Outcasts or citizens? : the poor and the social sciences

First published online: 28 July 2009A logic of exclusion-inclusion nowadays dominates the debate on poverty and social policies, namely through categories such as underclass and social exclusion. Thus, poverty becomes an essentially moral problem, rather than political, and the poor are treated as a group apart. Though different, both concepts work to reinforce the fracture separating the poor, and increasing a process of erosion of citizenship ties—what Madeleine Rébérioux denounces as being today a crisis not only of work, but of political and civic ties as well