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Two strands of social inquiry provide resources for probing the fabrication and fate of a concept: the Begriffsgeschichte of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck and the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, grounded in the applied rationalism of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem.

Drawing on historical philology and the hermeneutics of his teacher Hans-Georg Gadamer, Koselleck’s “conceptual history” is exegetical; it focuses meticulously on texts to trace the changing semantic charge of “fundamental concepts” (Grundbegriff) and “keywords” (Stichwort) as “indicators” of evolving historical constellations across conjunctures and epochs. It stipulates that language is not “an epiphenomenon of so-called reality” but “a methodologically irreducible guiding authority, without which experiences could not be had, and without which neither the natural nor the social sciences could exist.” It enjoins us to capture “historical arrangements of concepts” synchronically in their “concrete contexts” as well as diachronically as part of the “linguistic arsenal of the entire political and social space of experience” (1); to link them to the political conflicts of the period of their circulation; and to critically evaluate these concepts for their use in social analysis. A study of the “underclass” informed by Koselleck must thus excavate the layers of meaning of the term, check its sources, probe its dissemination, and establish its relation to current sociopolitical issues.

Koselleck relies on the political theory of Carl Schmitt, for whom politics is fundamentally about the opposition between “friend and enemy,” to develop the notion of asymmetrical counter-concept, by which he designates pairs of opposite notions (hellenes/barbarians, Christians/heathens, Übermensch/Untermensch) that serve at once to build self-identity and to effect the exclusion of others by denying them mutual recognition and social reciprocity: “Asymmetrical counter-concepts have a lot to do with the art of silencing. They are means of attributing things to other people, to those who do not belong to our group, through a binary conceptualization that reduces them to a purely negative semantic field” (2). Koselleck then urges us to ask: who benefits from the use (and abuse) of such pairs? In the case of the “underclass,” what is the “we-group” that forms the tacit component of this asymmetrisch Gegenbegriff(3)?

Reflexivity in social science comes in three varieties (4). Egological reflexivity involves a sociological return onto the person of the researcher in an effort to control how her social position and trajectory (gender, class, ethnicity, age, etc.) affect her intellectual output. Textual reflexivity concerns itself with the ways in which the rhetorical forms employed by the researcher (voice, trope, metaphors, style, etc.) shape her object. Epistemic reflexivity, as advocated by Pierre Bourdieu, aims to control the “scholastic bias” introduced by the categories, techniques, and theories the sociologist uses as well as by the “scientific attitude” itself, which differs fundamentally from the “natural attitude” of everyday life dear to phenomenologists. Accordingly, Bourdieu deploys the “science of science” as vehicle for a reflexivity aiming to increase our collective capacity to design, engage and master properly scientific problematics (5).

In this regard, the French sociologist extends to social science the principles of historical epistemology, the discontinuist philosophy of science developed by his teachers Bachelard and Canguilhem, according to which science advances through rupture and reconstruction, thanks to an endless work of “rectification of knowledge” already there, and by overcoming “epistemological obstacles,” among them the contamination of scientific thought by ordinary constructs and turns of thought (6). Canguilhem urges us to ground the history of science in the genealogy of “conceptual filiations” to detect how these shape and displace problems over time. The present book is an application, to the thematics of the “underclass,” of the tenets of historical epistemology – a practical exercise in epistemic reflexivity.

Bourdieu takes us beyond historical epistemology with his theory of symbolic power and fields of cultural production, which serves to map the nexus of institutional positions and symbolic position-takings adopted by cultural producers such as artists, journalists, knowledge experts, state officials, and scientists (7). Thus, the scientific field is a space of forces that orient the strategies of scholars (their choice of objects, methods, theories, publishing outlets, etc.) and a space of struggles for the monopoly over the definition of scientific competency. The scientific cosmos itself is embedded within the field of power, where holders of rival forms of capital – artistic, scientific, religious, journalistic, juridical, bureaucratic, and economic – vie for establishing their supremacy and their particular interest as universal (8). It follows that to decipher a body of texts, such as competing discourses on the “underclass,” one must link the position of their producers and consumers, not in society at large, but in the relevant microcosms – in this case, the social scientific, journalistic, and political-policy-philanthropic fields – to the particular stance they take on the existence, makeup, and predicament of the “group.”

The combination of Koselleck and Bourdieu promises to be fruitful: the former brings an interpretive focus on texts and sources, the latter a relational framework within which to locate the producers and consumers of those texts, and to trace their practical repercussions. Together they pave the way for a structural hermeneutics of the “underclass.”

1 Reinhart Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History” (1982), p. 411, and idem, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (2002). See also Niklas Olsen, History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (2012).

2 Reinhart Koselleck, Javiér Fernández Sebastián, and Juan Francisco Fuentes, “Conceptual History, Memory, and Identity: An Interview with Reinhart Koselleck” (2006), p. 125.

3 Reinhart Koselleck, “The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (2004), pp. 155–91.

4 Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (1992), pp. 36–47.

5 Pierre Bourdieu, Science de la science et réflexivité (2001), and idem, “The Scholastic Point of View” (1990), and “Participant Objectivation: The Huxley Medal Lecture” (2003).

6 Gaston Bachelard, La Formation de l’esprit scientifique. Contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective (1938), and Georges Canguilhem, Connaissance de la vie (1952). A lucid and compact presentation of the tenets of “historical epistemology” is Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay (2010 [2007]). Bourdieu’s indebtedness to historical epistemology is fully documented in his book (with Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron), Le Métier de sociologue. Préalables épistémologiques (1968, 2nd ed. 1973).

7 Pierre Bourdieu, Fields of Cultural Production (1993c).

8 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason” (1991), and idem, La Noblesse d’État. Grandes écoles et esprit de corps (1989), Part 4; Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “From Ruling Class to Field of Power” (1993); and Pierre Bourdieu, “Champ du pouvoir et division du travail de domination” (2011).

Through two decades of heated debate initiated by the Harlem blackout riots of 1977, the “underclass” remained a stubbornly incoherent, heterogeneous, and specular notion, plagued by a host of semantic ambiguities, logical deficiencies, and empirical anomalies. Its spectacular, if fleeting, success expressed first and foremost the class fear and caste horror of the educated middle classes and state managers in the face of the deteriorating condition of the black precariat, and the desire to affix blame for mounting urban ills on this outcast category.⁷ Its sudden demise in public debate in the mid-1990s (contrasting with its continued silent circulation in social science as a descriptive stand-in for a variety of subalterns) reveals the fundamental heteronomy of the category: after the “welfare reform” of 1996, policy-makers abruptly pivoted to other worrisome populations and conditions, and social scientists followed suit, finding new problem subgroups to study and shepherd: “fragile families” expected to transition “from welfare to work,” parolees going through “prisoner reentry,” and inner-city residents redistributed in space through housing subsidies and “moving-to-opportunity”-type programs.

Through the reflexive sociology of the rise and fall of the “underclass,” I offer a critique, not just of the normal science of “race and poverty” in the American “inner city,” but of a particular style of sociology one might call normalized empiricism. This sociology is empiricist in that it borrows its categories unfiltered from the social world, it is driven by data collection and mining, and, paradoxically, it is maximally distant from the phenomenon. This sociology is normalized in that its parameters, tools, and sources are embraced as a matter of course, without systematic examination or explicit justification. In that regard, the present book is an extension of, and a complement to, my earlier critique of moral empiricism in the normal practice of urban ethnography in America.⁸

I use the strange career of the “underclass” to raise several questions that can shed light on the trials and tribulations of other concepts. What accounts for the “lemming effect” that drew a generation of scholars of race and poverty over a scientific cliff? What are the conditions for the formation and bursting of “conceptual speculative bubbles”? What is the role of think tanks, journalism, and politics but also academic reproduction in imposing “turnkey problematics” soaked in moral doxa upon social researchers? And what are the special quandaries posed by the naming of destitute and stigmatized categories in scientific discourse? Answering these questions constitutes an exacting exercise in epistemic reflexivity in the tradition of Bachelard, Canguilhem and Bourdieu.⁹ This exercise leads me to elaborate a minimalist set of criteria for what makes a good concept in social science, liable to minimizing epistemic troubles such as those epitomized by the “underclass.”

In conclusion, I draw on these epistemological criteria to tackle the most ductile and flammable category of them all: “race.” I propose to rethink race as veiled or denegated ethnicity, a pure form of symbolic violence through which a classificatory schema trading on the correspondence between natural and social hierarchies is turned into reality – inscribed in the subjectivity of socialized bodies (habitus) and in the objectivity of institutions (social space).¹⁰ The dialectic of classification and stratification based on quantum of honor supplies the core of an analytic of race and distinguishes it from other bases of division (class, gender, age, etc.). I advocate for breaking down ethnoracial phenomena into the elementary forms of racial domination that compose them: categorization, discrimination, segregation, ghettoization, and violence. Reversely, I spotlight the dangers of lumpy notions such as “structural racism” as guides for knowledge production and civic action.

At multiple junctions in this inquiry, I sound a clarion call against epistemic promiscuity – the tendency of scholars to deploy a mix of instruments of knowledge and criteria of validation circulating in different universes (science, journalism, philanthropy, politics and public policy, everyday life), without duly checking their origins, semantic span, logical coherence, and the social unconscious they carry. The Invention of the “Underclass” will have fulfilled its mission if it increases the epistemological vigilance of its readers and assists them modestly in the “perpetual reconstruction of those concepts through which we seek to comprehend reality.”¹¹