• 1 This expression comes from Arthur Kemp, director of the Mont Pèlerin Society, who looked for an alt (...)

2The book is cleverly structured to provide a chronological progression with geographical shifts. Chapter 1 is an “anti-mythology” challenging teleological reading of the origins of Universal Basic Income in 18^th and 19^th century political thought in Britain and the US. The second chapter, through the prism of Milton Friedman’s proposal for a negative income tax, demonstrates how a break in thinking about the idea of UBI was taking place, a break initiated by economists sharing an adherence to the principle of consumer sovereignty. This adherence is the main foundation of the specific way of thinking about economic and social problems that unites the supporters of UBI. Chapter 3 revisits the gradual disappearance of the New Deal social order in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, which was replaced by the promotion of an ideology of “welfare without the welfare state.”1 Chapter 4 deals with European debates, particularly in France and the Netherlands in the 1980s. Chapter 5, using the examples of South Africa, India, and Mexico, explains how, in the 1990s and 2000s, the idea of UBI shaped economic and political debates on the best ways to promote development in the “Global South”. The book concludes with an epilogue that takes us back to the US, where the cash transfers experimented within the countries of the Global South over the past 20 years are now being transposed as a new weapon in the war against poverty.

• 2 On 19^th century populism in America, see Jäger (2021).

3Emphasizing the criteria of unconditionality, individualization and universality, the authors point out the paucity of proposals for a UBI in 18^th and 19^th century political philosophies. Agrarianism is an ideology centered on property. Its main advocates (such as populists Henry George and Edward Bellamy) considered that political stability requires either a rotation of land or the taxation of land to compensate non-owners by funding redistribution.2 While many proposals echo the contemporary concept of UBI, most of them make the receipt conditional on working. In the context of societies that were not affluent yet, non-participation in production was widely considered as an act of “social secession” (22). Like agrarianism, the “producerism” of 19^th century European socialists confronts the problem of providing a decent minimum for everyone in order to satisfy basic needs, in other words, to ensure their freedom. They nevertheless broke with the ideal of agrarianism of a republic of smallholders to think about the socialization of property in the wake of the industrial revolutions. But contrary to contemporary projects, the proposed allocations were often based on lists of goods in kind rather than on monetary transfers, in addition to being conditional on work. The only proposal that can truly be considered as the ancestor of UBI is the “territorial dividend” plan of a Belgian Fourierist lawyer, namely Joseph Charlier. This plan consists in an allocation decoupled from both property and work. Its implementation would nevertheless remain null and void (Cunliffe and Erreygers, 2001).

• 3 In 1934, Tinbergen coined the term basikinkomen.

5This chapter, which should be of particular interest to historians of economic thought, relates how Milton Friedman proposed in 1939 “one of the first and most coherent versions of a noncontributory guaranteed cash transfer scheme” (35). This type of scheme, which is immediately thought of as an alternative to social security models in which the state plays a pivotal role in the allocation of resources, gradually gained support of many economists of various political sensitivity (William Hutt, Abba Lerner, George Stigler, Jan Tinbergen, James Tobin).3 Jäger and Zamora Vargas repeatedly stress the importance of the controversies among economists in their history of the idea of UBI: “New interwar economic debates on welfare economics, needs and the state as social planner shaped innovative ways to tackle poverty and inequality” (36). The shift from old welfare economics to new welfare economics in fact favors the emergence of a cognitive infrastructure within which the concept of guaranteed income emerges as the preferred solution to settle the social question. Firstly, the shift from a cardinal to an ordinal conception of utility generates the substitution of the concept of needs for that of preferences and the substitution of an objectivist conception of these needs for a subjectivist one. Such subjectivist approach to needs through the concept of individual preferences then legitimizes the argument of the superiority of cash transfers rather than transfers in kind. Secondly, since needs, as revealed by consumer choices, are considered to be specific to everyone, Arthur Pigou’s argument that cash transfers could generate waste when they “satisfy needs different from those collectively defined as important” no longer holds (38). It is not only seen as an expression of paternalism imposing a normative conception of the good life, but also as outside the legitimate boundaries of economics as established by Lionel Robbins with his plea against value judgment. Thirdly, the utility maximizing objective of old welfare economics, inherited from utilitarianism and having a powerful egalitarian dimension, is explicitly abandoned by Friedman. He favored a freedom maximizing objective, freedom understood in the sense of freedom of choice, namely the absence of coercion in the expression of consumer preferences. Jäger and Zamora Vargas conclude that the elevation of the market price system to a true “civilizational benchmark” is not only due to its economic efficiency properties but also because of its political efficiency in preserving individual freedom: “the end goal was to be free in the market rather than free from the market” (49-50).

• 4 For more details, see Desmarais-Tremblay (2017) and Chirat (2020).

6While Beveridge believed that increasing purchasing power was not a solution to the social question as “many vital needs can be met only by collective action” (46), Friedman thought otherwise, putting aside the analysis of the supply side of the market. Concretely, his scheme aims at establishing a basic income through the definition of a minimum standard of living to be guaranteed by “an equivalent income rather than by collective provision” (43). While it cannot be described as paternalistic, in the sense that it intends to allow individuals to freely express their preferences as consumers, we want to stress that such conception reflects both an essentialist and technocratic approach to basic needs. Friedman leaves it to experts—according to criteria of nutritional intake—to determine the minimum standard of living required. Which rules and procedures would determine who is qualified or not as an expert? Friedman does not seem to have addressed this problem inherent in any technocratic delegation of policy issues. Moreover, such an essentialist approach of basic needs is in opposition to “conventionalist” approach of basic needs, namely conceptions that consider that “they are what society agrees individuals should not be without” (Penz, 1987, 166). In economics, such conventionalist approaches to needs were promoted, for instance, by Richard Musgrave—through his concept of “merit wants”—and John Kenneth Galbraith—when he diagnosed a social imbalance within American capitalism.4 While they explicitly provide a list of basic needs (education, health, housing), the choice of a public or private procurement of these needs is left to the political debate and must be determined through vote rather than by experts. Jäger and Zamora Vargas do not explain in these terms the opposition between essentialist and technocratic conceptions of basic needs and conventionalist and democratic one. But they make clear the process of depoliticization of the definition of basic needs that underpins the worldview that presides over the justification of unconditional cash transfers as a privileged means of fighting poverty, which is reconceptualized in passing as an essentially individual and monetary phenomenon (53).

• 5 Friedman rejected such a label. For instance, he wrote to Galbraith on October 1, 1978: “I have alw (...)

7The growing popularity of guaranteed income proposals in the United States from the 1950s, including Friedman’s negative income tax, is stimulated by the recognition that the social order inherited from the New Deal has failed to address the problem of poverty, despite the substantial increase in per capita living standards. Jäger and Zamora Vargas emphasize the contrast between two modalities of social control of the economy. While in the New Deal paradigm, poverty is not considered in isolation from all other economic relationships and the solutions have in common that they aim at reducing dependence on market mechanisms, proponents of the UBI paradigm generally denounce the inefficiency and obsolescence of increased public spending and full employment policies. Through the lens of the contemporary concept of UBI, the book thus provides a fresh reading of the debates between various liberal Keynesian economists, such as Walter Heller, Galbraith, Leon Keyserling and James Tobin, or sociologists, such as Michaël Harrington. The authors argue that the seeds of “reactionary Keynesianism” under Kennedy and the emergence of the “New Left”, based on an anti-paternalist and anti-statist ideology—led to the emergence of support from the left of the political spectrum for Friedman’s scheme, that Jäger and Zamora labelled as “conservative”.5 Convinced that technological progress was biased towards polarization of the workforce and that structural unemployment was substantial, many new left intellectuals wanted, from the 1960s onwards, to “dispense with work as the central category for human emancipation” (71).

• 6 On Foucault’s political thought and its link with neoliberalism, see Dean and Zamora (2021).

9In Europe, the Netherlands was the first country to experience a national debate on the possibility of implementing a universal income from the 1980s onwards, with a number of intellectuals arguing for the decoupling of work and income in a context of stagflation and in the light of the US debate (94). At the same time, “New Left intellectuals” such as Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, André Gorz, Herbert Marcuse, and Ivan Illich all insisted on the autonomy of the individual as a fundamental value. That led them to reconsider both “socialism’s emphasis on the dignity of labor” and the very definition of such concept of labor (99). It is no longer a question of liberation thanks to work, but of liberation from work seen as the privileged vehicle of the alienation of the individual. In both France and Netherlands, Jäger and Zamora Vargas point out that proposals for guaranteed incomes were based on two core beliefs. First, technological progress liberates from the imperatives of productivity that foster authoritarian coordination within the firm and allows for increasing free time. Second, the New Left was eminently suspicious of the state, as illustrated by the case of France. On the intellectual level, Foucault laments for instance that social security led to “standardize the conduct of individuals” and to “impose a particular way of life.”6 On the political level, the deuxième gauche, embodied by Michel Rocard, undertook to “destateify French society” (109-110).

• 7 On the thesis of “the convergence of the extremes” in economics, see Olson and Clague (1971).

10The description of the intellectual path of Philip Van Parijs is a particularly stimulating moment. Van Parijs is one of contemporary main advocates of a maximalist version of UBI, in the name of negative freedom rather than freedom as the ability to satisfy one’s needs. A close reader of economics, Van Parijs sees universal income as a substitute for labour market regulations such as the minimum wage, as well as a way of shattering “the simplistic beauty of the left-right axis” (117). André Gorz diagnosed at the same time the “partial osmosis” between “neoliberals and neosocialists”.7 While he was initially skeptical, insofar as it would make work “optional” and “absolve society from concerning itself with the equitable distribution of necessary work” (121), Gorz finally rallied to Van Parijs’s arguments in favor of UBI. The changes in the nature of work, the difficulty of measuring work and the fact that any activity can be considered as work explain that he changed his mind. The reconstruction of Van Parijs’s (1984) and Gorz’s (1985) thoughts enables Jäger and Zamora Vargas to exemplify their general thesis that the two intellectual waves of anti-statism on the one hand and post-workerism on the other favor the adherence to proposals for a UBI.

• 8 On the differences between technocracy and populism, see also Schroeder (2020, 25-26).

14The book concludes with an epilogue which looks at how direct cash transfers, first experimented in the Global South to alleviate poverty, are now being implemented in the US, especially under the patronage of corporations of platform capitalism. Jäger and Zamora Vargas attribute the enthusiasm for cash transfers to three main factors: the process of privatization of needs, the retreat of work as the basis of social identity and the disorganization of civil society (retreat of mass parties and trade unions). By the term “technopopulism”, Jäger and Zamora Vargas refer to the idea that people are considered to know best what is good for them, an idea at the basis of the legitimization process of UBI. They also argue that many populists believe that “reducing poverty does not imply a top-down approach to needs or pushing the market out of social life” (171). Building on the work of Bickerton and Accetti (2017; 2021), they claim that “technocrats and populists” share “an abstract view of human needs” (171). One would therefore like to know which contemporary political ideologies have resisted this trend of abstraction of needs which appear as a structural one since the interwar? If technopopulism is considered by the Jäger and Zamora Vargas as an ideology, either thin or thick, a clear conceptual characterization would have helped the reader. They explain that the “technopopulist” dimension of UBI is embedded in the fact that the preference for direct cash transfers would be a manifestation of the rejection of political intermediation that technocrats and populism share. But paradoxically, as Caramani (2017, 60) points out, populists and technocrats also share the idea that the general will (or public interest) is unitary and objective. Therefore, if public interest can be objectively known, would transfers in kind not be potentially superior to transfers in cash, especially if pure collective goods are included in the list of goods that satisfy assumedly objective basic needs? Proponents of UBI would answer, against both populists and technocrats, that such view runs counter the pluralism of values characterizing modernity. Thus, although thought-provoking, the complexity of the relationship between populism and technocracy might be too massive for the insights of the epilogue to convince all the readers.8 This reservation is nonetheless minor compared to the way in which the book fulfils its objectives and invites us to a salutary reflection on the question of the right balance to be found between individual and collective processes of satisfaction and production of basic needs.