Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Governmentality of Social Insecurity (review)

Loïc Wacquant's book — part of a trilogy exploring changing social and political formations in the United States and beyond — presents a powerful and cogent analysis of how social insecurity is produced and governed. Its core argument addresses the changing state formations through which the poor are being managed, highlighting the double movement towards "prisonfare" and "workfare." He traces the rise of the penal state in the United States, but argues that this needs to be seen as interwoven with the transformation of welfare into workfare. For me, this is a powerful and important claim, not least because penality and welfare are typically studied by different groups of people. Grasping how the state's different apparatuses are being reformed typically falls outside conventional disciplinary perspectives. I am grateful for Wacquant's intellectual insistence on, and rich empirical demonstration of, the importance of this way of thinking. My comments are intended to respond to the spirit of this view, exploring rather than challenging the vital significance of studying the multiple transformations of the state. However, I do have some questions about how this project can be best conducted.

The first involves the problem of neo-liberalism. Wacquant identifies the project of transformation as a neoliberal one — referring to both the social and economic transformations of social relations, as well as the reworking of the state into a more punitive and disciplinary stance. At points, he views these changes as emerging from the logics of the transnational political project of neoliberalism. (306) Eslewhere he argues against such totalizing conceptions in favor of seeing the changes as the results of "a welter of disparate public policies." These two views are never convincingly brought together and the overall effect of the book is an image of the power and coherence of neoliberalism, but without fully explaining its causal force. I would have wished to see a more careful delineation of what Wacquant understands as neoliberalism, rather than the too cursory "sketch of a neoliberal state" that forms the final chapter, given what a profoundly problematic — and promiscuous — concept neoliberalism has proved to be.

My second question concerns Wacquant's view of what happens beyond the United States. He points to some instances of the double transformation (with the United Kingdom as the leading case, but other examples drawn from Western Europe). This is a profoundly vanguardist view of the United States (and its neoliberalism). However, the evidence for the trail-blazing United States being followed or mimicked elsewhere is relatively slight and raises problems about the possible transfer of these logics, policies and practices to other settings (see also Lacey, forthcoming). In part, these problems relate to the levels of imprisonment and penal policies elsewhere, but they are also the consequence of rather different trajectories of welfare reform in other places. It is not clear that the widespread European enthusiasm for labor market activation is the same as workfare (the Nordic countries were committed to such activation as a central plank of social democratic welfare states). While different state apparatuses are being reformed (again and again in some cases), they do not share the precisely twinned trajectory visible in the United States, which leaves me wondering about the capacity of this neoliberal governmentality to travel.

I am puzzled by the concepts of policy travel and transfer that Wacquant deploys which seem rather mechanical and linear; recent work on policy translation points to a more interesting (and political-cultural) view of how policy moves between polities and social formations (e.g., Lendvai and Stubbs 2007). But this puzzle also directs me to the substance of policy: although Wacquant clearly knows that "welfare" (in its U.S. meaning) is not the equivalent of welfare state, he nonetheless treats welfare reform as synonymous with welfare state reform. In the European context, the reform of public assistance programs has been both linked to, and different from, the trajectories of other welfare benefits and...