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.”