How should this ‘social state’ be situated within the history of the state as such? The Western state is not a timeless and universal institutional form, but an invention of pontifical lawyers between the 11th and 13th centuries—contrary to a tenacious legend that places the modern age in a direct filiation from Greco-Roman antiquity and spirits away the medieval melting-pot from which it arose. The idea of the immortal state was modelled on the life of angels, who have a beginning but no end; it has undergone three metamorphoses since its birth. The first dates from the Protestant Reformation, which established sovereign powers emancipated from the Pope, though not from all spiritual reference. The second, inaugurated in France by the Revolution of 1789, saw the disappearance of this balance between temporal power and spiritual authority, conferring on the state an omnipotence that only a new separation of powers could limit. The third metamorphosis was a response to the crisis of legitimacy that struck this omnipotent entity when, with the rise of industrial capitalism and scientific positivism, it began to be seen as simply an instrument of administration or domination. It was this crisis that led to the birth of the social state.

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The social state was born from a metamorphosis of this type. Over barely a century, the industrial revolution had subjected human labour to transformations of an unprecedented scope. This change was both technological—with the increased power of steam engines, exposing the army of workers operating them to new physical risks—and legal, with the rise in the hiring of waged workers, which treated labour as something freely negotiable, separate from the human person. The combination of these two factors proved deadly for the new labouring classes, to the point of imperilling their reproduction in the industrialized zones. Social law arose to neutralize this danger, as a technique for humanizing technology. By protecting physical and economic health and security, over the duration of a life-time, it served to domesticate machines and put them at the service of social well-being, rather than endangering human life. And by the same token, it made the exploitation of labour as a commodity both economically and politically durable.