Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to critically reflect on the analytical themes and issues reflected in two of Loïc Wacquant's major works (Urban outcasts, 2008a, and Punishing the poor, 2009). Despite the essential similarities of their respective subject matters, the books are quite different in content, style, tone and methodological orientation. The former, by far the most conventionally research-led, explores, on the basis of survey data and area-based indicators, comparisons and contrasts between life and living conditions in the deteriorating ghettos of Chicago's South Side and conditions in the banlieue estates on the outskirts of Paris. Differences of scale, the extent of inequality and racial polarisation aside, there is still much that these areas, and their residents, have in common and might find recognisable.

The concept ‘advanced marginality’ perhaps best describes the precarious conditions of these increasingly disadvantaged, economically marginal and socially toxic areas. Tim Hope's concept for similar areas (albeit in a British context), ‘communities of despair’ (Hope, 2001), captures something of the issue, except that, the aim here is not necessarily to chronicle despair. On the contrary ‘despair’ implies far too passive a notion to describe the (often desperate) survival practices of the urban outcasts themselves. Accordingly, one theme of the chapter is to develop some reflections on Frances Fox Piven's observation regarding Wacquant's work in Punishing the poor: ‘We should also wonder about the role of the people who were the objects of penal control. Were they merely the witless objects of social control, or were they also actors in the drama?’ (Piven, 2010, p 114). With that idea in mind, a related concern involves what we might term ‘neoliberalism beyond the state’.

The two themes are intended to connect; the argument will be that neoliberalism corrodes the conditions of social order and that while states certainly contribute to these processes they typically have far wider ramifications. Violence and resistance, in particular, are often a direct consequence of these de-civilising processes although states often further imperil the conditions of civilised coexistence by the ways in which they, often selectively, seek to re-impose forms of order and authority. A key question for Wacquant concerns the extent to which he devotes sufficient attention to these wider ‘non-statutory’ questions of violence and resistance.