Robert Castel was born in France in 1933 and is a sociologist and labour historian. He is director of the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) in Paris and a member of the Centre d'etudes des mouvements sociaux (Study Centre for Social Movements). He is one of the founders of the Groupe d'analyse du social et de la sociabilité. As Pierre Bourdieu's pupil, he worked with him in the 1960s. He later studied under Michel Foucault, combining sociological analysis with the study of psychoanalysis, laying down the foundation of what is now known as critical sociology. In recent years his work has principally centred on the analysis of the dynamics of exclusion and marginalisation ("social disaffiliation"), studying the citizens of post-modern society with their ever-increasing security problems.

His publications include Les Métamorphoses de la question sociale, une chronique du salariat (The metamorphosis of the social question: a chronicle of wage labour) (1999), Propriété privée, propriété sociale, propriété de soi (Private property, social property, personal property) (2001), L'insecurité sociale. Qu'est-ce qu'etre protege? (Social insecurity. What it means to be protected) (2003) and La discrimination négative (Negative discrimination) (2007), where he describes the effects of social insecurity produced by globalisation: unstable jobs, racism, impossibility of planning the future, etc.

WSS's interest in Robert Castel's work is due to his ideas on the perception of risk and the sense of fear and bewilderment, which overwhelms post-modern individuals. According to him, this is the result of a late capitalist, neo-liberal ideology, which ruthlessly divides the world into winners and losers, rejecting all collective and shared ideas as useless heritage that is out of synch with the times. Although the modern nation state has been able to ensure a fairly good level of public security over the last 25 years, it can no longer provide security in the social sense, resulting in an increasingly frequent sensation of insecurity today. We have moved away from the pre-modern age, where the family, the community and corporations offered "close protection" to individuals, in exchange for their liberty, to the modern age with the genesis of the modern nation state, which offers protection for property (of goods and of persons). His statement is therefore linked to the question of security for the physical person and his property. It was the salaried society that made it possible for those without resources to have access to so-called social property, or work related resources. It thus became possible for those who had been left out of the protection afforded by private property, to finally aspire to independence and security. The result was a society which was still basically unequal, but was made up of "similars", with interdependent relationships between them, thanks to the common pool of rights and resources, guaranteed to them by the state. In this sense, a stable employment situation resulted in generating a series of rights (welfare, redundancy payments, health and accident insurance, etc).

These conditions no longer exist today. The crisis of the welfare state, which was increasingly seen as an obstacle blocking the development of free enterprise and forcing the burden of welfare costs on an economy which is on the brink of recession, has also resulted in new thinking about defending workers' rights and interests. As Castel points out in L'insecurité sociale (Social insecurity) (2003), the current version of capitalism has favoured a generalised mobilization of labour relations, pushing the worker to become "his own promoter" outside the standard linear "Ford-type" model. Some people have benefited as a result, but for others it has resulted in a worse situation. This meant the return of the so-called "dangerous classes", or people we had to protect ourselves from, those without social links and who had been "left out". As a consequence, wherever the social protection situation broke down, the demand for the maintenance of law and order, for security and for "zero tolerance", increased.

This means that greater security is only possible in the arena of public and collective policy that aims to mitigate inequalities and marginalization. When these problems also concern those who are already at risk of social exclusion, they cause fear and intolerance in public and thus political opinion, and the issue of security moves from that of the social context to one of public order. This widens the current boundaries of the welfare state, which is called on to respond to increased expectations of protection from the State, driven by the same logic as welfare benefits which made people more autonomous from their community of origin, the family. In this situation, where the old guarantee system is undergoing a crisis, individuals who are used to security are consumed with the fear of losing it and become fragile and demanding at the same time. Traditional protections become weaker and new risks for humanity (industrial, health, ecological, natural) appear, creating frustration that leads to distorting reality and causing a disproportionate influence on it, increasing the demand for social security. This type of situation, on the other hand, fuels another one, a "generalised undiscriminating risk ideology" used by the neo-liberal culture to ordain the end of public protection and justify the inevitability of private insurance. In this sense, according to Castel, there is a close connection between the explosion of risks, hyper individualization of procedures and privatisation of insurance.

The challenge of the future must therefore be to guarantee rights to people despite the discontinuity of the job market. This means that to overcome what the French sociologist terms "security-related frustration", an effect of the extremely high expectations of protection created until today by our "insuring societies", it is becoming urgent to act against the precarious nature of labour by "domesticating the market", and reviving that inseparable relationship between the constitutional State and the welfare State which forms the basis of the European social model. This objective fits the attainment of a new society "of similars" built on the idea and the practice of social citizenship determined by the requirements of the people at all levels: local, national and today more than ever, transnational.

This is a formidable challenge because the outcome is uncertain, but it is a necessary one. A mechanical replication of a protection model based on standard types of work would simply exacerbate the dualism between those who have secure jobs and those who don't. In Castel's opinion, the attempts being undertaken to reform welfare, very capably buffer situations of social exclusion at risk of worsening. However, in a minimum welfare situation they risk turning protection into aid, often of mediocre quality, limited to the most deprived. If social protection is the basic condition to ensure that all persons can continue to be part of a society of similars, the welfare state cannot limit itself to compensating for the poverty of those in extreme situations, nor can it indemnify damages. It must offer all citizens protection against the threats of modern society, based on selective criteria which take into account the needs and incomes of each one. At the same time it must also offer social promotion measures, for example favouring the entrance of weaker categories (women and youth) to the work market, offering continuing education and supplementary pay for workers with discontinuous careers, earmarking resources and services for self-insufficient elderly persons, etc.

Work is the main source (though not the only one) - of redistribution of rights and income. Therefore it is in this arena that an essential part of social destiny continues to play out for a large chunk of humanity. Castel's hope is to reform the work charter and transfer the right to work to the working person (an example is the right to training, distributed over the entire professional career), to reconcile job mobility and protection. This would be a system of "active security" sustained collectively and co-financed by the state and business, able to respond to the demands of individual citizens within a collective protection framework. It would enable the citizen-worker to use flexibility (managed today mainly by industry/business) for his/her own benefit as well, with a view to integrating work and social life better. There is no doubt that innovation and quality would develop, but there would also be benefits for society as a whole, measured in terms of social cohesiveness, in the form of conditions that remedy or even prevent the fears of its members.