| In January of 1843, a young chemist sat in a prison cell with a pinwheel device in one hand and a bowl of excrement at his side. His ten-hour ordeal served to establish a standard air volume for France's new penitentiaries. Chemists in this period invented a new paradigm for measuring the human economy: the minimum standard of living. In 1840s France a complex of concepts emerged for quantifying and normalizing life functions. Minimum standards fixed quantities of food, air and other consumer goods deemed necessary to sustain life. I claim that by the twentieth century, a wide field of measurement and intervention focused specifically on the consuming body. Its practitioners shared a common program: to maintain bodily functions at the lowest possible expense of goods and money. Consumption and waste became the object of intensive scientific optimization.;The dissertation examines four fields: the science of nutrition, wartime rationing, domestic architecture, and the minimum wage. Chemists formulated scientific standards for dietary intake and breathable air. State administrators quickly applied these measures to schools, hospitals and prisons. Modernist architects in the twentieth century seized upon physiological standards as a means to revolutionize domestic architecture. Economists and workers' associations battled over scientific norms for thrifty workers' budgets. Until the late 1960s, minimum standards served as an instrument of scientific consensus. The "minimum," once a strictly mathematical term, became a key social category in modern France.;The notion of minimum needs is a vital element of political economy and a foundation for modern social regulation. Yet this seemingly natural category lacks a critical historical account. My dissertation seeks to provide one. Over the course of a century, scientists constructed a new subject for state administration: a class of minimal consumers. This innovation exposed "paupers," dependent populations, and finally all low-budget households to expanded state intervention in their daily lives. The social science of consumption permitted a rationalized apparatus of poor aid and laid the ground for a discourse of economic rights. I argue that a new science of consumption set the conditions for the modern administration of scarcity. |
