Loïc Wacquant (; born 26 August 1960) is a French sociologist specializing in urban sociology, urban poverty, racial inequality, the body, social theory and ethnography.
Wacquant is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Law and Society, the Global Metropolitan Studies Program, the Institute of Governmental Studies, and the Center for Ethnographic Research. He is also a research associate at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP) in Paris and an organizer of the Ethnographic Café.
Wacquant's research has been recognized with several awards. He was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows for the term 1990–1993. In 1997, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2006, he was granted an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship. Wacquant won the Lewis A. Coser Award of the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association in 2009.
Wacquant is the only sociologist of note to have competed in the Chicago Golden Gloves amateur boxing tournament. The then 29-year-old 5-foot-81⁄2 Frenchman, nicknamed "Busy Louie" and weighing in at 137 lbs, suffered a decision loss in a light-welterweight contest at Saint Andrew's Gym in 1990. Wacquant received a standing eight count in the first round.
Career and education
Wacquant was born in Nîmes and grew up near Montpellier in southern France, where, at age four, he lived for a year in the birthhouse of Auguste Comte. A member of an "educated middle-class family", his father was a botanist and his mother a schoolteacher. As a teenager, "prodded" by his father, Wacquant worked summer jobs as an industrial painter, a car mechanic, a farmhand, and a construction worker. After high school in Montpellier, he received his education in economics and sociology in France and the United States: attending the École des hautes études commerciales de Paris (HEC Paris), the Université Paris Nanterre, Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, Washington, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wacquant was a student and close collaborator of Pierre Bourdieu, whom he met at a public lecture at the École polytechnique in November 1980. Wacquant attended Bourdieu's lectures at the Collège de France and walked home with him at their conclusion. Wacquant has described his walking and talking with Bourdieu through Paris as being like an "accelerated independent study course" and a "fabulous private tutorial for an apprentice sociologist." Wacquant also worked closely with William Julius Wilson at the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in sociology in 1994. Wacquant has called Wilson the "foremost expert on the nexus of race and class in the United States" and Wilson has called Wacquant a "supremely creative scholar". At Chicago, Wacquant took classes with multiple anthropologists: Marshall Sahlins and Bernard Cohn among them. One of his "course buddies" was David Graeber. Wacquant has remarked that he was "negatively influenced by the Chicago school of sociology" and "positively influenced by the power-and-symbolism-in-history mold of Chicago anthropology".
Jean Baudrillard, whom Wacquant has labelled a "flimflam artist", was one of his examiners at Nanterre.
Wacquant has published more than a hundred articles in journals of sociology, anthropology, urban studies, social theory and philosophy. He is a co-founder and former editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography and a contributor to Le Monde diplomatique and the New Left Review. His research has been conducted in the ghettos of Chicago, the banlieues of Paris, and the prisons of the United States and Brazil. In surveying the relevance of his oeuvre to social work, the University of Salford's Ian Cummins, a qualified probation officer with expertise in mental health, has noted that "Wacquant's work locates him firmly on the progressive Left of the political spectrum." Wacquant is a critic of both major American political parties: regarding them as "little more than labels to facilitate the raising of funds" to pay for election campaigns. Alongside dozens of other intellectuels, including Pierre Rosanvallon, Étienne Balibar, Jacques Bouveresse, and Pierre Macherey, Wacquant advocated a vote for Ségolène Royal, in preference to and against Jean-Marie Le Pen and Nicolas Sarkozy, in the first round of the 2007 French presidential election. Nevertheless, Wacquant, with the journalist Serge Halimi, has criticised the Socialist Party for its "abandonment of working-class voters", the seeming duplicity of Lionel Jospin, and its aping of New Labour. Though he has argued that sociologists "are not in the business of being either optimists or pessimists", Wacquant believes that the social sciences can make a "civic contribution of the first order" through the "methodical critique of the categories and topics which weave the fabric of the dominant discourse" and by revealing "possible alternative paths" or "points of bifurcation in the road of history."
Research Wacquant's research explores and links together diverse sociological themes. The human body, urban inequality, ghettoization, precarity, and the development of punishment as an institution aimed at poor and stigmatized populations all feature in his work. His interest in these topics received impetus from his experiences as a functionary of the former French Office of Colonial Research (ORSTOM) in New Caledonia, where he fulfilled his mandatory military service during the period 1983–1985, and as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago during the second half of the 1980s. Commenting on what he found in Chicago in the New York Times in 2003, Wacquant said "I had never seen such scenes of desolation. I remember thinking: It's like Beirut. Or Dresden after the war. It was really a shock." Latterly, Wacquant has affirmed that the "nexus of race, class and space" in New Caledonia made it a "fabulous historical laboratory" and prepared him well for the "apartheid-like" sociospatial inequalities that he later encountered in Illinois. Wacquant's intellectual trajectory and interests are explicated and reflected upon in "The Body, the Ghetto and the Penal State" (2009) and "Carnal concepts in action: The diagonal sociology of Loïc Wacquant" (2023).
In the 2001 article "Deadly symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh", Wacquant offers a 'middle-range' theory, addressing mass imprisonment, that is mainly relevant to contemporary anti-black racism in the United States. Adapting the distinction drawn by the historian Moses Finley between "societies with slaves" and "genuine slave societies", Wacquant concludes that lower-class African Americans now live in the "first genuine prison society of history." For Wacquant, the "novel organizational compound formed by the vestiges of the ghetto and the expanding carceral system" constitutes the fourth 'peculiar institution' that has "shouldered" the task of drawing and enforcing the 'color line' that "cleaves American society asunder": following, in temporal succession, slavery, Jim Crow, and the post-Great Migration urban ghetto of the Northern or Yankee industrial metropolis. According to Wacquant, the ghetto and the prison are structurally and functionally akin, reinforcing each other, with governmental encouragement, to ensure and perpetuate the socioeconomic marginality and symbolic depreciation of the black subproletariat. As Wacquant would have it, the prison should be viewed as a "judicial ghetto" and the ghetto—especially the post-Fordist class-segregated 'hyperghetto'—as a species of "ethnoracial prison". Taken together, these comprise part of a "carceral continuum" that "ensnares a supernumerary population of younger black men, who either reject or are rejected by the deregulated low-wage labor market, in a never-ending circulus between the two institutions". In the wake of industrial divestment, and in contradistinction to the high twentieth-century "dark ghetto" that functioned as a "reservoir of cheap and pliable labor" for urban manufacturers, the 'hyperghetto', like the prison system, serves the "negative economic function of storage of a surplus population devoid of market utility". For Wacquant, whereas the "dark ghetto of mid-century" was ethnoracially homogeneous but socially heterogeneous, and "held within itself a full complement of classes", the "hyperghetto is a novel sociospatial configuration, doubly segregated by race and class, devoid of economic function, and thus stripped of the communal institutions that used to provide succor to its inhabitants." See See also One of the most consequential effects of the "wedding of ghetto and prison into an extended carceral mesh", with its concomitant 'hyper-incarceration' of young African American men (during a period of flattening, and subsequently declining, crime rates in which ethnic patterns of criminal activity have not fundamentally changed), Wacquant notes, has been the revivification of racist ideology, the semiotic conflation of blackness with criminality, and the "return of Lombroso-style mythologies about criminal atavism".
In a 2007 conversation with the American novelist Russell Banks, who felt a "great affinity" with his work, Wacquant reiterated several of the points argued in "Deadly symbiosis":
Caught in the deadly pincer formed by the deregulated labor market and the retrenching welfare state, poor blacks are captured by the penal state, which simultaneously perpetuates and justifies their marginalization by presenting it as the product of their personal failings.
...
With the transition from an industrial to a service economy, the ghetto lost its function of economic extraction and its residents were pushed out of the sphere of wage work. The economy of the street replaced the labor market, and social and criminal insecurity diffused everywhere. Then, to manage this population doubly marginalized on the basis of race and class, the state deployed its police and judicial apparatus. Today, America's Gargantuan carceral system holds under lock nearly one million black men. Imprisonment is generally regarded as a remedy for crime—everybody has the 'crime-and-punishment' schema in their heads. But in reality, rolling out the penal system serves primarily to deal with dispossessed and dishonored populations. The prison boom in America is the response that the state gave to the rise of the disorders caused by economic deregulation and by the collapse of the ghetto as an instrument of ethno-racial control.