The Origins of the “Cause of the Poor”
Abstract
A vast literature exists on contemporary transformations on welfare state models in Europe. However, these works tend to be focused on the study of social policies embodying these transformations. This article defends the idea that new social policies are preceded by a process of requalification of the social problems by using new categories such as poverty/new poverty instead of inequality or unemployment. The social logics of this process of requalification are linked to the transformations in the structure of the Catholic field after the Second World War, as well as the transformations in the intellectual field since the 1960s. These transformations have a transnational nature and affect countries with different welfare state regimes.