The Review

Over several months this year, the prominent sociologist Loïc Wacquant’s 2022 monograph The Invention of the “Underclass": A Study in the Politics of Knowledge has been the subject of a series of reviews — by Claire Dunning, Hilary Silver, Zachary Levenson, and Marcus Anthony Hunter — in the pages of the journal Dialogues in Human Geography. Some of the reviews are quite critical. Last month, Wacquant responded; I learned about the dispute as passages from his rather acerbic response (“The reader of this symposium may be excused if he feels somewhat disoriented”) did the rounds on Twitter.

What was the debate about? The Invention of the “Underclass” is not a sociological study of the people grouped under its key term but an intellectual history of the idea of the “underclass” itself. As Wacquant writes in a 2023 follow-up paper, his book is what the historian Reinhart Koselleck called a Begriffsgeschichte — a concept-history — of “the stunning rise, multi-sited flourishing, and sudden demise of the urban ‘folk devil’ of the closing decades in the 20th century known as the underclass.”

As Wacquant tells it, the “wooly and inchoate notion” of the underclass “dominated the academic and public debate on race and poverty in the American metropolis roughly from 1977 to 1997.” Originating in analyses of Black urban poverty in the United States, it spread to academic, philanthropic, and policy institutions across the world. Obscuring more than it reveals, its real work is not explanatory but ideological: “The rhetorical desecration of the undeserving (black) ‘underclass’ effects the sacralization of the deserving (white) ‘middle class’ of national mythology.” When concepts in sociology are both morally loaded and uninformative, they should “be retired and buried. Such is the case of the ‘underclass’: requiescat in pace.”

In his review in Dialogues in Human Geography, the Florida International University ethnographer Zachary Levenson expressed some skepticism about the timeline of the “underclass” concept, which Wacquant locates so precisely in the late 20th century. After all, Levenson points out, a moralized conception of surplus populations can be found in Marx’s “lumpenproletariat,” comprised of “vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes.” And Levenson doubts the novelty of the racialization of the very poor that Wacquant identifies with the American underclass concept: “Earlier terms, including both rabble and tramps, were absolutely racialized, or at the very least ethnicized.”

Conversely, the UCLA sociologist Marcus Anthony Hunter seems largely to agree with Wacquant’s historical thesis, but finds Wacquant himself guilty of the very sins he critiques. Observing, for instance, that Wacquant mistakenly believes the rap group Public Enemy to be from Compton, Hunter insists that “this casual error reflects a pattern in the book where the humanity and lives of urban Black America are irrelevant in Wacquant’s study, just as they were amongst ‘underclass’ proponents during its heyday.”

In a somewhat similar vein, the George Washington University sociologist Hilary Silver accuses Wacquant of being so focused on the concept of the “underclass” that he “has virtually nothing to say about the unfortunate people lumped into that category.” Silver construes this fact almost as a form of disrespect: “Alternative terms that the subjects themselves might use to describe their condition are also absent. There is no grounded theory here.”

Most trenchantly, Silver suggests that Wacquant is making too much out of what, after all, is just a word. And she points out that “advanced marginality,” the term Wacquant prefers to “the underclass,” is hardly “any less stigmatizing.” Why all the fuss over labels? Silver ultimately accuses Wacquant of a kind of naïve nominalism: “To complain that academics’ uncritical use of words may reproduce the problems they allegedly seek to remedy is over the top.” Whether the term du jour is “underclass,” “the ghetto poor,” or “advanced marginality,” “urban poverty did not disappear, and neither did scholarship studying it, whatever ‘keyword’ might be in use.”

You can find all of the reviews, as well as Wacquant’s response to his critics, here.

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Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin