ABSTRACT
From a vantage point on the continental European sidelines, the characterisation of British discourse about disadvantage, marginalisation and exclusion as a ‘coded debate’ holds immediate attraction. L. Wacquant traces the contemporary history of the term ‘underclass’ to Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s war on poverty era. At that time, it was embedded in structural analyses of poverty; only in the 1980s was it revived as a moral category of urban menace, serving as a modern-day analogy to the ‘depraved poor’ of the last century. The term ‘social exclusion’ is a entrant into British research and policy discourse on disadvantage and poverty. Whilst western Germany, as noted earlier, was inclined to deny the very existence of poverty within its borders, France reacted with concern to the fact that economic prosperity had apparently failed to prevent the social reproduction of severe inequalities. There is, however, an important general issue to raise about the study of youth and social exclusion.
