“Minimal Frenchmen” offers a strikingly original interpretation of the historical origins of constructs often taken to be unproblematic: minimum standards of life. Simmons examines minimum standards for food, air, and wages in France over an extended period of modernization, locating their origins in research on nutrition, housing, and labor. She draws on ideas in chemistry, medicine, and architecture and illuminates the significance that the categories of ration, prison cell, and budget had for new forms of government. Her main argument–that the stories of “minimal Frenchmen” belong to the history of political economy–approaches the phenomenon of consumption from the bottom up rather than concentrating on accumulation, leisure, or the emergence and expansion of the middle class. This work suggests the centrality of human science, economically marginal populations, and regulation to consumption, one of the most defining features of western modernity and one more typically associated with autonomy and abundance than with dependence and scarcity. “Minimal Frenchmen” shows how needs once believed to be irreducibly minimal and determined by nature actually evolved as subjects of social consensus and mobilization, a process in which the human sciences played key roles.
--2006 Prize Committee: Ellen Herman (chair), Jill Morawski, David Robinson