Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France by Dana Simmons (review)

In recent years, politicians and voters across Europe have deliberated the relative merits of creating or increasing minimum wages and standards of living with varying results. In 2015, for example, Germany implemented its first ever minimum wage law, while a year later, Swiss voters considered, but ultimately rejected, a proposed minimum guaranteed national income. In each case, concerns about economic growth and worker productivity played a key role in shaping the debates and their outcomes. How, one might wonder, did social questions about basic human subsistence and welfare become intertwined — even overwhelmed — by economic imperatives? Dana Simmons’s Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France provides essential reading for anyone who has pondered this question.

In this well-written and tightly-argued volume, Simmons examines how the concept of minimum needs emerged in a country often seen as the embodiment of the welfare state: France. Simmons’s history brings together the agronomists, chemists, sociologists, anthropologists, and politicians who helped to create a “technopolitics of human needs” (2) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Everything — from the amount of food needed to maintain a single (male) labourer, the quantity of air and space required for housing and prison cells, and the necessity of a household sink and leisure time — eventually came under the purview of these social reformers. These were not, Simmons argues, idle preoccupations but political moves that delineated the possibilities of human life within a system of wage labour. For, as she writes, “[t]he opposite of the ‘vital’ in vital minimum was not death, but unproductivity. To live, in this sense, was to be useful, to function, to produce, and reproduce” (6). Thus Vital Minimum reveals how the science of human need bolstered a regime of wage labour and advanced a welfare state designed to compensate for a market economy that perpetually drew down wages.

Simmons traces the ways that science, technology, and politics intertwined to define human need through a series of nine short but cogently-argued chapters. The first half of the book examines the methods of early agronomic and anthropological experts to quantify the so-called natural needs of workers. Drawing upon the pioneering experiments of Antoine Lavoisier, early French agronomists and chemists employed scale balances, chemical analysis, and empirical data to measure and quantify human subsistence. In the mid-nineteenth century, sociologists like Georges Cuvier and Frédéric Le Play adopted the social survey, which used questions and ethnographic observation to measure and categorize workers’ needs. Both techniques promised a scientific and technical solution to France’s “social question,” namely how to ensure social harmony and stability in a post-revolutionary age of industrialization and growing class conflict.

In the second half of the book, Simmons shows how these methods contributed to the evolution of the concept of the “vital minimum” from the late nineteenth century through the Fourth Republic. Food rationing policies put into place during the Siege of Paris and the individual minimum wage implemented in WWI, she demonstrates, were pivotal measures. These two policies were subsequently integrated into Vichy’s prototype of a modern welfare state based on biosocial economics. This model, she argues, ultimately served as the foundation of the welfare state as it emerged in postwar France. Though the actual term “minimum vital” was abandoned well before it was even implemented, the concept nevertheless remained instrumental in how workers, politicians, and policy makers envisioned French social policy throughout the twentieth century.

Simmons’s book does an excellent job of showing how science, economy, and politics converged to define the needs of French worker-citizens and to establish the parameters of contemporary debates about state support. Likewise, she offers an important analysis of the way that scientific and technical approaches helped to naturalize forms of wage labour and the gendering of this work in state welfare policies. Occasionally the reader is surprised by lacunas in the historical account. In particular, WWI is given...