François Ewald, The Birth of Solidarity: The History of the French Welfare State, trans. Timothy Scott Johnson (Duke 2020) 

Originally published in 1986 and appearing in English translation here for the first time, Ewald’s account of the rise of social insurance in France in the late 19th-century will be of interest to those interested in biopolitics (Ewald was an assistant to Michel Foucault), labour, liberalism, and the logics of probability, forecasting and the socialization of risk (including environmental risk). The book charts the story of how the French republic adapted to the emerging problem of workers’ exposure to injury, in the context of mechanized, industrial workplaces – obviously a problem for workers, but also for the capitalist bosses whose profits relied upon their labour, as well as upon social and political stability. Who, in this context, was “responsible” for injured workers, and how would that responsibility be institutionalized? How could it be made morally consistent with the precepts of liberalism?  Ewald’s book shows how responsibility for injury, and for foreseeing and planning for it, passed from individual workers, to benevolent associations, to industrialists and, ultimately, to the state. This is the birth of what Ewald calls “solidarity,” the principle underlying social insurance, the core modality of the French, capitalist, welfare state. Along the way, he also exposes the biopolitical logics of forecasting, calculation, finance and risk that accompanied this transition and were extended across multiple governmentalities. A criticism of the book might be that it tends to fall out of the register of Foucaultian genealogy into something more like a history of ideas, reverting to an almost Hegelian sensibility, in which the birth of social insurance is attributed to the perfection of its idea in the rational debates of French jurists and parliamentarians, with the political struggles of actual (and organized) workers relegated to the deep background. -DB