Our approach

Our approach is best described as archaic anthropology – an attempt to historicize the present, to recognize the presence of the past in the present. These initially incongruous terms, archaic and anthropology, are combined to provoke a rethinking of modern phenomena, to cultivate a sense of the contingency and historicity of everyday society, not of secret origins or underlying structures, but to restore a long-term perspective on state, society, economy and culture, things hidden in plain sight. Archaic, in its original Greek sense of arche, refers to central and persistent ideas rather than the contemporary image of lost fragments of the ancient world. Anthropology entails participation and observation; an ethnography of our shared experience. Our work draws on almost a decade of ethnographic engagement in the curious world of unemployment, interviews with the unemployed, explorations of welfare offices, media discourses, policy making, policy submissions, statistics, jobseeking advice and digital platforms; there is no scientific white coat which separates us neatly from our data. These explorations are then illuminated by the genealogical method of Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and Agamben, who challenge us to recognize the historicity of things and ideas that appear to have no history – key ideas like choice or work or selfhood.

This method does not mean searching for ‘origins’ but recognizing our deep entanglement in history and that therefore religious ideas have shaped supposedly secular modern phenomena; even economic categories like unemployment, welfare or the labour market. Nietzsche suggested that even though ‘God is dead, and we have killed him’, religious ideas permeate our contemporary morality and attitudes towards suffering. Weber reveals how religious ethics inform our contemporary economic practices – most famously, the Protestant work ethic provides the ‘spirit of capitalism’. Foucault’s studies of governmental power illuminate the welfare state as an echo of the pastoral power of the church over its flock. Agamben identified how the economy and the state are interpreted as providential mechanisms within modernity, imprinting a theological model despite secularization. Taken together, these theorists provide an approach to history which allows us to recognize how official policyspeak and academic scholarship create the very things they seek to describe.

Reader beware! This book is not a history of the welfare state or unemployment, or a contribution to policy, or a detailed case study of contemporary experiences of jobseekers. Nor is it an excoriating critique of neoliberal ideology and the contemporary ‘dismantling of the welfare state’; it will not suddenly awaken policymakers or politicians to the futility or cruelty of their policies, or inspire resistance or prompt revolution. Nor does it propose any new solution to the intractable problems of welfare. Such books already exist, some of which are reviewed herein. Instead, this book is a call to recognize the presence of history in the present and how religious ideas animate the contemporary world. Such a reflexive and philosophical undertaking is open to any reader, specialist or otherwise, who is open to considering that their ideas may be derived from society or from history, and often in uncomfortable ways – and that even critics may have common ground with their opponents. Recognizing the persistence of history, especially our disavowed religious inheritance, is vital to understanding why perennial problems seem so intractable, and offers a clue as to why utilitarian policy solutions do not fix society. Work and welfare are more foundational, perhaps even primordial, to Western lives than is commonly imagined.

Most critics of welfare insist that the capacity to contest widely accepted definitions of how the world works is an important political tool, and any historical approach asserts that the world was not always thus, and might be remade. Certainly, our approach joins them in rejecting trite generalizations about the inevitability of certain political and social arrangements. An alternative and less comforting implication is that we can only think at all by using historically inherited ideas, and therefore, thinking differently is difficult indeed. Importantly, composing alternative histories or launching critiques or gathering anthropological evidence are practices with a long intellectual history. Rather than changing the world, we emphasize understanding our culture and society, with the acknowledgement that how we think about our world matters. Recognizing neglected historical influences on the present and the tensions and contradictions within them is a crucial precursor to trying to think anew, indeed another meaning of ‘radicalism’ is returning to roots.

The new trials of Job

Recent times have seen the emergence of the neologism ‘jobseeker’, basically meaning the unemployed. Words may seem like mere labels for an unchanging economic reality, yet the terms used to describe something shape it. Indeed, the term ‘unemployed’ is reshaped by the emergence of the statistical category of ‘unemployment’, which emerged in the late nineteenth century as states began to keep national records of the numbers claiming poor relief (Walters, 2000; Burnett, 2002). This implied that not having work was a temporary economic situation, in contrast to medieval categories of ‘pauper’ or ‘poor’ which indicated a permanent state – or terms like ‘idler’ or ‘vagabond’ which implied immorality or even criminality (Mollat, 1986).

While the term ‘unemployed’ evokes the gathering of individuals together into a society-wide category of unemployment, ‘jobseeker’ envisages a person as a single economic unit. They are imagined as an active participant in the labour market, searching for opportunities, investing in their skills; an entrepreneur selling their labour to employers. Yet, simultaneously, they are unemployed, dependent on the welfare office, enduring months of frustrated jobseeking. The logic of welfare activation and conditionality is that unemployment and welfare jobseeking should be arranged so that an individual is compelled to engage in the labour market. The market competition for work has moral significance.

A revealing parallel to jobseeking is the Old Testament book of Job. Job – Iyov in Hebrew – is a pious and prosperous man who is tested by God at the instigation of the devil in a quixotic story. Catastrophically, his livestock, servants and children die in turn, yet distraught Job still blesses God in his prayers. After further torments, Job’s wife beseeches him to curse God. Job’s friends suggest that he must have done wrong to receive such a fate, and eventually Job accuses God of being unjust. One of Job’s friends chastises Job, saying God is never wrong and that we cannot comprehend all that God does. God appears in a whirlwind, demonstrating his reality and power, and restores Job’s good fortune, granting him a long life and children. Suffering here appears not as something to be overcome or circumvented by action or ignored in passivity but as a refiner of faith, a purifier of the soul.

The book of Job presents a poetic parable of suffering and faith – widely read to this day – and addresses the theological conundrum of theodicy – why an all-powerful, all-knowing and benevolent God allows bad things happen to good people. Religions offer justifications, whereas political realism simply says, ‘And the weak suffer what they must’ (Varoufakis, 2016). The sufferings of Job are also distinctly economic; his fortune depends upon God who then tests his faith by ruining him, yet without harming him personally.

The poetic myth of Job, commonly dated sometime between the 6th and 4th century BC, is a persistent source of food for thought, inspiring reflection on more immediate philosophical and political concerns: Negri (2009) argues that Job reflects labour resisting capitalism; Deleuze (1994) suggests that Job demands recognition and accountability from a capricious deity; Spivack (1958) sees the parable as the development of an inner conscience and personal relationship to God; darker hints of sacrifice are detected by Girard (1987); for Jung ([1952] 2010), the story of Job reveals the devilish dimension of God, despite Christian and Enlightenment banishments of evil – considered simply as the absence of God or reason.

Each theorist attempts to explicate a hidden dimension of the parable, yet really the message is familiar and suffuses Christian, Western and modern culture. Misfortune is a test which tries our fortitude. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. The sufferings of Job are a trial of faith; those who persist in hope despite everything will eventually succeed. Implicitly, suffering is a way of purifying, purging individuals of their sinful tendencies.

Growth through adversity is not only part of our philosophy of life; it suffuses our policies, and it is institutionalized in how the unemployed are treated. The economy is our primary test, where the invisible hand of the market replicates the hand of God (Cox, 2016). Those who need state support, especially the unemployed, are forced to suffer and put to the test of seeking work. Effectively, the state becomes the incarnation of providence, testing individuals to the limit (Agamben, 2011). Yet, like Job, the jobseeker must not despair but hopefully and interminably seek salvation in the form of employment (Pecchenino, 2015).

Strikingly, Job’s good fortune is attributed to him being favoured by God – he is selected or elected by God’s predetermined will. Just as swiftly, he is cast out of God’s favour, a reversal of fortune faster than economic recession. Yet, he remonstrates with God, demanding justice, a fair test, a second chance (Deleuze, 1994). This enigmatic relationship of fate and faith, tests and trials, purging and redemption animates the modern economy and welfare state to this day.

The problem of unemployment

Politicians, policymakers and the public at large view unemployment as a problem to be solved, principally by jobs, delivered by economic growth, in the pursuit of full employment. Despite occasional recessions, temporary interruptions to continuous and compounded economic growth, almost every year more people work globally to create more goods and services than ever before. Yet since World War II, every decade has seen rates of unemployment edging upwards gradually almost everywhere, somehow, despite repeated economic recovery and growth – there were still people who needed a job. Modern capitalism is a work culture of unlimited growth, but it is also haunted by a nostalgic dream that once upon a time everyone had work and that the economy was stable and functional; states across the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) work tirelessly to reduce unemployment to almost nothing; from their perspective the economic shocks simply temporarily enlarge the problem.

Through boom and bust, states manage unemployment continuously, not just through providing financial supports to alleviate poverty but through active labour market policies (ALMPs). These ALMPs have replaced alms for the poor – supports are no longer charitable, but exist to support work. ALMPs are varied, but basically they are attempts to reform or transform the individual, either by giving them training or education – ‘human capital building’ – or by putting pressure on them to find work, sometimes known as ‘welfare conditionality’. Rather than simply being supported, the unemployed must take part in case-officer meetings, group engagement, psychological and algorithmic profiling and motivational or CV workshops, and must carry out extensive monitored job searches and accept almost any employment or training they are offered. Failure to comply will eventually or immediately lead to sanctions; cuts or suspension of welfare payments, leaving individuals with no support.

Contemporary academic research has explored welfare conditionality extensively in different jurisdictions; for instance, the Danish system is more oriented towards flexible working, the French to rights-based administration, the Irish towards local adaptations and caprice, and the UK system towards increasingly harsher and punitive approaches (Boland and Griffin, 2015; Dwyer, 2019; Hansen, 2019). Across this research, it is clear that welfare sanctions sometimes push people into poverty, debt, homelessness, black-market activity and even suicide, with mental and physical health impacts which are hard to measure. Indeed, even those who are never sanctioned are pressured and stressed by the ever-present threat of sanctions.

Officially, ALMPs, conditionality and sanctions exist to get people back to work, and there is some evidence that they may shorten the average period of unemployment, although such statistical findings have been contested (Card et al, 2015). Critics have suggested that ALMPs simply accelerate a cycle of low-pay/no-pay by pushing individuals to take up precarious work (Shildrick and McDonald, 2012). While the threat of sanction may be a motivation, the actual impact of sanction on an individual may render them less likely to gain employment.

Despite these criticisms, the effort to ‘reform’ the unemployed intensifies: there is increased psychologized testing and behavioural economics style ‘nudges’ to ‘activate’ jobseekers (Friedli and Stearn, 2015; Frayne, 2019). Pressure is applied to more and more groups, for instance, the chronically ill, migrants, people with disabilities, single parents of increasingly young children and those in part-time work (Watts and Fitzpatrick, 2018^; Dwyer, 2019). Entitlements become increasingly conditionalized, for instance, the increased use of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in South America and elsewhere which make support dependent on certain behaviour, re-education or even health or lifestyle choices (Humpage, 2019). Welfare conditionality has gone digital, with jobseekers required to register on certain websites and complete supervised online searches, having their CVs rewritten by motivational coaches.

Beyond examining the largely negative experiences of unemployed people subjected to welfare conditionality, scholars have analyzed the political and media debates around these policies, researched the inner workings of welfare offices and organizations and traced the impact on the experience of work (Demazière, 2020; Dwyer and Wright, 2014; Jensen and Tyler, 2015; Fletcher and Wright, 2018; Jordan, 2018; Whelan, 2020). All this cannot be summarized here, but broadly what emerges is that rather than simply supporting the unemployed, contemporary welfare offices intervene in the lives of individuals; basically, states govern the lives of jobseekers.

Governing the unemployed

The relationship between the welfare office and the unemployed may seem simple, it is even described by policy documents and official forms as a contract; the welfare office provides welfare payments and offers support and guidance in exchange for compliance with requirements for jobseeking by so-called ‘clients’ (DSP, 2012). Critics point out that this contractualization of welfare entitlements is effectively an offer you can’t refuse. Clearly, this is not a free-market arrangement but a power relationship, which we describe herein as disciplinary or governmental power.

This approach is associated with the field of governmentality studies, inspired by the work of Michel Foucault. By joining ‘govern’ and ‘mentality’, this approach refers to how states think about society, using academic disciplines, statistics, policy and so forth to conjure up a series of institutions which shape individual lives (Dean, 2010). This is not a simple dystopian nightmare of government control – though historically liberal thinkers have frequently criticized state tyranny – this form of power is taken on by individuals, literally empowering them. For instance, without the governmentality of education, this book would scarcely be written or read. So, governmentality has multiple effects: its knowledge redefines reality, its disciplinary power pervades society and it shapes individuals’ conduct and selfhood.

For Foucault, governmentality implied a certain governing rationality, an orientation towards transforming the lives of individuals and entire societies in pursuit of various ends. Broadly, governmentality assumes that it is always possible to improve and reform, to govern better, and attempts to survey the population and produce interventions and policies which ‘optimize’ people in specific ways, in an ‘eternal optimism’ that things can be made better (Miller and Rose, 2013). Yet, this governing rationality is not universal reason or infallible logic but a particular approach, expressing certain values and pursuing particular ends.

Governmental power is most visible at the street level; for instance, the lives of jobseekers are shaped by requirements to attend meetings, account for themselves, prove job-search efforts, undergo assessment, retrain and so forth (Brodkin and Marsden, 2013). Such power is clearly disciplining– shaping people’s conduct by exercising intermittent surveillance and demanding compliance. Beyond this, academic disciplines shape how unemployment is interpreted as a problem (Bacchi, 2015). A combination of ideas from economics and sociology – explored in Chapter 4 – suggests that the unemployed will fall into a poverty trap and draw the dole rather than work unless incentivized by welfare conditionality, that they will lose their skills and ‘work-readiness’ if they are not compelled into jobseeking, and incrementally enter a downward spiral of ‘subjective deterioration’ because work provides various social and individual goods. Consequently, jobseekers tend to blame themselves for failure to secure employment, rather than the lack of suitable openings or the number of candidates (Sharone, 2013).

Strikingly, two meanings of ‘discipline’ meet in the welfare office: first, policy is created by academic disciplines – forms of knowledge which define social phenomena in key ways – posing the problem of unemployment in specific ways (Bacchi, 2015). Second, the unemployed are subject to ‘discipline’; interventions into their personal conduct, as though joblessness were a sickness or moral failing. Of course, the problem of widespread job shortages is acknowledged, yet ALMPs never create jobs, only reshape individual conduct. While in 1909 Beveridge published Unemployment: A Problem of Industry, the underlying assumption since then and long before is that unemployment is a problem of government.

Cruel to be kind?

Why must the unemployed be made to suffer? ALMPs primarily seek to free the unemployed from their situation – even to the point of being considered emancipation (Hansen, 2019). Welfare conditionality clearly has negative impacts, yet officially it is only ‘cruel to be kind’, a form of tough love, a sort of testing or challenging of the unemployed to motivate them to find jobs, despite being ineffective (Fletcher and Flint, 2018). How can we explain this government rationality? Why is suffering essential to the system? Previously we have described this impulse metaphorically as chemotherapy (Boland and Griffin, 2016), highlighting the medical model imposed upon unemployment, as though it were a pathology to be cured by tough but purifying measures. Yet, there is more at play: ALMPs are not just invasive treatments, and work coaches demand not just better conduct but also that the unemployed examine themselves. Furthermore, the test of the transformation of the unemployed individual is the labour market.

Unsurprisingly, many critics diagnose capitalism as the root problem; for instance, Grover (2012) suggests that these emergent forms of harsh conditionality serve the purpose of ‘commodifying labour’ – that is, turning individual lives into labour, a useful resource for employers, capitalists who exploit the productivity of real work to accumulate wealth. Furthermore, Grover (2019) argues that the state is complicit in these processes, as it exerts power over citizens, imposing precarity, austerity and inequality through the machinery of the welfare state – the very institution which was supposed to alleviate these difficulties.

Supposedly capitalism is ‘liberal’ in the sense of cultivating market freedoms, yet welfare conditionality is authoritarian: a paradoxical hybrid of ‘liberal authoritarianism’. In Punishing the Poor (2009), Wacquant describes the emergence of a hybrid ‘centaur state’, which deregulates and allows liberties to business and especially financial capitalism, but simultaneously imposes a starkly authoritarian rule upon the poor. This is most noticeable where states are ‘tough on crime’, through the growth of prisons and militarization of policing, but largely stems from welfare reform – dismantling and conditionalizing the welfare system which drives poverty and racial ghettoization, considered as problems of ‘law and order’ rather than economics and social policy. While there is something to this punitive-turn thesis, it scarcely accounts for the extensive governmental attempts to transform or reform jobseekers.

For decades researchers have examined the shaming and stigmatization of welfare claimants, and particularly the use of moralizing concepts of the deserving and undeserving poor (Whelan, 2020). Such ideas are expressed in the media, increasingly as a form of popular entertainment (Jensen and Tyler, 2015), in politicized policymaking (Gaffney and Millar, 2019) and are even expressed in the very processes and architecture of welfare activation (Wright, 2016). Strikingly, those who are unemployed often tend to reproduce stigmatizing discourses about other, ‘real’ unemployed people – the ‘skivers/shirkers/spongers’ who have supposedly ‘never worked a day in their lives’ (Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013).

Indeed, stigmatization can be considered as a form of social control: Imogen Tyler’s Stigma (2020) argues that, beyond temporarily spoiling the identity of individuals through social shaming, concerted political and institutional efforts to stigmatize welfare claimants work precisely to reshape behaviour and leave psychic and even physical marks on the unemployed. Moving beyond the well-established ideas of Goffman about social-role stigmatization and the individual negotiation of shame, Tyler argues that stigmatization is a distinctly political and governmental project which produces docile – and damaged – jobseekers, and can only be resisted through collective solidarity.

Yet beyond the logic of the ‘stigma machine’, clearly welfare reform has a broader project than simply punishing the poor. Specifically, activation aims to retrain, reform and improve the unemployed, making them better jobseekers and eventually workers. From policymakers to street-level bureaucrats, the ambition is to reform the unemployed, and while moralizing judgements and harsh decisions are part of welfare conditionality, the system is not simply capriciously cruel. To understand this rationality of purifying people through suffering we must turn to theology.

Theology resurrected

For centuries the West has proclaimed its secular nature, yet there is something ironically religious in proclaiming a new age. Many social sciences are experiencing a ‘theological turn’ (Juergensmeyer, 2013; Schwarzkopf, 2020) which examines the religious roots of meaning, belief and the sacred in modernity (Habermas, 2008). The contemporary reformation of welfare is the result of states incrementally institutionalizing theological ideas through welfare policies, and thereby transforming the lives of individuals – something churches did more directly for centuries.

Most scholars of the welfare state consign the influence of religion to the past: the standard story of the influence of religion on the welfare state is largely confined to the idea of charity. Before there were workhouses and poorhouses, medieval Europe gave alms to the poor and supported the destitute within the parish out of Christian obligation. Early theologians such as Pelagius and Dominus variously debated the morality of riches and obligations to the poor; for instance, St. Francis insisted on the idea of personal poverty, and many apocalyptic preachers demanded the radical redistribution of wealth. Yet, for millennia, Augustinian ideas of charity held sway: all humankind, rich and the poor, are fallen sinners, continuously straying from God’s commandments and therefore always in need of redemption, and thus, charity should be a regular yet voluntary obligation (Holland, 2019). Welfare effectively occurred via the religious practice of expiating sins by giving alms to the poor. Eventually, the state took over the care of the poor from the church and parish authorities, along with the moral ideas of Christianity – the condemnation of idleness and the idealization of work.

Crucially, reforming welfare policy is not simply a matter of fine-tuning rules, processes and institutions within the state but follows cultural models. While political discussions often focus on the costs of welfare payments and their impact on the economy, these numbers describe deeper concerns; the lives, the behaviour, the very being of those who claim welfare payments. Ideas like ‘incentives’, ‘culture of dependency’ or ‘human capital’ may initially seem like academic abstractions, but they reflect inherited ideas. Policies which are simply described as ‘labour market reforms’ or ‘activation’ are attempts to transform individuals: whether through sticks and carrots of incentives or education and training, the aim is to reshape the attitudes, behaviour and decisions of individuals. This is an attempt at ‘reform’ – to purify and save the individual.

Architects of welfare conditionality are not coy about this goal; they tend to carefully avoid moralizing and religious language, but they explicitly aim to transform the unemployed into active jobseekers. Obviously, there are different approaches: some focus on incentives – which implies the unemployed are lazy, feckless and greedy, or too proud to take humble work and therefore need reformation; others formulate arguments around the ‘culture of poverty’ or ‘welfare dependency’ which imply the unemployed need to be re-educated in the ‘work-ethic’. Recognizing that these concepts are shaped at least partially by religious inheritances may help us to better understand these ideas and the hold they exert on the imaginations of policymakers and populations.

Yet, this book is not simply a critique which identifies others as ‘ideological’ but a reflexive interrogation of how our Judeo-Christian culture shapes our thoughts and lives today. Theological ideas are adapted and adopted by economics, but also sociology, anthropology, psychology and so forth. Specifically, the crucial idea here is that humans can be transformed by their experiences, yet they make their own choices and actions. This is the idea of socialization, but also of salvation. These ideas suffuse Western society beyond the ivory tower – which was hardly their origin in any case – and influence how states govern their subjects.

Crucially, states assume that individuals are transformable and that suffering and challenges will make them stronger. Therefore the state reforms institutions to reform individuals, historically by containing them within actual spaces – poorhouses, asylums and even work camps (Fletcher, 2015). Yet now, these are diffused throughout society, and the individual pressured, enticed and empowered to reform themselves in line with the priorities of governance. Perhaps these governmental projects are often ineffectual or may also be partially resisted by those subject to reformation, but what matters is how they permeate our contemporary thinking, almost to the eclipse of any other ideas, as the only way forward.

What is at stake in this book?

This book is intended to be thought provoking, exploring new avenues for understanding the contemporary transformations of welfare. Yet, it is relatively accessible, not requiring the reader to have an expert understanding of the sociology of unemployment, welfare policy, labour-market economics or esoteric theological knowledge. Rather than exposing secret hidden histories, this book restores connections, allowing us to recognize how the relatively well-known ideas of the Judeo-Christian world animate the modern world. These are usually discounted as fairy tales, yet the argument is not that policymakers believe in metaphysics or superstitions, but that our underlying ideas – models of human choice, versions of self-transformation, idealizations of work – inform and animate the welfare state. As such, this book is inevitably centred on the distinctly Western Judeo-Christian inheritance which matters mostly in Europe and in the Americas; the ideas presented here will be less resonant or even irrelevant for other places.

The phrase ‘reformation’ inescapably evokes Protestantism, which marks the rejection of alms and charity alongside the growth of reformatory institutions. Yet, new modes of ‘policing the poor’, anticipating the welfare state, predate Luther and Calvin (Michielse and Van Krieken, 1990). Indeed, Catholicism had its own reformation which equally set out ways of reforming individuals; for instance, inventing purgatory and penitential pilgrimages or regular confessions. Thus, this book is about the tensions between different principles which exist within Christianity rather than being for or against its various versions. Any religion or culture has competing demands and ideals within it, rather than a simple coherent ideology, and to an extent this book is an attempt to redress the current imbalance whereby we have drifted towards a punitive rather than forgiving ethic.

Thus, the book is clearly neither for nor against religion – indeed, the whole idea of assessing religion as if from outside is absurd. Claims to be post-religious, atheistic, secular and so forth rely, ironically, on Judaic or Christian models of iconoclasm, anti-idolatry and theological models of separate church and state. Rejecting religious ideas ironically reiterates the gesture of Moses and subsequent prophets who denounced idol worship as vain superstition – our aim is to recognize how these ideas shape us. Our archaic anthropology suggests the importance of recognizing that contemporary culture exists in the aftermath of millennia of organized belief, which not only contributes to how we organize the state and economy but constitutes the deep background of our philosophical ideas which are not mere abstractions, but shape how we experience the world and interpret our lives.

This book attempts to expand the horizons of existing scholarship; there is extensive and excellent research on welfare and unemployment, on individual experiences, social organization, cultural ideas and policy, yet the actual impact of this research is somewhat disappointing – certainly we were disappointed by the impact of our own research which was highly critical of welfare activation in Ireland. Whether in academic papers, the popular press or even in parliament, criticism does not have the desired effect of reversing the turn towards activation and instituting more humane treatment of the unemployed. Perhaps the ideological proponents of welfare activation are more convincing, or governments may be adherents of neoliberal ideology. Or perhaps, things might be even worse were it not for these critiques, which restrain other impulses in a plural public sphere. Perhaps we need more resonant cultural ideas.

We suggest that contemporary critique does not do enough to understand the deeper political and cultural impetus towards welfare activation. Critics often ‘reveal’ neoliberal ideology in politics or policy which unfairly suggests that others are delusional or evil. Such an approach not only tends to provoke policymakers into defensive positions but also frames the debate in terms of truth and illusion, so that rival think tanks and academics can return the criticism – decrying ‘left-wing propaganda’ or ‘bleeding hearts groupthink’. The capacity of words to reveal the truth and change minds is often overestimated; indeed, criticism suffers from the law of diminishing returns – the more there is, the less effective it is – or the perverse logics of an arms race – the more one side critiques, the more they are critiqued in turn during an endless culture war. This book is not a revelation of other people’s illusions, but ruminates upon our shared culture.

Outline

Rather than starting at the next chapter, readers should note that many of the chapters of this book work as stand-alone analyses, particularly from Chapter 4 to 7, and readers are welcome to sample these first. These focus on particular elements of economic life – work, welfare, jobseeking and CVs – and how deeper theological and religious ideas considerably shape our modern practices. These are not obscure ideas but remarkably familiar for Western ‘post-Christian’ readers, and largely still circulate in popular culture today; ideas of redemptive labour, purgatorial purification, pilgrimages of self-transformation and penitential conversions. Each of these appear initially as arcane superstitions, yet we will argue that they are part and parcel of contemporary thought – how we model human nature and society today.

So, in Chapter 4 we revisit Weber’s famous Protestant ethic thesis, to examine the centrality of work in modern culture. Beyond the idea of frugal living and relentless reinvestment of profits, we suggest that work is also considered as a mode of self-transformation. While Weber turned to Benjamin Franklin as his exemplar of capitalism, we analyze Maslow’s idea of self-actualization, whereby to work is to test yourself and grow. From there, we examine how the absence of work in unemployment is considered in the popular imagination and sociology. Curiously, the absence of a job is figured as the opposite of monastic life, not just lacking discipline but implicitly damned rather than saved.

Extending an earlier article, ‘The Purgatorial Ethic and the Spirit of Welfare’, our fifth chapter outlines how contemporary welfare activation derives inspiration from purgatory, imposing purifying and redemptive suffering on individuals. Dismissed as mere superstition in modernity, purgatory returns in the numerous institutions of modernity which manage transformation, from penitentiaries to poorhouses. These buildings are now replaced with individualized treatment, so that jobseekers carry a sense of perpetual obligation to redeem themselves; purgatory pervades their lives.

Initially more hopeful, our sixth chapter focuses on pilgrimage, the ritual of penance through travelling to a shrine, as informing the process of jobseeking – for the unemployed and job-changers or the perpetually precarious. Pilgrims seek out signs of favour and face personal challenges along their road, and thus, economic outcomes are converted into a moral drama of faith in the face of adversity, a balance of hope and despair. Such metaphors persist in modernity, where almost anything can be characterized as a ‘journey’, yet the idea that it would reform one’s character or reveal the truth is a distinctly religious idea. Interestingly, pilgrimage is markedly individualistic, even in supposedly communal medieval culture, so salvation is a personal matter, despite the collective problems of economics.

In Chapter 7 we focus extensively on the CV or résumé, the key document of the labour market, desired by employers and required by welfare officers. Such a practical document nonetheless has a religious history in the obligation to confess, to reflect upon oneself, to tell the truth about oneself, to transform oneself in order to profess oneself to the world. Each tailored CV is a statement of faith in oneself and the labour market, yet in a world of proliferating jobseeking and compulsory applications for the unemployed, these supplications are made over and over again.

Our theoretical position and methodological approach are outlined in Chapter 2, a combination of the sociological and the historical which we term archaic anthropology, an exploration of the presence of the past in the present. Drawing inspiration from key figures, particularly Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and Agamben, we outline an approach which allows us to recognize how older, ancient, even archaic ideas echo, persist, animate and give meaning to the present. While our concern is welfare in particular, the broader roots of modern states in the pastoral power of the medieval church and the providential interpretation of the economy as the ‘hand of God’ are introduced to contextualize the impulse towards reform.

Informed by this method, our relatively self-contained chapters combine together into a larger argument centred on the idea of reform, which is explored in depth in our third chapter in regard to both policy reform and the reformation of individual unemployed people through welfare activation. Key ideas which are developed throughout the book are introduced here, particularly the idea of the transformative effect of suffering, imposed by governmentality in an effort to reform, and the idea of the economy as a test or even of life itself as a trial which reveals the truth. While punitive and stigmatizing impulses are part of the process, the governance of welfare is oriented towards reform, demanding work discipline and personal transformation, but also incorporating individual choices and positioning the market as the final judge; a providential expression of divine will. Combining detailed social-policy analysis and theological sources, this chapter is perhaps more challenging, but it is the key to our thesis, and also to our recommendations, which are summarized in our conclusion, that reform can be excessive and welfare would be better off wholly unconditional, especially in the face of contemporary challenges.