Growing social inequalities represent a major concern associated with the Digital Revolution. The article tackles this issue by exploring how welfare regulations and redistribution policies can be rethought in the age of digital capitalism. It focuses on the history and enduring crisis of social citizenship rights in their connection with technological changes, in order to draw a comparison between the industrial and the digital scenario. The first section addresses the link between the Industrial Revolution and the genesis of social rights. (...) It describes the latter as a legal ‘machine’ designed to offset the imbalances produced by the technological movement of industrialization. The second and third sections introduce the notion of ‘industrial citizenship’ to describe the architecture of social rights in mature industrial societies and to contend that European systems of welfare are still largely modeled on an industrial standard. The fourth part investigates the impact of the Digital Revolution on this model of social citizenship. It identifies debates on basic income as a major trajectory for redesigning welfare regulations in a post-industrial era, and the digital user as a crucial emerging subject of rights. The final part explores how digital users could be entitled to social rights as data suppliers. To this end, it introduces the idea of ‘digital-social rights’ resulting from the incorporation of welfare and redistribution principles into emerging digital rights. Hence, it proposes a legal-political framework for the redistribution of the revenues generated by data in the form of a ‘digital basic income’ for citizens of cyberspace. (shrink)

How should the notion of civics be rethought in the digital age and within the infosphere? The commentary addresses this question by focusing on two main issues. The first part delves into the effects of the dynamics of “surveillance capitalism” and datafication processes on the possible developments of the idea of civics in the digital sphere. It stresses the need to set the issue of users’ data rights at the center of digital civic initiatives. The second part explores the notions (...) of political community and membership that should underpin the idea of digital civics. It argues that the diverse range of values and virtues which shape civics on a global scale should be taken into consideration to define the spatial scope—or political geography—of the community to which digital civic initiatives are addressed. (shrink)

This article explores the forms of housing and living of the subaltern classes in the French urban context of the early 19th century affected by the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. It focuses on the social representations and discourses developed by the liberal elites in order to retrace the genesis of the concepts of “domestic comfort” and “public hygiene”. The cholera epidemic of 1832 and the growth of the hygienist movement are identified as crucial driving forces for the emergence (...) of plans of urban and housing reform for the working class aimed at protecting the social order and public health. (shrink)

Starting from Miguel Abensour’s contribution, the article addresses an interpretation of the concept of utopia aiming to stress its political nature and to place it within the movement of emancipation emerged throughout the nineteenth century. The first part of the article points out four fundamental dimensions of the Abensourian concept of utopia, whilst the second part aims to locate it within the broader context of the French Marxism debates and, in this way, to link it with Jacques Rancière’s thought of (...) utopia. The conclusion provides a critical interpretation of the considered idea of utopia and maps out the political-intellectual environment emerged around that idea in France at the end of the 1990s. (shrink)

The essay explores some of the processes through which the ‘working class’ emerged both as a collective subjectivity and as a field of social science inquiry and public policies in 19th century France. Starting from the 1831 Canuts revolt, widely recognized as the stepping stone of the European workers’ movement, the first part retraces the process of the ‘making’ of a social and political subjectivity by stressing the relevance of its linguistic and discursive dimension. The second part examines the emergence (...) of the empiric method of the modern social sciences through new strategies of inquiry on urban misery, which progressively focuses on the ‘working class’ and on labour conditions as a field of knowledge, rights, and governmental practices. (shrink)