Towards a projective synthesis. Thinking about social insecurity with Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Castel

Abstract

This essay addresses the little-known similarity between a series of analyses developed by Pierre Bourdieu in the 1960s on The Glorious Thirty and those of Robert Castel on the crisis of wage-earning society carried out in the 1990s. Unlike the debates of his time on social exclusion, Castel defended the idea of a continuum of security and analyzed welfare state reforms as producers of social insecurity. For his part, Bourdieu provided theoretical and empirical keys to modeling analyses of social (in)security, emphasizing the importance of individuals' projections into the future. Articulating these two authors and the theoretical frameworks they developed based on French society, this essay sets out to take a step aside in the analysis of inequalities. We thus arrive at a theoretical proposal that articulates objective and subjective data, as well as the slope of the social trajectory, in order to understand the entire social structure. The “projective synthesis” allows us to capture concrete and socially differentiated capacities in order to take control of the future, both our own and that of society as a whole.