Dana Simmons. Vital Minimum

According to its introduction, Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France is “about the technopolitics of human need” (2); according to its conclusion, it is “about politics of life under a modern European form of welfare capitalism” (161). As both definitions are true (even if the former applies more directly to the chapters on the nineteenth century and the latter to those on the twentieth), it is an ambitious book. It is also a well-researched one; Dana Simmons devotes a third of it to detailed footnotes and an impressive bibliography. Moreover, it is eminently readable, likely because it recalls to the reader that the first meaning of history is “inquiry.” Here the inquiry is motivated and driven by the “appeal of epochalist modes of social thought,” which makes us see our contemporary times as different—not different from anything that came before, but different from the world that emerged in the last two centuries and is now on the wane. During this relatively brief period, so the argument goes, needs became the core of Western politics, while the same is true today of resources. As for “man” in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966), there are now signs of the end of “needs” as an object of knowledge and politics. And that makes the inquiry timely

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