1236840

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ISS0010.1177/02685809241236840International Sociology Reviews: Social Stratification

Reviews: Social Stratification

International Sociology Reviews
2024, Vol. 39(2) 162­–169
Reviews: Social Stratification © The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/02685809241236840
https://doi.org/10.1177/02685809241236840
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Loïc Wacquant,
The Invention of the ‘Underclass’: A Study in the Politics of Knowledge, Polity: Cambridge, 2022; 246
pp. with index, ISBN 9781509552177 (hardcover), 9781509552184 (paperback)

Reviewed by: Matthias Fringant, Centre de sociologie européenne, École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales, France

Keywords
Historical sociology, reflexive sociology, sociology of knowledge, urban poverty, underclass

During the summer of 1985, Loïc Wacquant flew from France to the prestigious
University of Chicago to start a PhD in sociology under the direction of William Julius
Wilson, to whom the book is dedicated. Being a newcomer to the North American socio-
logical field, the young sociologist was struck by how quickly the ‘underclass’ was
adopted, not only by social scientists but also by journalists and policymakers as an
analytical category. Wacquant sketched an outline of a study of this notion but quickly
gave up as he was also busy translating Pierre Bourdieu’s pieces and immersing himself
in a Chicago gym for his PhD. A few decades later, Wacquant found the draft of the
abandoned study and decided to start back where he left off. The Invention of the
‘Underclass’ thus aims at documenting and explaining the career of a notion that once
thrived in North American learned discourses. Theoretically speaking, Wacquant draws
on two main sources, Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history) and
Pierre Bourdieu’s théorie des champs (field theory). According to this conceptual frame,
Wacquant’s structural hermeneutics’ goal is first to empirically map the uses of the word
in specific parts of the social space but also to understand its different conceptual mean-
ings. The first part of the book tells the tale of the ‘underclass’, while the second devel-
ops a larger set of epistemological reflections on the basis of the previous findings.
The first four chapters help to examine the main uses and meanings of the word. After
a few isolated uses of ‘under-class’ – for instance under the pen of the Scottish socialist
John Maclean in 1918 – it was not until the 1960s we witnessed its larger circulation. In
his 1963 book Challenge to Affluence, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal challenges
Daniel Bell’s and John Galbraith’s idea of a class-neutral process of modernization.
Myrdal thus analyzes the emergence of a new social group of marginalized people that he
calls the ‘under-class’ (drawing on the Swedish word ‘under-klass’). Myrdal is careful
Reviews: Social Stratification 163

with this lexical invention and brackets the word. This structural line of analysis is then
appropriated by some English-speaking sociologists, such as Anthony Giddens and John
Rex. They thus start a small circulation of the word in the anglophone social sciences dur-
ing the 1970s. In the meantime, the category is also appropriated in different ways by
American philanthropical groups such as the Ford Foundation, who seeks to legitimize its
political action vis-à-vis American ghettos. But this first structural understanding of the
‘under-class’ is soon challenged by what Wacquant calls the ‘behavioral’ and ‘neo-ecolog-
ical’ versions of the word and its concept. The behavioral variant first appears on both the
covers of the Time Magazine in 1977 and of Ken Auletta’s book The Underclass in 1982.
During a political sequence of direct attacks on the welfare state by the Ronald Reagan
administration, both texts popularize a vision of a social group that is not characterized by
its position in a social structure but rather by its inherent properties. This journalistic idea
of a group solely responsible for its own fate has a huge impact on other parts of social
space as it starts to shape the ‘poverty knowledge’ programs in the 1980s. After this jour-
ney in different parts of the field of power (the philanthropical, journalistic, and political
ones), the term starts to be widely used by North American social scientists in a neo-eco-
logical variant (basically a compromise between the first two versions). The publication
of The Truly Disadvantaged by William Julius Wilson in 1987 can be considered as a
strong indicator of this trend, even if Wilson quickly distanced himself from the category.
If the word steadily started to be questioned by European scholars during the 1990s, its
widespread use in North America is abandoned after the adoption of the ‘welfare reform’
by the Clinton administration in 1996, which ends the poor’s right to assistance. In
essence, the main story of the ‘underclass’ is one of a racist behavioral a priori that pros-
pered in various parts of the North American field of power between 1977 and 1997.
The rest of the book reflects on this story. Chapter five centers on its implications
regarding the subfield of urban sociology. Wacquant underlines the weak empirical rooting
of what he names a ‘speculative conceptual bubble’ that has mainly been elaborated in
ignorance of social scientists’ problems and findings. Part two of the book, which could be
considered as an essay in sociological epistemology, simultaneously details and expands
this line of reasoning. Wacquant first reflects on the ambiguous implications of naming
social groups and processes, and then establishes a set of criteria to hierarchize ideas
employed by social scientists. Considering that the ‘underclass’ does not satisfy them, he
suggests replacing it with ‘precariat’. Because of its previous usage in different groups of
Italian, French, and English activists and social scientists, the word may be more suited to
describe and explain the existence of dispossessed groups living in the relegated urban
neighborhoods of advanced societies. Coming back to the subfield of urban sociology,
Wacquant then lists a set of questions left unanswered by the behavioral version of the
‘underclass’. He explains the social successes of this concept by linking them to three
social processes: the bandwagon or lemming effect, the conceptual speculative bubble, and
the turnkey problematics. This examination leads him to give a set of useful recommenda-
tions to evaluate other ideas employed in the social sciences, and to suggest that ‘we should
give up the search for the ‘one perfect concept’ and seek instead to craft good-enough
concepts, or better concepts than the ones we inherit and find at hand’. In coda, he self-
applies this piece of advice by conceptualizing – in a Bourdieuian-inspired sense – the
concept of ‘race’ as a classification struggle associated with ethnicity.
164 International Sociology Reviews 39(2)

Reviving a tradition of a theoretically oriented and empirically grounded line of anal-

ysis of words and ideas initiated by Henri Berr and continued by scholars like Émile
Benveniste, Robert K. Merton, Elinor Barber, Quentin Skinner, Reinhart Koselleck, or
Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant’s work is without doubt the more in-depth examination of the
‘underclass’ available to this day. As valuable as this inquiry may be, one might argue
that Wacquant universalizes a particular part of the history of the word and idea (its
North American uses from 1977 to 1997) as the ‘underclass’. Indeed, it is in a short
appendix separated from the first part of the book that Wacquant only briefly studies the
transatlantic travels of the world after 1997, quickly concluding that the concept has died
after this year. Still, graphics show that the uses of the word are increasing from 1990s
onward in various regions such as Europe, Australia, and Asia, and in fields such as the
journalistic and the social sciences ones. More empirical work about this part of the story
and its relation to the American one may therefore have increased our knowledge of this
object. As previous studies on different notions have shown (for instance ‘French the-
ory’), it is indeed the circulation between different nations that seem to fully explain the
national social success of symbolic goods. However, one can but recommend the reading
of this very well-conducted piece of reflexive work.

Author biography
Matthias Fringant is a PhD candidate at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
His Ph.D. thesis analyzes the idea of reflexivity through the ways in which the uses of the word
have evolved in the English and French contexts. He is interested in understanding the develop-
ment of social sciences and humanities in different contexts.

Heba Gowayed,
Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, ON,
Canada, 2020; ISBN 9780691203843 (US/UK), $27.95/£22.00

Reviewed by: Shahd Alasaly, University of South Florida, USA

Keywords
Ethnography, refugee, human capital

Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential, written by Heba Gowayed, is an out-
standing ethnography that explores the lives of Syrian families who have fled their
homeland to seek refuge in Canada, the United States, and Germany. The book provides
an educational deep dive into what it means to be a refugee, and it is a concise, factual,
and informative read that fills in many background gaps about the refugee experience.
The book adds to academic knowledge about refugees by providing a nuanced and
detailed account of the challenges and opportunities faced by refugees in the process of
resettlement.
The book is particularly valuable for academics interested in the social, economic,
and political aspects of refugee resettlement. Gowayed’s research is based on extensive