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Red Judges and Labor Law Until 1936, the relations between employers and wage-earners were not defined by a specific jurisprudence ; they were regulated, instead, by common law, except in the case of disputes. These were handled by special tribunals, the conciliation boards (conseils de prud'hommes), composed equally of elected employers and wage-earners, charged with reconciliation, rather than with judging the conflicts which might occur in this area. Recruited largely from among the small artisans and highly skilled workers (who were often militant unionists), these bodies had an unusual side, as can be seen from the simple and relatively informal settings of their meetings. A form of popular justice, the institution of the conciliation boards had a clientele consisting of workers and apprentices in the traditional economic sectors (woodworking, building trades, etc.) ; their expectations were not so much juridical in character (e.g. finding the employer guilty of some crime) as practical (e.g. recovering monies due to workers). Starting in 1936, this kind of work-related justice underwent a major transformation. Under the influence of a small group of jurists, there developed, at first, a new juridical theory in which the relations between workers and employers were analyzed less in terms of individual relations than in terms of collective relations. This theory, which was elaborated with the aid and advice of the unions, the political parties, and the law schools, was the basis of a movement for the creation of a labor law in the proper sense of the term. And since the war, this subject has become an independent branch of jurisprudence. Simultaneously, the increasing number of labor disputes between wage-earners and white-collar workers, on the one hand, and their employers, on the other hand, led to the appearance before the boards of two new personages, the union lawyer and union legal adviser. These legal specialists introduced into the tribunals, which previously were oriented toward reconciliation, a new juridical dimension, that of «stating the law». But, because of their very composition, these bodies were unable to undertake this task. The union CFTC which had little foothold in the arbitration boards, turned away from this institution and sought other ways of putting its ideas into effect, notably in the domain of the penal System. The more repressive judges then found themselves at a critical juncture and attemtped to endow their office with a new definition. The problems stemming from union disputes, which would henceforth corne before their courts, served them as an expedient and a stepping stone in the struggle they were carrying on within the judicial field itself.

The War on Poverty in the United States : The Status of Poverty of an Affluent Society. Two observations suffice to illustrate the paradox of poverty in the United States. Of all the advanced industrial countries, the United States is among those which provide the worst treatment for their ill and poor. From the reports of the Commissioners on the Poor at the beginning of the nineteenth century to J.K. Galbraith, poverty has generally been viewed as an atypical phenomenon in American society, an «afterthought», to use Galbraith's term —a kind of incidental, archaic, or exotic fact. This is because a so-called affluent society is not a society in which poverty does not exist but one in which poverty has no proper status ; it is not a society in which wealth is universal but one in which the justification of wealth dominates discussion of the subject. This denial of poverty as a social and political phenomenon determines the way that welfare agencies handle the ill and the poor. Naturally, poverty does pose a serious social problem in the sense that beyond a certain critical threshold the difficultes it engenders must be dealt with on a collective basis. However, it cannot be admitted that poverty might be social in its origins and significance. The paradox of poverty in an affluent society rests on the foliowing notion : poverty, properly speaking, does not exist : there are only poor people. In other words, the poor are individuals who themselves bear the chief responsibility for their condition. As a result, the politics of welfare centers around the management of individual deficiencies. This interpretation makes it possible to provide a coherent account of the principal strategies in America's struggle against poverty (or against the poor), from the construction of alsmhouses in the first half of the nineteenth century to President Johnson's «War on Poverty», not forgetting the politics of the New Deal. Two historical constants may be noted in this regard : first, the refusal to recognize that the poor have rights whose interpretation is independent of the views of the agencies charged with dispensing assistance ; and second, the fact that the practices of social work are based primarily on individualistic conceptions (which at first were moralistic and later became «psychologistic»). Accordingly, there exists an organic relationship between the denial, in the political realm, of a status to poverty and the proliferation of «psychologistic» techniques on the level at which poverty is actually handled. The present essay attempts to elucidate this relationship by examining the different approaches to public assistance which have succeeded each other in the United States in the last century. It is found that almost all the American institutions specialized in the management of poverty (including the recently established federal bureaucracies) operate with notions which are ultimately psychological in nature, for the very reason that their definition of the person receiving assistance is one which denies him a social status right from the start.

Critical Reflections on Behavior Therapy. The notion of mental health is currently the subject of a lively debate. The parties involved are, on the one hand, those who claim to employ modem science for the purpose of rehabilitating people and allowing them to lead normal lives and, on the other hand, those who reject, in the name of individual liberty (the nature of which is itself problematical), the «therapeutic society» and its tendency towards ever-increasing control. In this debate, the panoply of therapeutic methods, the rapid increase in the number of educators of all sorts, and the «medicalization» of deviant practices have recently been strongly re-inforced by a new ally : behavior therapy. With an impressive arsenal of aseptic techniques, it confidently presents itself as the efficient therapy, its principal argument residing in its scientific origins. Since it is, in fact, founded upon the experimental study of behavior and the «laws» that the behaviorists have formulated, it enables its practioners, at little cost, to make neurotic symptoms «disappear». And for the behavior therapists, these symptoms are the disease. In reality, this efficacy must be examined in a way which brings to light the background of the «clientele» treated by these therapists and the ephemeral nature of the «cures» they obtain. The head of the behaviorist movement, Skinner, who has inspired numerous methods for aiding people to readapt to normal life, deserves credit for clearly voicing the ideological aim of these experiments on human behavior. The cosmetic liberalism by which the dominant classes seek to preserve their power has been quick to adopt such experiments. For they provide it with unobtrusive instruments for maintaining the social order which, thanks to their scientific basis, are virtually immune to attack.