ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the association of work with respectability, which was a foundational expression of the middle-class story of work. It indicates how social thinkers and politicians put forward a range of arguments about the reasons for unemployment, which suggested particular roles for the state in addressing the problem. The book reveals that the ‘discovery of unemployment’ was accompanied by increasingly detailed categorization of people without work. It illustrates the growing movement to represent ‘labour’ both inside and outside Parliament, in large part to address the problem of unemployment. The book also examines the development and politics of a variety of socialist parties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their relationships to men and women out of work.
