“How, one might wonder, did social questions about basic human subsistence and welfare become intertwined — even overwhelmed — by economic imperatives? Dana Simmons’s Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France provides essential reading for anyone who has pondered this question. In this well-written and tightly-argued volume, Simmons examines how the concept of minimum needs emerged in a country often seen as the embodiment of the welfare state: France. Simmons’s history brings together the agronomists, chemists, sociologists, anthropologists, and politicians who helped to create a ‘technopolitics of human needs’ during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

Canadian Journal of History

″‘Reason not the need,’ admonishes King Lear. Yet for the past two hundred years scientists have done just that: they have deployed the tools of scientific inquiry to calculate the minimum needed to sustain life. What sort of life? As Dana Simmons shows in this remarkable book, a productive one—specifically, that of the male wage earner and his reproductive family unit. Chemists and agronomists have analyzed the feces and exhalations of laboring men and animals. Social scientists have assembled comparative scales of misery and family budgets. From Lavoisier’s human machines and the Commune’s ration cards to Vichy’s eugenicist vital minimum and the postwar minimum wage, Simmons’ lively and incisive history of ‘need’ transforms our understanding of the underpinnings of modern political economy, the welfare state, and modern science alike. Like Lear, Simmons warns us that to ‘reason the need’ is to value human life ‘cheap as beasts.’”

Ken Alder, Northwestern University

“How did ‘our daily bread’ become the object of scientific experiment, philosophical debate, and mass politics? By untangling the threads of the ‘vital minimum,’ this elegant and eye-opening book provides nothing less than a hidden genealogy of the modern state and biopolitical citizenship. With a fascinating, discipline-scrambling cast of characters—including boxed-in-prisoners, early recyclers, starving families, panting chemists, and earnest economists—Simmons deftly analyzes the material technologies and the natural, moral, and political economies which merged and clashed in the race to set the lower limit on life. A must-read for historians of nineteenth and twentieth-century science, economics, and politics.”

John Tresch, University of Pennsylvania

“An impressive study, drawing upon a range of neglected or unknown evidence, Vital Minimum is the first book to bring the important historical themes of consumption, nutrition science, and statistics together in a single volume—themes which are particularly timely given the economic troubles of recent years. Focusing on France from 1790 to the 1970s, Simmons offers a detailed and rigorous examination of the circumstances under which debates about need arose and were addressed. This is an extremely readable and thought-provoking book.”

E. C. Spary, University of Cambridge

“Dana Simmons’s Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France is an extraordinarily ambitious and highly successful exploration of one of the key concepts lying at the interface of the biological and social sciences: “needs.” Noting the virtual omnipresence of the language of needs in modern-day social discourse, especially where social policy and economics intersect, and its highly moralized tone, Simmons seeks to trace a history of the regime of “needs” and how the term came to take on such power within modern French political culture (and, by extension, within the political cultures of most other European welfare states as well).”

Journal of Modern History