Contemporary welfare states attempt to govern unemployment using active labour market policies to reconnect jobseekers with the labour market. Critics suggest these reflect a punitive turn in social policy and are ineffective in any case, leading to debates over the evidence-bases and ideological underpinnings of social policy. Here, we investigate the deeper cultural codes which inform how the state governs the unemployed and how individuals interpret their experiences of work and jobseeking in the labour market. Specifically, we argue that there are unrecognised theological models which anim ... More

Contemporary welfare states attempt to govern unemployment using active labour market policies to reconnect jobseekers with the labour market. Critics suggest these reflect a punitive turn in social policy and are ineffective in any case, leading to debates over the evidence-bases and ideological underpinnings of social policy. Here, we investigate the deeper cultural codes which inform how the state governs the unemployed and how individuals interpret their experiences of work and jobseeking in the labour market. Specifically, we argue that there are unrecognised theological models which animate the contemporary scene – explored through an approach which combines cultural sociology and governmentality studies, a historicisation of the present which we term ‘Archaic Anthropology’. We draw together Nietzsche’s genealogy of the revaluation of suffering, Weber’s thesis on the Protestant work-ethic, Foucault’s analysis of pastoral power and Agamben’s work on how the economy is given a providential meaning in modernity. Through empirical analyses of interviews, ethnographies and social policy we add to this an analysis of the ‘economic theology’ of the welfare state; specifically, we identify a Purgatorial inspiration for workhouses and welfare offices, job-seeking as a form of Pilgrimage, and CVs as confessional declarations of faith. Effectively, the state is dedicated to ‘reform’ – of policies and of individuals, in an almost endless attempt to transform people through purifying suffering. Yet there are alternatives, more forgiving, charitable and generous cultural resources within society.