The Rise of Uncertainties

Abstract

This paper provides an overview, prepared by Robert Castel himself, of his last book, La montée des incertitudes (The Rise of Uncertainties). It describes how a new regime of capitalism has weakened and sometimes destroyed forms of social organization that had been established at the end of industrial capitalism. It discloses three main ongoing transformations: (1) Labour market deregulations – in the sense of questioning both the right to work and the employment statute, and advances in insecurity; (2) The reconfiguration of protective measures – in the sense of the restriction of rights and a rapid rise in social insecurity; (3) The paths of disaffiliation – or how it is that some categories of individuals find themselves destabilized and threatened with social invalidation in this new conjuncture.

Keywords:

• precarity
• labour
• rights
• social protection
• disaffiliation

Acknowledgements

Thank you to SociologieS for kind permission to republish Robert Castel's paper in English. Acknowledgement details from the original French publication are as follows: Robert Castel, “Grand résumé de La Montée des incertitudes. Travail, protections, statut de l'individu, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, La couleur des idées, 2009,” SociologieS [En ligne], Grands résumés, “La Montée des incertitudes. Travail, protections, statut de l'individu,” mis en ligne le 20 décembre 2010, consulté le 11 mai 2015. URL: http://sociologies.revues.org/3276

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Castel

Robert Castel was a French sociologist and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), who died in 2013. He was an acute observer of the transformations of the relationship between contemporary societies and their vulnerable populations. Originally trained as a philosopher, Castel turned to sociology thanks to the influence of Pierre Bourdieu, but soon forged an independent path. From the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, a period when he was close to Michel Foucault, Castel went on to develop an original research trajectory around a sociological understanding of psychiatry. His books on this topic include Le Psychanalysme, l'Ordre Psychiatrique (The Regulation of Madness, 1988) and La Gestion des Risques. He later dealt with the wage system and exclusion, or rather what he called “disaffiliation.” In Les métamorphoses de la question sociale, first published in 1999 (From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question, 2011), he reconstructed the history of what he called “the social question,” or the ways in which both labour and social welfare have been organized from the Middle Ages onwards to contemporary industrial society. This historical sociology analyses the constitution and precarization of the wage-worker (salariat) as a social and political condition.