Vital Minimum
Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France
What constitutes a need? Who gets to decide what people do or do not need? In modern France, scientists, both amateur and professional, were engaged in defining and measuring human needs. These scientists did not trust in a providential economy to distribute the fruits of labor and uphold the social order. Rather, they believed that social organization should be actively directed according to scientific principles. They grounded their study of human needs on quantifiable foundations: agricultural and physiological experiments, demographic studies, and statistics.
The result was the concept of the "vital minimum" – the living wage, a measure of physical and social needs. In this book, Dana Simmons traces the history of this concept, revealing the intersections between technologies of measurement, such as calorimeters and social surveys, and technologies of wages and welfare, such as minimum wages, poor aid, and welfare programs. In looking at how we define and measure need, "Vital Minimum" raises profound questions about the authority of nature and the nature of inequality.
Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Subsistence
Pigs on a balance
Scarcity
Bread and meat
Recycling and reproduction
3. Social Reform
Scale balances
Air rations
Maintenance rations
4. Family, Race, Type
Welfare and comparative zoology
Family and race
Socialism and statistics
5. Citizens
Useless mouths, get out!
Meat or bread
6. Vital Wages
Socialism, statistics, and the iron law
The fever of needs
Vital wages
7. Science of Man
Biosocial economics
Rationing
The vital minimum wage
The science of man after 1945
8. Human Persons
Incompressible needs and the SMIG
Human persons
An impossible standard
9. Need, Nature, and Society
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Dana Simmons is associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside.
Reviews
"'Reason not the need', admonishes King Lear. Yet for the past two hundred years scientists have done just that: they have deployed the tools of scientific inquiry to calculate the minimum needed to sustain life. What sort of life? As Dana Simmons shows in this remarkable book, a productive one – specifically, that of the male wage earner and his reproductive family unit. Chemists and agronomists have analyzed the feces and exhalations of laboring men and animals. Social scientists have assembled comparative scales of misery and family budgets. From Lavoisier's human machines and the Commune's ration cards to Vichy's eugenicist vital minimum and the postwar minimum wage, Simmons' lively and incisive history of 'need' transforms our understanding of the underpinnings of modern political economy, the welfare state, and modern science alike. Like Lear, Simmons warns us that to 'reason the need' is to value human life 'cheap as beasts'" – Ken Alder, Northwestern University
"How did 'our daily bread' become the object of scientific experiment, philosophical debate, and mass politics? By untangling the threads of the 'vital minimum', this elegant and eye-opening book provides nothing less than a hidden genealogy of the modern state and biopolitical citizenship. With a fascinating, discipline-scrambling cast of characters – including boxed-in-prisoners, early recyclers, starving families, panting chemists, and earnest economists – Simmons deftly analyzes the material technologies and the natural, moral, and political economies which merged and clashed in the race to set the lower limit on life. A must-read for historians of nineteenth and twentieth-century science, economics, and politics" – John Tresch, University of Pennsylvania
"An impressive study, drawing upon a range of neglected or unknown evidence, 'Vital Minimum' is the first book to bring the important historical themes of consumption, nutrition science, and statistics together in a single volume – themes which are particularly timely given the economic troubles of recent years. Focusing on France from 1790 to the 1970s, Simmons offers a detailed and rigorous examination of the circumstances under which debates about need arose and were addressed. This is an extremely readable and thought-provoking book" – E. C. Spary, University of Cambridge
