Walters charts this route into the unemployment question and presents a valuable account of many of its facets. The discussion of the transition of unemployment from a moral problem (based on individual failings), to a social problem, with unemployment just one of the risks inherent in the operation of an industrial economy (and one sufficiently predictable that it could be insured against), to an economic problem (lack of aggregate demand) that appropriate Keynesian measures could counteract and control is nicely done. Similarly, the examination of administrative practices and the way they link to and reinforce certain concepts of unemployment is insightful.

The duality of purpose, in which the genealogy of the social looms as theoretically most important, leads Walters to a series of disclaimers throughout the study that seek to define what the book is not. It is not concerned with the historical experience of unemployment or its causes, and it is not a history of unemployment or of the welfare state. Rather, it is a historical sociology of the governance of unemployment. This technique serves to situate the book but perhaps is overdone and certainly lends a defensive tone to the discussion. This is compounded by the determined avoidance of confronting or testing the interpretation against those from other perspectives.

At times the disclaimers “protest too much.” Walters obviously does not want the book to be considered simply as a history of ideas; yet, in pursuit of his own project, he provides a very good history of the idea of unemployment. Notwithstanding his emphasis on the institutional construction of unemployment, or techniques for governing unemployment and the unemployed, it is the ideas (definitions, conceptualization, and so on) that come through most prominently. The institutions are enmeshed in the production of ideas, new forms of knowledge about unemployment, new ways of categorizing and thinking about the subject. Conceived in this way an institution ostensibly set up to deal with unemployment “does not simply find unemployment already there. It produces unemployment…. In a sense, we are talking about the invention of unemployment” (p. 47).

The author does not consider unemployment a preexisting condition; rather, it is constructed—through discourse and through the practice of government agencies, such as the labor exchanges of the early twentieth century, established to deal with the recently defined phenomenon. This analysis contrasts with social policy or structural accounts of unemployment. But Walters does not confront that literature directly; his account evades it and is offered as another way of looking at the unemployment issue, a supplementary account perhaps.

The social conditions that made it possible to “invent” unemployment are alluded to, and it is recognized (p. 15) that changes in economic and occupational structure played a role in developing the notion of employment (and unemployment). But the failure to discuss adequately the maturation of a capitalist labor market and its first real crisis, the Great Depression in the 1870s, weakens the plausibility of this account of the arrival of the concept of unemployment in that period. The view that concepts reflect reality rather than constitute it, and institutions respond to problems rather than invent them, has much to commend it; avoidance is not an effective strategy for dealing with that position.

With Keynesianism, Walters observes, the seemingly natural link between governance of unemployment and simulataneous government of the unemployed was temporarily broken. “Temporarily” because recent conceptions of unemployment have retured to the notion of individual culpability for the experience, as expressed, for example, in explanations that rely on deficiency of skills and poor attitudes among the unemployed. On this point, Walters presents a case study of New Labour's “New Deal,” a work for welfare program. The initiative is presented as steering a path between the neoliberalism of the Thatcher Conservatives and the statism of old Labour.

The case rests on the view that the New Deal is partly an ethical and moral project and thus “is shielded from the criticism that training and jobseeking schemes are somewhat limited in tackling persistent unemployment because they do little to affect the aggregate supply of jobs; it is about the ethical as much as the economic” (p. 132). Others claim that the New Deal creates few jobs, perhaps 80% of which would have been created anyway, and from which 60% of the participants drop out, and might regard it as an exercise in the politics of manipulation rather than morality. But addressing such claims is beyond the defined scope of the book, which consistently side-steps confrontation with other perspectives.

Ultimately, therefore, the genealogy of the social perspective, with its emphasis on discourse and the “invention” of social phenomena, limits itself by its failure to engage with interpretations that see institutions as responding, in various and often contradictory ways, to social problems that are, however, extant rather than invented.