Provisional Government right after the
February insurrection with producing an Enquiry on the conditions of working
classes in France during the year 1848.S7 Adolphe Blanqui, the brother of the
more famous Auguste, protagonist of the revolution, was placed in charge.

Blanqui was himself a social economist, with links to the analysis of the 1840s.
However, that analysis was seen now as responsible for a fallacious interpretation
of the social question, that had ultimately added to the risk of revolution.
To reconsider the social question according to the new situation created by
the revolution demanded, as Blanqui put it, that economic and moral aspects of
the problem of poverty be carefully separated. They could no longer be treated
together as social economy had advocated. Social economy had obscured the truth
that economic production was regulated by stable laws which nothing could
modify, not even the state. The reality was that no society could fully succeed in
avoiding poverty; poverty was irremediably inscribed in the eternal laws of
180

production. In contrast with previous optimism, the sheer extension of labor was
no longer credited with working miracles: the industrial order, just like any other

order, was unable to guarantee people against poverty. To have let people believe
that it was possible to eliminate poverty had been a first aspect of an exagération
philanthropique that Blanqui intended to denounce through his Enquiry. To
exaggerate the indigence of the poor also led people to forget all the benefits of
the new economic order, especially how much the new productive system had
already improved the conditions of the lower classes. The results were a strong
resentment against the economic organization and the illusion that the political
constitution of a state could change anything.
The poverty that pushed people into the streets of Paris to claim their rights
was then far beyond the reach of any reform. Poverty was an effect of unchange-

able laws of economic development. It was then utterly economic, yet not
industrial: on the contrary, the industrial system was slowly but surely reducing
poverty. There was also another sort of poverty: a moral one, which it was possible
to treat socially. Such a poverty had no natural justification: it originated in the
gap between the &dquo;economic improvement of the lower classes, and their moral
progress.&dquo; In this defective sociability lay the cause of the moral poverty:
idleness, improvidence, irresponsibility affecting the popular classes. Against this
poverty, no remedies would be effective other than improved means of socializa-
tion. Social economy’s flaw had been to confuse these two kinds of poverty. By
doing this, it had contributed to politicizing the question of poverty by letting
people think that its elimination would be a sheer matter of political will. In this
way, the claim for a reform of the economic order had assumed the significance
of a social revolt.
Blanqui’s strategy was intended to avoid the figure of the state as protector,
as well as that of the individual standing before the state as a sovereign subject
with positive rights. Poverty was either out of the reach of human intervention or
it was the fault of the poor, since it resulted from the individual’s own default of
sociability. A lack of social responsibility could hardly become a source of new
rights; however, it could support a network of duties, which would correspond to
the moral duty of the society vis-a-vis its members. The need of an education for
sociability was thus confirmed from the analysis of its lack and consequences. A
new perspective was thus opened, a field of nonjuridical, noneconomic social

relations, the proper field of social discourse.

From that point on, social discourse, finally freed from reference to economic
discourse, was no longer forced to move between the liberal dogma of noninter-
vention and the social need for state intervention. By referring exclusively to the
so-called moral element that social economy had promoted as a crucial part of
the analysis of poverty, social discourse could then take a point of view closer to
the state’s. It would be able to defend the autonomy of the latter not only in a
 181

negative sense, as the liberal model had suggested, but also in a positive way, by
elaborating techniques of socialization aimed to produce social solidarity. Thus
the state would find other means of government than just the legislative and the
juridical ones. The total relation between state and society would then no longer
take place only within a juridical frame. The foundations for an administrative
relation between state and society were eventually provided.

THE DUTIES OF SOCIABILITY

Alongside the juridical conception of the limits of the state, the analysis of
the social question had constantly provided materials for a &dquo;social&dquo; conception of
the state, emphasizing the need for social cohesion. The dominant role played by
the economic analysis of social facts, however, had confined this search for social
ties within the narrow range of possibilities offered by the individualistic bases
of the economic model. The idea of reform had consisted mainly in attacking
social behaviors that were incompatible with that model and were therefore
considered antisocial.
With the new revolutionary crisis, the absence of social cohesion was once
more dramatically apparent. Facing it, Comte stressed the dominance of social

sympathy over any other sentiment: &dquo;To the Positivist, the object of Morals is to
make our sympathetic instincts preponderant as far as possible over the selfish
instincts; social feelings over personal feelings.&dquo;59
Since social sympathy is less
spontaneous in the individual than is self-interest, the real problem is &dquo;to raise
social feeling by artificial effort to the position which, in the natural condition, is
held by selfish feeling.&dquo;60
This is the social morality Comte’s sociology wanted
to promote, as a socially organized network of &dquo;mutual duties&dquo;: &dquo;Its appeal is to
social feeling, and not to personal, since the actions in question are of a kind in
which the individual is far from being the only person interested.&dquo;61
For Comte as for his friend Saint-Simon, the political problem had long been
how to end the revolution, since social order was incompatible with a continuous
turning upside down of the bases of society. A new order must be established, in
order to overcome the old. Karl Löwith viewed in Comte’s effort to reintroduce
an element of stability into the dynamics of progress an analogy with Hegel’s

attempt. From this point of view, order was to the former what spirit was to the
latter.62 The Revolution of 1848 was then nothing but a moment in a long process
of transformation, which Comte viewed through his crucial discovery-the
sociological laws of development of society. And as Etienne Gilson has stressed,
the very force of such laws in the Comtian system consisted in their ability to
actively combine the scientific and the political points of view. Even more,
through the sociological laws &dquo;politics became a science, but science in turn
became a politics.&dquo;63
No wonder, then, that in Comte’s intentions the Soci6t6
Positiviste was to be &dquo;a political society.&dquo;
182

[Against] a general and today extremely disastrous tendency to always seek in political
institutions the exclusive solution to whatever difficulty in our situation [the question was
rather] to direct, often more morally than politically, just popular claims in a way fit for
their realposition. 64
It had become then necessary to direct social attention toward areas other than
the political one, while promoting a large enterprise of popular education. Only
a moral transformation could make it possible to organize that social solidarity
which one would vainly expect from political institutions. The principles inspiring
such theoretical work were all combined in the notion of duty.
In general this new philosophy will tend more and more to spontaneously replace in the
current debate the vague and tempestuous discussion about rights with the calm and
rigorous determination of social duties. The first point of view, critical or metaphysical,
had to prevail in so far as negative reaction against the former economy had not been fully
achieved; the second, by contrast essentially organic and positive, must preside over the
final regeneration: since one is in the end purely individual, and the other directly social.

The analysis of the new status of poverty in a liberal society and the political
problems it raised helped to point out the failures of such notions as individuals’
rights and interests in explaining social facts. The making of a social discourse
was tied to the theoretical challenge of providing its own foundational concept.
The notion of right had proved to be insufficient and dangerous because of
its inherent reference to equality and liberty. It was insufficient because its
individualist assumptions meant that it could not provide the criteria for organiz-
ing social solidarity-a task that the revolutionary crisis had made all the more
urgent. It was dangerous because conceptualizing the solution to the social
question in terms of rights (to assistance or to labor) reintroduced inequality into
the sphere of the juridical argument. This led, as with the right to labor, to the
notion that the right included the power of enforcement. This shift from right to
power would enhance a face- to-face confrontation between state and individuals,
more dangerous than ever given the unavoidable rise of universal manhood

suffrage and the reemergence of the right to insurrection. It became all the more
urgent to provide a broader framework than the juridical one to describe political
relations within society, to offer another kind of foundation than individuals’ right
to membership in society.
The notion of interest also proved unable to provide a rationale for the
question of poverty. As a general key to interpreting human actions, the notion of
interest had arisen from an attempt to improve the art of governing, as Albert
Hirschman has shown. 66 Yet poverty had soon proved ungovernable from the
narrow point of view of individual self-interests, and their hannonic composition
into a general interest was conceived in a way far too automatic to supply any
actual means for integrating the poor. Social economy had regarded poverty as a
question for the whole of society. In so doing, it appealed to some kind of
unselfish, &dquo;disinterested interests&dquo; oriented toward collective, solidary values
 183

(disinterested with respect to the individual). Once the religious frame of charit-
able discourse had been condemned as socially ineffective, what could be the
nature of disinterest? And who could be the subject of such disinterested interest?
The notion of noninterested interest was by itself unable to provide its own
internal regulation. It referred rather to an external principle of an institutional
nature for defining the collective point of view responsible for this sort of interest.
The Comtian notion of duty then came into play as an idea that was able to
replace the notion of right as the foundation of social reciprocity and to regulate
the degree of interest from a collective point of view. The notion of duty became
the key concept regulating the production of the social link (lien social) that
French sociology put at the core of social solidarity from Comte to Durkheim.
Duty did not simply play the role of diverting any popular claim for social rights
by responding with a general duty of society. It entailed a far more important
transformation. &dquo;Instead of politically establishing the individuals’ duty to respect
universal rights, on the contrary one should conceive of each one’s rights as
resulting from others’ duty toward him.&dquo;6~ Duty was then placed at the origins of
an active morality, which had to break the opposition between individual and
collective, or private and public, that had been confirmed by the juridical
framework.
The notion of duty is directly social. Inscribed in collective aggregations, it
organizes interdependencies, instead of extending the range of individuals’ liber-
ties and sovereignty. Duty does not promote individuals’ attributes, nor grant
qualities. On the contrary, observed through a network of duties the individual
appears to be fragmented in a series of experiences, instead of in the unified
juridical subject of rights. In each duty, one is nothing but the individual counter-
part of a collective experience, whose meaning is constantly going beyond one.
Even the space of an individual’s experience is reduced to fragments, at least as
many as the duties ascribed to one. Duty, in effect, does not have limits, since one
does not possess it, like a right, but can only learn it. Duty thus became the matrix
of a vast pedagogic project aimed at producing the subject of reference for civil
society. As for this subject, duty expresses something as a social instinct, regulat-
ing the integration of individuals into society, binding them as the individual
counterpart of the laws governing society. This is why the natural basis of
individuals’ sociability becomes the open field of an unlimited pedagogy of the
citizen.
From early childhood one should carefully maintain healthy habits under the influence of
suitable presumptions, aimed at actively developmg a social instinct and a sense of duty,
which ultimately would be rationalized according to the actual knowledge of our nature
and the fundamental, static or dynamic, laws of our sociability; in this way one firmly
establishes first the universal obligations of a civilized individual, successively considered
in his personal, domestic or social life, and then their transformations according to different
essential situations characteristic of modem civilization. 68
184

Hence duty gives to our sociability the universal character of religious

obligation, considered to have a force of social cohesion difficult to reach in a
secularized society. Duty is finally an operative notion which allows the combina-
tion of &dquo;omnes et singulatim&dquo;, as Foucault put it in his Tanner Lecture of 1979.69
If it is true that modem political rationality is characterized as both &dquo;in-
dividualizing and totalizing,&dquo; the notion of duty is situated at the core of a
pedagogy aimed at individuals, as well as of the production of the social link. As
such, it becomes a crucial element in a democratic strategy, bringing to an end
the opposition between state and individual which had rendered liberal society
far too unstable. Duty makes possible the organization of the social space between
the two, where a state prepared for an administrative rather than only a political
intervention faces an individual defined by his &dquo;duty of being a citizen.&dquo; From
this point of view, the suffrage itself, which is to be recognized as a universal
manhood right, becomes less the exercise of a sovereign right, than the in-
dividual’s insertion into a collective, where everyone is bound by a network of
duties.
The analysis of poverty led eventually to strengthen a critique of economic
and juridical individualism and to a new science-the science of social solidarity.
That this became the mainstream trend in French sociology by the end of the
nineteenth century is far from being its unique effect. For having started by
analyzing the poor, social science had tied its fortune to an administrative state.
It engaged in the political arena, playing an active role in promoting a new strategy
of &dquo;government of the social,&dquo; which was at the core of the transformation from
a democracy based on the rights of each into a democracy based on the duties of
all toward everyone.

NOTES

1. "Under the motto Order and Progress I have now created a political society, aimed
to play, with respect to the essentially organic second part of the great revolution, a role
corresponding to the necessarily critical role the Jacobins’ society played in its first part."
2. Giovanna Procacci, "Notes on the Government of the Social," History of the Present
3 (1987); and "Il governo del sociale," in Effetto Foucault, ed. Pier Aldo Rovatti (Milan:
Feltrinelli, 1986), pp. 184-192.
3. Keith M. Baker "On the Problem of the Ideological Origins of the French Revolu-
tion," in Modern European Intellectual History, eds. Dominick LaCapra and Steven L.
Kaplan (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 197-219.
4. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). On Michel
Foucault, see in particular Paul Veyne, "Foucault révolutionne l’histoire,"in Comment on
, 2d ed. (Paris: Le Seuil, 1978).
écrit l’histoire
5. Auguste Comte, "The Social Aspect of Positivism," ch. 2 in A General View of
Positivism (New York: R. Speller, 1957).
6. Donald R. Kelley, ’The Prehistory of Sociology," ch. 13 in History, Law and the
Human Sciences (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984), pp. 133-142.
 185

7. On this point, see especially Keith M. Baker, ’The Early History of the Term Social
Science," Annals of Science 20 (1964): 211-226; and Keith M. Baker, "The Politics of
Social Science," ch. 5 in Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
8. For an analysis of the conception of mendicity during the Ancien Régime, and its
erosion as a consequence of an economic perspective, see Jean-Pierre Gutton, La société
et les pauvres en Europe, XVI-XVIII siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises,
1974).
9. Maurice Agulhon, 1848 ou l’apprentissage de la République (Paris: Le Seuil, 1973),
pp. 225-230.
10. Henry Gouhier, La jeunesse d’Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme ,3
vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1933-1941); see vol. 2, pp. 16-29.
11. Camille Bloch and Alexandre Tutey, Procès-verbaux et rapports du Comité de
Mendicité de la Constituante (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1911); and the official collec-
tion of Archives Parlementaires. As for the period before the Revolution, see Bloch,
L’assistance et l’Etat en France à la veille de la Révolution (Paris: Picard, 1908).
12. Barère, Rapport sur les moyens d’estimer la mendicité, Le Moniteur 24 floréal an
2, t. xx. For further reading on assistance during the Great Revolution, see Louis Paturier,
L’assistance à Paris sous l’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (Paris, 1897); Léon Lallemand,
Histoire de la charité
, t. iv (Paris, 1910-1912); Michel Bouchet, L’assistance publique en
France pendant la Révolution (Paris, 1908).
13. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for
Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 97.
14. Quoted in Gouhier, La jeunesse d’Auguste Comte, vol. 2, p. 24.
15. On problems raised by the notion of a right to labor and to assistance, see Robert
Castel, L’ordre psychiatrique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), particularly ch. 3.
16. Procacci, "Social Economy and the Government of Poverty," Ideology and
Consciousness 4 (1979): 55-72.
17. It might be useful to call the reader’s attention to the very different role French
philanthropy played with respect to the American one: the latter was mostly privately
undertaken, therefore contrasted to public intervention, though sometimes publicly or-
ganized, while the former, whether private or not, was generally aimed to provide public
institutional means for some collective moralization. See Procacci, "Le gouvernement de
la misère. La question sociale entre les deux révolutions, 1789-1848," Ph.D. diss.
(Université Paris-8, 1983); and the analysis of the "parti d’hygiène" by William H.
Coleman, Death Is a Social Disease. Public Health and Political Economy in Early
Industrial France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
18. According to the formulation suggested by Foucault in his Lectures au Collège de
France about liberalism, and recalled in Colin Gordon, "Foucault en Angleterre," Critique
471-472 (1986), pp. 826-840.
19. For historical analysis of 1848, see in particular among recent works in English:
Rober Price ed., Revolution and Reaction. 1848 and the Second French Republic (New
York: Barnes & Noble, 1975); Peter Amann, Revolution and Mass Democracy (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975); Bernard H. Moss, The Origins of French Labor
Movement (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1976); William H. Sewell,
Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Régime to 1848
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Armies
Mark Traugott,
of the Poor:
186

Determinants of Working-Class Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of June 1848

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).
20. Louis Blanc, Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 (Paris, 1849), vol. 1, p. 129.
21. Ibid., p. 148.
22. Blanc, "Discours sur le droit au travail," in Le droit au travail à l’Assemblée
nationale, ed. Joseph Garnier (Paris, 1848), p. 385. See also John Stuart Mill, Défense de
la Révolution de 1848 vis-à-vis de ses détracteurs (Paris, 1849), pp. 84-85.
23. This perspective accounts for the privileged place June 1848 has assumed in
historians’ attention, as though it was the only significant moment of the whole Revolution;
by contrast, the role played by the February insurrection throughout the few months of
feverish political attempt to avoid a new insurrection is most often underestimated, because
of its juridical and less "street-fighting" character.
24. Sewell, Work and Revolution.
25. Garnier, "Introduction," in Le droit au travail, p. xvii.
26. Lamartine, in Le droit au travail, p. 48.
27. Blanc, "Discours sur le droit au travail," in Discours à la Commission du
Luxembourg, ed. Émile de Girardin (Paris, 1849), vol. 1, p. 193.
28. Mathieu, Le droit au travail, p. 65.
29. Ibid., p. 68.
30. Blanc, Discours à la Commission, vol. 1, p. 206.
31. Carl Schmitt, "Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen,"
Europaische Revue (1929).
32. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart, 1944).
33. Blanc, L’organisation du travail, p. 20.
, vol. 2, p. 237.
34. Blanc, Histoire de la Révolution
35. Blanc, Discours à la Commission, vol. 1, p. 204.
, vol. 2, p. 345.
36. Blanc, Histoire de la Révolution
37. Blanc, L’ organisation du travail, p. 13.
38. Blanc, Le droit au travail, p. 105.
39. Sewell, Work and Revolution, p. 243.
40. Laws d’Allard and Le Chapelier, 1791.
41. Abbé Sieyès,
Préliminaire de la constitution française. Reconnaissance et exposi-
tion raisonnée des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, (Paris, 1789), pp. 35-36. Sieyès’
distinction between active and passive citizens was to be adopted by the 1791 French
Constitution; see Les constitutions de la France depuis 1789, ed. Jacques Godeclist (Paris:
Flammarion, 1979), p. 40. For Guirot’s notion of "citoyen capacitaire," see Guirot,
"Elections" 1826 reprinted in Discours à la démiques (Paris, 1861). See also Pierre
Rosanvallon, Le movement Guirot (Paris, Gallimard, 1985), pp. 95-104.
42. Blanc, L’organisation du travail, p. 17.
43. Blanc, Le droit au travail, p. 103.
44. Jacques Donzelot, L’invention du social (Paris: Fayard, 1984), pp. 33-49. This is
inevitable, however, if one assimilates liberalism and democracy, instead of taking into
account their tensions, as Donzelot does throughout his book.
45. Robert J. Bezucha, ’The French Revolution of 1848 and the Social History of
Work," Theory & Society 12, no. 4 (1983), pp. 469-484.
46. Sewell, Work and Revolution, p. 246; Traugott, Armies of the Poor, p. 117.
 187

47. Michel Chevalier, "Objections à l’organisation du travail," in Blanc, Organisation

du travail, p. 134.
48. Remi Gossez, Les ouvriers de Paris, vol. 1: L’organisation, 1848-1851 (Paris:
Société d’histoire de la Révolution de 1848, 1967).
49. Traugott, Armies of the Poor, see especially pp. 182-185.
50. Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, Extinction du paupérisme (Paris, 1844).
51. Quoted in Traugott, Armies of the Poor, p. 138.
52. Garnier, "Introduction," in Le droit au travail, p. xviii.
53. Alexis de Tocqueville in Le droit au travail, pp. 100-101.
54. Mill, Défense de la révolution de 1848, pp. 84-85.
55. Comte, "Rapport à la Société positiviste par la Commission chargée d’examiner
la question du travail," in Angéle Kremer-Marietti, A. Comte et la théorie sociale du
Positivisme (Paris: Seghers, 1970), p. 170.
56. Ibid., p. 176.
57. Adolphe Blanqui, Des classes ouvriéres en France pendant l’année 1848 (Paris:
Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, 1849).
58. Ibid., p. 818.
A General View of Positivism, p. 101. Although convinced of the impor-
59. Comte,
tance of economic analysis, Comte regarded a separate theory of wealth as responsible for
antithetic errors such as laissez-faire and socialism. In his view, the development of social
sympathy was to avoid both. See T. Wittaker, "Comte and Mill," in Reason and Other
Essays (Cambridge, 1934), pp. 31-80.
60. Comte, A General View of Positivism, p. 102.
61. Ibid., p. 108.
62. Karl Löwith, Weltgeschichte und Heilgeschehen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1953).
63. Etienne Gilson, "La spécificité de la philosophie d’après Auguste Comte," in
Congrès des Sociétés Philosophiques (Paris, 1921), p. 367.
64. Auguste Comte, Physique sociale. Cours de Philosophie Positive (Paris: Hermann,
1975), p. 658.
65. Ibid., p. 659.
66. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, p. 69.
67. Comte, Physique sociale, p. 659.
68. Ibid., p. 663.
69. Foucault, "Omnes et singulatim: vers une critique de la raison politique," Eng.
trans. Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1980),

pp. 224-254.

Politics & Society 17, no. 2 (1989): 163-187.