The making of a category of economic understanding in Great Britain (1880–1931): ‘the unemployed’

Evidence-based policy relies on measurement to trigger actions and to manage and evaluate programmes. Yet measurement requires classification: the making of categories of understanding that approximate or represent collective phenomena. In 1931, two decades after implementing the first compulsory unemployment benefits in 1911, the British Government began to carry out a census of out-of-work individuals. Why such an inversion, at odds with the exercise of rational-legal authority, and unlike to its French or German counterparts? To solve this puzzle, we document the making of ‘the unemployed’ as a category of scientific analysis and of public policy in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Our circumscribed contribution to the history of economic thought and methodology informs today’s controversies on the future of work, the weakening of wage labour through the rise in the number of part-time contracts and self-employed workers, as well as the rivalry between the welfare state and private charities with regard to providing impoverished people with some kind of relief.