ABSTRACT
This article aims to show how labour came to be an “acceptable” commodity through the institutionalization of salaried employment. For the liberal thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century, the dependent nature of salaried labour rendered it unacceptable; and this liberal denunciation was inherited by Marx, who, by making the alienation of the worker a characteristic feature of the capitalist social order, was able, in contrast to the liberal economists, to create a conceptual framework in which to think about salaried employment. Certain “bourgeois” economists, such as Tocqueville and Courcelle-Seneuil, also reacted against the liberal doxa: in the spirit of institutionalism, they considered that wage dependence should be accepted as a positive social fact. For them, the challenge was to conceive a form of subordination that was limited in time as well as to the place of work, such as would finally be established in law at the beginning of the twentieth century.
