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Social Policies and
Emotions
A Look from the Global South
Angélica De Sena
and
Adrian Scribano
Social Policies and Emotions
Angélica De Sena • Adrian Scribano
Social Policies and

Emotions
A Look from the Global South
Angélica De Sena Adrian Scribano
Gino Germany Research Institute CONICET
University of Buenos Aires Gino Germany Research Institute
Buenos Aires City, Argentina University of Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires City, Argentina
Social Observatory
University of La Matanza
La Matanza
Buenos Aires, Argentina
ISBN 978-3-030-34738-3 ISBN 978-3-030-34739-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34739-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
This book is fully dedicated to our families for their love and patience as
always. We want to express our thanks to the staff of Palgrave Macmillan,
especially Anca Pusca and Katelyn Zingg, for their generous support. We
must underline the editing work carried out by Majid Yar, with his usual
kindness and excellence. Surely we have not exhausted in this book all the
connections between social policies and emotions, but we are sure that the
critical discussion of these topics should remain a central axis of the social
sciences. We also offer enormous thanks to Aldana Boragnio and Andrea
Dettano for their extensive collaboration.
v
Contents
1 Social Policies and Emotions: A Look from the Global

South 1
2 State, Public Policies and Social Policies: Synthesis of

Some Points of Departure 13
3 Social Policies, Bodies/Emotions and Politics of

Sensibilities 31
4 Normalized Societies and the Assisted Citizen 49
5 Compensatory Consumption: A New Way of Building

Sensibilities from the State? 71
6 Poor Already Hits: The Voice of Violented Women 93
7 Educational Practices and Management of Sensibilities:

Learning to Feel109
8 Universality, Targeting or Massiveness? An Unfinished

Discussion125
9 The Aid as Central Axis of the Politics of the Sensibilities

of the Conditional Cash Transfers Programmes145
vii
viii Contents
10 Weak Bodies: Energy, Food Policies and Depredation of

Common Goods169
11 The Occupability as a Form of Social Policy187
Index203
List of Figures
Fig. 7.1 Sensibilities 122

Fig. 11.1 Conditional cash transfer programmes in Argentina throughout
the life cycle. 2019. (Source: Prepared) 191
ix
CHAPTER 1
Social Policies and Emotions: A Look

from the Global South
The central objective of this book is to make evident the connections

between social policies and the politics of sensibilities. Using an analytical
perspective that articulates and potentiates the sociology of bodies/emo-
tions with the sociology of social policies, we try to show how social poli-
cies build sociabilities, experiences and sensibilities, thereby producing
processes of conflict avoidance and consecration of the given. It is intended
to facilitate the observation of the processes by which the state manages to
neutralize the effects of inequality, producing a containment of the sub-
jects through compensatory consumption.
Social Policies, Emotions and the Global South

Emotions are elaborated, circulated and reproduced in and through
social practices since they are practical. As we will see later, an emotion is
characterized, among other things, by being a practice that transforms
the world (sensu Sartre). Social policies are state actions, which, among
other traits, are qualified by deliberately seeking to suture failures of state,
market and civil society in the equitable reproduction of the social struc-
ture, that is, changing the social world by suturing their conflict breaks.
In the process of the aforementioned social intervention, the state devel-
ops sociabilities, experiences and sensibilities. Each state action evokes,
manages and uses the capacity of emotions as a basic element to operate
the conflict suture and thus transform the perceptions and sensations of
© The Author(s) 2020 1

A. De Sena, A. Scribano, Social Policies and Emotions,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34739-0_1
2 A. DE SENA AND A. SCRIBANO
the subjects before the failures that originate the various conflict net-
works upon which social policies are focused.
It is in this way that it is possible to understand how states are inter-
ested, in emotional management and regulation on the one hand, and, on
the other hand, in the elaboration of intervention practices that contain
and channel absences of enjoyment through consumption through direct
state actions, whether they are in the form of services, money and/or
“accesses”.
The book contextualizes the situation of violence that women experi-
ence as a starting point to understand the current state of social policies,
and then tries to describe how the “place” and the “value” of education
has become a central feature of social policies in order to disband conflict,
and in the same vein shows the connections between bodies with little
energy available for action and food policies. The text also explores the
“practical conceptions” regarding universal, focused or massive policies, as
well allowing us to rethink massiveness, “occupability”, intergenerational-
ity and “lifetime coverage” as central features of social policies today. It
seeks to make clear the “place of help” in the experiences narrated by the
subjects receiving a conditional cash transfer programme. In the same way,
it points out how receiving a set of benefits from the state “keeps busy”
the beneficiaries in such a way that it reinforces the character of all social
policies as a conflict avoidance mechanism. The last two chapters explain
the emergence of a social phenomenon that, at least, has been consolidat-
ing in the last sixteen years in Latin America in general, and Argentina in
particular—the compensatory consumption system—and emphasize the
emergence of the “assisted citizen” as a result of this.
Taking as a starting point the empirical data on Argentina and the
information associated with the problems of social policies in Latin
America and the rest of the world, the book presented here attempts to
elaborate a view from the Global South. The chapters that compose it
make it clear how the elaboration of sensibilities through social policies is
part of a double process of coloniality: (1) the one carried out at the plan-
etary level that results in colonial time/space enclaves that constitute the
Global South, and (2) the one carried out on a personal level as a colonial-
ity of the inner planet (sensu Melucci). It is from this double perspective
that many of the consequences of social policies are colonial.
There are no objective possibilities to explain Argentina or Latin
America in particular, and the Global South in general, without accepting
1 SOCIAL POLICIES AND EMOTIONS: A LOOK FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH 3
its current colonial situation. Beyond the proximities and distances,

beyond the agreements and disagreements that may exist between postco-
lonial, post-Western and/or decolonial approaches, with what will be pre-
sented here, the central “problem” of these perspectives is sustained; and
our fundamental divergence is its diagnosis of the state of imperialism,
dependency and the colonial situation. Our argument has, as its starting
point and horizon of understanding, the acceptance that the current mate-
rial conditions of existence and the dialectic of world domination—at the
beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century—are character-
ized by a “renewed” colonial situation that we designate as post-
independentist. This designation is intended to emphatically emphasize
the persistence of colonial ties and the inadequacy of the description of the
current period as postcolonial. For us, this situation can be characterized
as follows:
1. Capitalism has been transformed (emphasizing some of its previous

features) into a large predatory energy machine—especially bodily—
that has configured and redefined its social bearability mechanisms
and devices for the regulation of sensations while being a great
international repressive apparatus.
2. The privileged route of connection between collective actions,
phantoms and social fantasies is the acceptance that the body is the
locus of conflict and order. It is the place and locus of conflict where
a good part of the logic of contemporary antagonisms passes. From
here, it is possible to observe the constitution of a political economy
of morality, that is, some modes of sensibilities, practices and repre-
sentations that put domination into words.
3. At present, the emergence of religion of colonial helplessness can be
observed. Thus, the (institutional) policy must create the new reli-
gion of the dependent colonial countries that replaces the—already
old—trinity of the “industrial religion” based on unlimited produc-
tion, absolute freedom and unrestricted happiness, for the trinity of
the expelled composed of mimetic consumption, solidarity and res-
ignation. A religion whose liturgy is the construction of social fanta-
sies, in which dreams fulfil a central function as a kingdom of heaven
on earth and the sociodicy of frustration, plays the role of narrating
and making present the phantasmal hells of the past, now made
present continuous.
The occupation and expropriation to which the entire populations of

the planet are subjected by global capitalism is imperial aggression that,
although it takes various forms and densities, manifests itself in colonial
relations.
There is no colony without a state of dependency, and this state is not
verified without the imperial plot imposed by the “dominant groups” at
the global level. These three ways of presenting the subjection on a plan-
etary scale are indeterminate, complex and changing forms that the capi-
talist system of exploitation and expropriation adopts to model, maintain
and reproduce itself. From the perspective of the upward twist of the con-
stitutive spiral of global domination practices embedded in the aforemen-
tioned forms, the colony, as usurpation, overlaps and condenses the
expropriation states of dependence, which, in turn, implies the imposition
of the governance of the groups that “represent” the imperial situation.
From a downward perspective on the same spiral, the imperial situa-
tion, with the concentration of capabilities to “make-the-world”, enables
and promotes the inescapable depredation in the structural dependence
between cities, territories, nations and states that produce and consume
the “wealth” that, in turn, is anchored in the planetary dispossession orga-
nized as a colony. It is in this context that we maintain that:
1. When there are on the earth social groups that centralize the con-
centrated capacity of the imposition of needs, desires and actions
constituting a political economy of morality that enshrines excess
expropriations—thus avoiding all forms of autonomous practices—
it is faced with a modality of imperialism;
2. When there is a coalescence of relations between territories, nations
and states that socialize the destructive effects of the processes of
accumulation of environmental assets, and these relations are condi-
tioned by the state of the productive fields of high profitability—
structured by means of the connections of the global dominant
classes—we are facing a situation of dependency;
3. When there is class segregation behind walls that contain and repro-
duce the moments of expropriation and dispossession, enshrined in
the racialization of the relationship between colonist and colonized,
the current colonial situation becomes effective.
It is not our interest here to discuss “philosophically, punctually and in

detail” the distances that separate us from the various approaches (and
authors) that have thematized the relationship between coloniality and
knowledge in the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of
the twenty-first, as well as the proximity that binds us to them. The mul-
tiple works of Quijano, Lander, Escobar, Coronil, Dussel, Mignolo and
Castro-Gomez (among others), strongly associated with various inten-
tions to “reconstruct” the possibilities of thinking from the margins of
coloniality, beyond existing differences among them, are those that surely
mark the field of discussion in which the present work is inscribed.
Therefore, it is appropriate to emphasize that the presentation made here
does not have any “overtaking” claim, but rather slides the aforemen-
tioned field of discussion towards the constitution of another space where
the Social Sciences of the South can discuss the current colonial situation.
This book was written with the conviction that elaborating a critical
view of social policies as constructors of sensibilities is a task with a double
relevance: theoretical, in terms of improving the comprehension of the
place and weight of emotions in the contemporary world, and critical
because it allows a systematic reflective act on the processes of loss of
autonomy for people in the face of states and markets.
Book Content1
The introduction has a double objective: (1) to summarize the theoreti-
cal focus of the book, and (2) to point out the connections between the
chapters, their themes and the epilogue. In first place, the theoretical
and epistemological view of the sociology of bodies/emotions as an ana-
lytical reference framework for studying society is summarized. This
implies making explicit our vision about the connections between emo-
tions, social structuring and politics of sensibilities. Secondly, our per-
spective on the meaning of social policies, the intervention of the state in
society and the current state of the so-called social question is developed.
In a third moment, we show which are the connections that we find
between social policies and the politics of sensibilities from the perspec-
tive of bodies/emotions. Once the aforementioned theoretical presenta-
tion has been completed, the reader is introduced to the content of the
chapters and the central conclusions of the book to provide a general
framework for reading it.
1
This book is the result of a long work and shared effort, but the chapters in particular
have been written: the Preface, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 9 by Scribano and De Sena; 5, 7 and 10 by
De Sena and 3 by Scribano.
The first chapter2 points out how the social policies are closely related
to the welfare state, political regimes and forms of social structure. From
their contemporary configuration, the aforementioned policies imply the
acceptance of some modality between capital and labour. The design and
implementation of these moulds the social issue and therefore elaborates
sociabilities and sensibilities. The twenty-first century has impacted the
social universe by incorporating changes in human relations, in social
interactions, in the labour market and therefore in the form of social inter-
vention that leads to a redefinition of well-being.
The second chapter aims to provide the reader with a synthetic approach
on how the connections between emotions and social policies are under-
stood. In order to achieve the aforementioned objective, we follow the
next argumentative strategy: first, some of the central approaches of the
sociology of emotions are summarized; then, our view on the bodies/
emotions is synthesized. At the end, we explain what are the social con-
nections between emotions and policies that the book as a whole supposes.
The third chapter seeks to emphasize the emergence of the “assisted
citizen” as a result of the application of compensatory consumption. In
this context, this chapter adds to the aforementioned framework the emer-
gence of three verifiable characteristics of those social processes, namely,
the structuring of a Logic of Waste (LoW), the elaboration of Perversion
Policies (PP) and the Practices of Banalization of Good (BoG). The aim is
to make evident the emergence of a “new” position of subject and citizen
in the context of the society standardized via immediate enjoyment
through consumption: the assisted citizen. One of the main consequences
of the connections between social policies and the politics of sensibilities is
the “creation” of a modality of subjectivity based on the close relations
between consumption, assistance and enjoyment.
The main goal of Chap. 5 is exploring the emergence of a social phe-
nomenon that, at least, has been consolidating in the last fourteen years in
Latin America in general, and Argentina in particular: compensatory con-
sumption. The chapter summarizes several inquiries we have undertaken
at the intersection between the sociology of social policies and a way to
understand the sociology of the body/emotions. We have chosen the fol-
2
In all the chapters, the research projects that serve as an empirical basis for their elabora-
tion are mentioned. The interviews cited were conducted by us or the people who partici-
pated in these inquiries under our supervision. The numbers and forms of citation have been
standardized to simplify reading.
lowing argumentative strategy: (1) we outline a pattern of connections

between consumption and enjoyment at present, (2) we present the results
of some inquiries which have been used as the basis of analysis and (3) we
conceptualize synthetically a notion of compensatory consumption as a
result of this argument. Our essay concludes by proposing the possibility
that compensatory consumption is today, perhaps, the “social policy”
taken up from and to the market.
Chapter 6 seeks to contextualize the situation of violence that women
recipients of social policies experience as a first approximation of the life
world. For this purpose, information is used drawn from the last 16 years
of investigations, in order to review the permanence of the forms of vio-
lence. From a purely qualitative approach is presented the voice of these
violated women from the reconstruction of a “life story” that allows the
creation of a narrative puzzle. This way of presenting the chapter was cho-
sen for two reasons: (1) because the word of the researcher only operates
while engaged in reflective listening, and (2) to elaborate a plot where the
voices become a narrative that reveals the lives of woman who live with
violence. As an argumentative strategy we have selected the following: (1)
the diverse ways of understanding violence against women are identified,
reviewed and systematized, (2) some findings are outlined about the
meaning of the “world of violence” from the voices of women who live it
and (3) as a provisional closure, some analytical consequences are extracted
from the conceptualizations presented for a critical hermeneutics about
violence(s) against women. To conclude, and in the context of what has
been expressed, it is our interest to present here possible connections
between the conceptual modes to address gender violence and its herme-
neutical potential by “confronting” them with the women’s experience of
what we call the world of violence in conditions of poverty.
The aim Chap. 7 is to point out, at least provisionally, how the “place”
and the “value” of education has become a central feature of social policies
to disband conflict and build the social bearability mechanisms and devices
of the regulations of sensations. In the same vein, the deep connection
between public education and social policies continues to be a central axis
in the politics of sensibilities. We want to show how complex are the rela-
tions between poor women who live in the shantytown of Buenos Aires,
and the result of the “dissolution/transformation” of educational policies
as a “path” to obtain social mobility. To achieve our goal, we have built
the following argumentative strategy: (1) we offer an introduction about
how the situation of women in Latin America can be characterized, (2) we
synthesize the school experiences of poor women giving some clues to

understand the place of educational practices in the management of sensi-
bilities and (3) as a final opening, we propose to see school practices as a
basic component of the management of compensated sensibilities.
Chapter 8 attempts to reflect on social policies, paying attention to
those aimed at the promotion of microenterprises, observing them as a
targeting strategy implemented for at least three decades. As an argumen-
tative modality, we chose to begin by reviewing some definitions of “social
policies”, considering that they are a way of building the “social issues”
and reflect sociabilities. As an argumentative modality, we begin by review-
ing the labour issue and the different social policies which were designed
to improve the situations associated with poverty and unemployment.
Then, we analyse how several of those implemented programmes—aimed
at a particular type of population, with certain characteristics—were
focused and intervened upon the effects of the problem and not its cause.
Therefore, the last point explores the conceptions regarding universal tar-
geting or massiveness policies, the latter as a modality that emerges during
the last decade. Finally, the case of the National Plan for Local Development
and Social Economy, “Hands to Work”, is taken as an example of occluded
targeting.
Chapter 9 explores the complex connections between social policies
and the sensibilities associated with being and staying “helped”. Currently,
in Argentina, the Universal Assignment per Child has almost 4,000,000
recipients (ANSES 2017); in Buenos Aires city, nearly 130,000 receive the
Citizenship programme (SICoPS-GCBA 2017); in Latin America, in
2012, it had 120,000,000 such recipients (Stampini and Tornarolli 2012).
In other places, we have made evident the close connections between
social policies and politics of the sensibilities from the perspective of the
sociology of bodies/emotions (De Sena 2014, 2016; Scribano 2013,
2016; Scribano and De Sena 2013, 2014). For some years now, there has
been a recurring theme that emerges from a set of interviews carried out
in different projects: the narration of aid as a key to structuring the sensi-
bilities of the interviewees concerning the receipt of conditional transfers
of income. It is in this context that the chapter seeks to make clear the
place of help in the experiences narrated by the subjects receiving a condi-
tional cash transfer. To achieve this objective, we follow this argumentative
strategy: (1) we synthesize the first approximation of the current situation
regarding cash transfers in Argentina, and (2) a series of interviews con-
ducted between 2014 and 2017 in Buenos Aires city and La Matanza are
analysed. It ends by reviewing how the Conditional Cash Transfers

Programs (CCTPs) organize life around feeling helped, so far away from
an autonomous subject, leaving in evidence the centrality of such pro-
grammes in the structuring of sensibilities and in redefining the compo-
nents of the political economy of morality.
Chapter 10 tries to show the connections between bodies with little
energy available for action and food policies. The chapter seeks to make
evident the connections between food policies and predation in the
Argentine case since the 1980s that have, as a direct consequence, the
dispossession of corporal and social energy through the management of
the politics of sensibilities. Under the current conditions of the massive
food assistance strategies, and to build the connection between food poli-
cies and bodily and social energy, we have selected the following argumen-
tative strategy: (1) the basic contents of the concepts of bodily energies
and predation are summarized, (2) the deficiencies of the state devices in
generating adequate nutritional conditions are presented and (3) we offer
some reflections to clarify the objective set for the chapter. We conclude
that, since the 1980s at least, there are food programmes in Argentina that
have expanded their coverage in one way or another, reaching out to more
children and mothers. These programmes have achieved relative success in
helping to reduce infant mortality and maintaining the reproduction of
the physical life of millions of people. However, neither of the contents,
volumes and deliveries of the aforementioned plans have been effective in
ensuring satisfactory nutrient intake for adequate development.
Chapter 11 discusses the practices by which the receipt of a set of ben-
efits from the state “keeps busy” the beneficiaries in such a way that rein-
forces the character of all social policy as a conflict avoidance mechanism.
One of the strategies most used in the twentieth century to manage and
weld the cracks left by the tensions and conflicts between capital and
labour has been the so-called welfare state. In this strategy, the centrality
of social policy has been fundamental according to its spatial and temporal
contexts. Beyond the different conceptualizations of each mode of the
welfare state, social policies have had a way to manage the worldviews and
sensibilities of those whom one can only “assist” such that it does not
constitute a conflict. In recent years, we have seen changes in relations
between the state, social policies and the politics of sensibilities. In this
framework, we want to point out another feature of social policies directed
to all persons who are intended to be “assisted” indefinitely and kept busy,
using “occupability” as a new way to suture market failures and avoid
conflict. To achieve the stated objective, we have elaborated the following
argumentation: firstly, we summarize the diverse views on the welfare

state; secondly, we show the connections between the social, political and
social policies; and, in the third place, they are synthesized with the prac-
tices of feeling associated with occupability. The chapter ends with some
reflections about the consequences of the phenomenon described.
In this context, we want to emphasize the role of maternal love—whose
central practical goal is to guarantee the present and future of their chil-
dren—as one of the fundamental features of those breaks, folds and hia-
tuses in the politics of sensibilities that the “World of No” (education,
nutrition and work) constructs as axes of socialization in spaces of segrega-
tion and expropriation.
At the height of the welfare state, a political economy of morality based
on work was consolidated and deepened as an organizer of daily life. In
the crisis of welfare models, the ability to organize the day-to-day was dif-
ferentiated between those who still had work (despite their precarious-
ness) and those who had to accept state aid as an input for the reproduction
of their material conditions of existence. In this framework, social policies
competed with work in terms of their differential impacts in the structur-
ing of the everyday. Social policies since 2000 (especially) have developed
new patterns of the political economy of morality where the recipients
“make-body” a set of “practices of feeling” that, in their cognitive-affective
face, map and colour everyday life.
References
ANSES. 2017. Asignación Universal por Hijo para Protección Social. Decreto
1602/09. Diciembre 2017. http://observatorio.anses.gob.ar/archivos/pub-
licaciones/Boletin%20mensual%20AUH%20Diciembre%202017.pdf.
De Sena, A., ed. 2014. Las políticas hecha cuerpo y lo social devenido emoción: lectu-
ras sociológicas de las políticas sociales. Buenos Aires: Estudios Sociológicos
Editora/Universitas. Editorial Científica Universitaria. Argentina.
———. 2016. Políticas Sociales, emociones y cuerpos. RBSE – Revista Brasileira
de Sociologia da Emoção 15 (44): 173–185. http://www.cchla.ufpb.br/rbse/
DeSenaDos.pdf.
SICoPS-GCBA. 2017. Informe de Monitoreo Ciudadanía Porteña y Estudiar es
Trabajar. Sistema integral de Coordinación de Políticas Sociales, Ministerio de
Hábitat y Desarrollo Humano. http://www.buenosaires.gob.ar/sites/gcaba/
files/informe_monitoreo_cp_-_abril_2017.pdf.
Stampini, M., and L. Tornarolli. 2012. The Growth of Conditional Cash

Transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean: Did They Go Too Far? IZA
PolicyPaper, n. 49.
Scribano, A. 2013. La religión neo-colonial como la forma actual de la economía
política de la moral. De Prácticas y discursos. Universidad Nacional del Nordeste.
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pdf/35143669.pdf.
———. 2016. The Sociology of Happiness in Buenos Aires. Journal of Humanities
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Scribano, A., and A. De Sena. 2013. Los planes de asistencia social en Buenos
Aires: una mirada desde las políticas de los cuerpos y las emociones. Aposta.
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———. 2014. Consumo Compensatorio: ¿Una nueva forma de construir sensibili-
dades desde el Estado? RELACES, 65–82. http://www.relaces.com.ar/index.
php/relaces/article/view/335.
CHAPTER 2
State, Public Policies and Social Policies:

Synthesis of Some Points of Departure
Introduction
The analytical framework and the practical scenarios of the problems ana-
lysed in this book take for granted a set of articulations, of proximities/
distances and assumptions characterized by theoretical approaches on
what will be understood as the state, public policy, the “social issue” and
social policies. This chapter summarizes schematically the contours of the
aforementioned complexities, bearing in mind that they are the pillars on
which the connections between social policies, emotions and sensitization
policies will be presented in the next chapter.
To achieve the aforementioned task, we have followed the following
argument: (1) our conceptual view of the State, social issues and public
policies is outlined and (2) a theoretical vision is introduced on what will
be understood by social policies.
It is important to emphasize that this theoretical synthesis includes the
general lines of how the State and public policies are specific practices that
shape societies and in that action are connected with the elaboration of
sensitivities.
In recent years, we have been warning about the preponderance of the
adjectivation of “all” politics as “social” thus giving it a certain character
of “positive” assessment of the state action for which it reserves directly/
indirectly, by this way, the ability to compensate for market and civil soci-
ety failures regarding inequality (De Sena 2014a). In the same direction,
we have pointed out that it is possible to verify the existence of a “hidden

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34739-0_2
curriculum” (metaphorically retaking the concept used in the analysis of

teaching practices) of social policies through which sensory regulation
devices are constructed that strengthen the views that carry the images of
the world that they suppose (De Sena 2014b). We have also analysed the
path in which the notion of universal income is lost to keep conditional
cash transfers, consolidating paradoxical and contradictory policies focuses
(De Sena 2016). At the same time, we have made inquiries about the rela-
tionships between sensibilities and hunger management (Scribano and
Eynard 2011; Scribano et al. 2010), regarding the states of sensation poli-
cies (Scribano 2008), to the characteristics of societies structured around
enjoyment (Scribano and Eynard 2013).
The policies of bodies and emotions are inscribed and elaborated in
certain geopolitical and geocultural contexts. In the current situation of
the Global South, we can partially characterize this context, comprising
the transformations of two of its most important edges: the social regime
of accumulation and the political regime in which it develops. The first
refers to a set of economic, social, cultural and legal institutions through
which the process of production, distribution and accumulation (repro-
duction) of material goods and values of a society is carried out. The polit-
ical regime can be understood as the set of institutions and processes,
governmental and non-governmental, performed by social actors endowed
with a certain capacity for power, through which the political domination
of society is constituted and exercised. In generic terms, “politics” as a
state practice refers to a set of actions developed in a planned manner and
following deliberately designed strategies in pursuit of the objectives that
are intended as their results. And it is the State, which—due to its coercive
capacity and the general scope of its intervention—constitutes the political
institution par excellence and the main executor of policies aimed at pro-
ducing effects that involve society as a whole, contributing in such a way
to decisively model the public (and private) scope of it. Consequently,
when we talk about “policies” in a narrower sense, reference is made more
specifically to a normative and/or executive attribution of general and
public competence, in principle, exclusive to the State.
So, this means that the analysis of social policies inevitably refers to the
accumulation model in force in each society and this allows us to under-
stand that those implemented for decades are favourable formulas for the
regulation of social aspirations and conflicts (Halperin Weisburd et al.
2008). But also, it is necessary to observe that said regulation advances on
the bodies, emotions and actions of each of the people who make up the
2 STATE, PUBLIC POLICIES AND SOCIAL POLICIES: SYNTHESIS… 15
social groups in each city, this shapes and consolidates ways of life, of
doing and perceiving, that organize the feeling of the populations (De
Sena and Cena 2014).
Registered in this context, it is possible to understand (at least partially)
that social policies fulfil a main function: that of mitigating conflicts that
occur in different classes or social groups, this being the terrain where—in
a privileged way—they connect with the policies of bodies and emotions
(De Sena and Cena 2014; Scribano 2008, 2012). In a double sense, the
concrete ways of distribution (circulation and accumulation) of “Social
Plans”1 imply a set of practices associated with the policies of the body and
also a set of ideological practices associated with the policies of emotions
tending to diminish and/or delete something.
Any critical reflection on the social issue implies much more than the
immediate problematization of poverty—or what at that particular
moment is being expressed as a social problem; it also involves the
thematization—and significance—of related problems such as the expla-
nation of the situation, unemployment, job insecurity and so on.
It is within this framework that it is essential to track the connections
between the State, social issues and well-being in an introductory way as
the fundamental axes of the interconnections between social policies and
politics of the sensibilities.
State, Social Issues and Public Policies

The changes in social policies in the last decades of contemporary history led
multiple scholars to review and question the Welfare State, its limits, its forms
of social assistance and conceptual paradigms, from Habermas to Castel in
Europe, and in Argentina from Isuani, Grassi to Romero among many oth-
ers. The economy and politics have undoubtedly had a decisive influence on
the “re-adaptations” of social policies to the new post-crisis scenarios of the
end of the twentieth century in their practical and political restructuring of
the bureaucracies of public administration and social services that lead to a
redefinition of the Welfare State and possibly also of welfare.
1
We use the expression “Social plans” since it is used in interviews by the recipients of
social programs in everyday life as the result of a long-term process that imputes meaning,
from their own voice, to the relationships that the sector’s structural poor have had with the
State for many years now. The content of this expression is clarified in the next chapter and
the book as a whole.
The modern Welfare State has its origin in at least two great moments,
on the one hand, the so-called Fabian Society, a movement of London
politicians and intellectuals founded at the end of the nineteenth century2
that contributed to creating socio-cultural preconditions and laid the
political and ideological bases necessary for the diffusion of solidarity sen-
sitivities and then the realization of the famous and fundamental “Beveridge
Report”. It was not a revolutionary movement but is located as the origin
of the Welfare State in its ideology and practices. The Fabian Society move-
ment was influenced by the Socialist ideology and foundation of the
Labour Party and observed the problems of social and economic nature
caused by capitalism in Britain that led them to consider that the welfare
of nations must be equitable in the population. They began by trying to
influence political decisions towards the achievement of social reforms
inspired by the principle of equality towards the weakest social sectors.
And, on the other hand, in the Germany of Otto von Bismarck, it was
argued that some socialism was necessary to avoid the socialists and recog-
nized that the State should promote the welfare of members of society,
and particularly of the weakest and neediest using the means that are col-
lectively available (Institute for Legal Research – UNAM).
During the 1880s the development of German society was not disturbed by
the Ricardian and classical restrictions on the role of the State. German
economists were concerned with history, and their warnings did not usually
give rise to serious warnings regarding the interference of the government.
According to Prussian and German tradition, the State was competent, ben-
eficial and highly prestigious. What was considered as the main danger of the
time was the active militancy of the rapidly growing industrial working class,
with its ostensible proclivity to revolutionary ideas, and in particular, those
that came from (…) Karl Marx, providing the clearest example of fear of
revolution as an incentive for reform, Bismarck urged that the most blatant
cruelty of capitalism be mitigated. 1884 and in 1887, after passionate con-
troversies, the Reichstag adopted a set of laws that granted elementary pro-
tection under the form of insurance in anticipation of accidents, diseases, old
age and disability. Although fragmentary, similar provisions were later
adopted in Austria, Hungary and other European countries address ‘the
weak and avoid social conflict’. (Galbraith 1994: 3)
In both cases, the task of the state is evident.
2
Among its ranks was George Bernard Shaw.
In the United States, the beginnings of the Welfare State are based on
the development of the New Deal during the presidency of Franklin
Roosevelt (1933–1945), to support the poorest sectors of the population,
reform financial markets and revitalize the American economy hit hard by
the Great Depression of the 1930s. The measures taken tended to eco-
nomic recovery and for this, public works were undertaken to create
employment opportunities, and in 1935, there was approved The Social
Security Act that established a social protection system on a federal level,
with retirement for people over 65, unemployment insurance and various
assistance for the disabled. Progressively, the system covered a larger part
of the population, particularly thanks to the amendments of 1939 and 1950.
Meanwhile, it is important to remember that the Incas in the fifteenth
century were organized in a kind of Welfare State, establishing a commu-
nity fund of goods that were used to guarantee the protection of the
homeless, the poor, elderly, sick and orphans. For this, the entire popula-
tion contributed to proportional quotas to the accumulated wealth over
time. There was also a free educational system widely disseminated at the
territorial level in relation to the arts and crafts. These elements allow us
to affirm that the Inca civilization lays the foundation stone of the Welfare
State (Branca 2008; Silva Galdames 1981).
In Europe, in 1942, there emerged the first concrete form of what
would become the Welfare State with the Beveridge Report. From an
investigation, Sir William Beveridge identified the four great evils of British
society: illiteracy, illness, unemployment and precarious housing. Beveridge
argued that it was essential to act on these evils and the State should ensure
that it was done in the shortest possible time and with the greatest possible
dissemination of interventions among the population. Thus the theoreti-
cal budgets and practical conditions for the construction of protection
were established social thought for the entire life of the citizen, and, there-
fore, defining safety from the cradle to the grave, addressing the economic
risks. This innovation is based on a conception of citizen participation
linked to the principle of social security, by strengthening the system
through the proportional tax contribution according to income; that is to
say a universalist vision of social policies but also—of course—of risk
(Branca 2008). In this way, this report gave way to the introduction of
measures in favour of the Welfare State, such as education and free health
service, and also in favour of employment and housing.
Additionally, there must be added an interesting reform that refers to
the creation of a ministerial institution for the management of social secu-
rity issues. In this way, the idea of a bureaucratic institution whose mission
is to address social issues crystallizes. Thus, social policies are defined as all
those social actions undertaken by policymakers in the real world. In this
way, social policy refers to the activity of formulating policies to promote
well-being (Alcock et al. 2003).
In these contexts, the concept of citizenship elaborated by T. H.
Marshall regarding the recognition of civil, political and social rights
becomes relevant, and is linked to the ideological assumptions of Welfare
State and its birth. Synthetically, Marshall, analyses the development of
citizenship from three points of view: civil rights, political rights and social
rights, according to historical development at all times. Civil rights refer to
those necessary for individual freedom, expression, thought and religion,
property and justice. Political rights correspond to participation in the
exercise of political power as the authority or elector of its members. And
social rights cover a wide range from security and economic well-being,
related to the possibility of living a decent and healthy life. His distinctive
contribution was the introduction of the concept of Social Rights, pro-
claiming the existence of full citizenship when the three types of rights are
possessed, defining citizenship as the status granted to the full members of
a community. In this way, all individuals are considered equal in their
rights and duties.
These principles created the basis for affirming that each person has
rights before the State and society, for the notion of rights and duties and
the recognition of universality, but also emerged as a response to the eco-
nomic uncertainties generated by industrialization. The situations of pov-
erty generated by industrialization required regulation and assistance by
the State along with a sense of social responsibility so that the attention to
citizens had an ethical and moral value, but also an economic one, given
that it allows the reproduction of the labour force. In this sense, the
Welfare State is a way of dissolving social conflict, it is a way to sediment
the effects of inequality, to integrate inequality (Dahrendorf, cited in
Branca 2008) and hence the political interest in its consolidation.
In this way, the Welfare State was born as an instrument to sustain the
balance of the complex social interactions of a society in which conflicts of
a different nature and different agents are constantly woven, which form
social forces and tensions that contribute to the definitions of the type and
modality of social policies.
This state model took different forms in each country with marked dif-
ferences between Europe, Latin America and the United States. Richard
Titmuss (1974), one of the great scholars in this regard, developed a

typology to interpret the various models, which refers to:
1. Residual or public assistance model: based on the premise that there

are two “natural” channels (or socially determined) through which
individual needs are duly met: the private market and the family.
Only when they fail to meet the needs is it necessary to intervene
through social policies. The author clarifies that the theoretical basis
of this model dates back to the Law of the Poor, and finds support
in society’s biological constructions presented by sociologists
Spencer and Radcliffe-Brown, economists such as Friedman and
Hayek, and the founders and followers of the Institute of Economic
Affairs in London.
2. Industrial remuneration model: this model considers that everyone
can access to better conditions to meet their own needs, based on
their own merit, work performance and productivity. An important
role is given to the economy and elements of the psychological order
to achieve well-being, given the weight of the incentive, effort and
reward. In this case, social policy intervenes as a partial corrective of
the Market that provides the means through wage labour and pro-
vides services from private channels.
3. Redistributive institutional model: this model considers social wel-
fare as an important integrated institution in society, the provision
of universal services outside the market. It is based partly on theories
about the multiple effects of social change and the economic system,
and partly on the principle of social equality.
According to Titmuss (1974), these three models are an approximation

to the theories and ideas of economists, philosophers, political scientists
and sociologists. However, these serve to indicate the main differences
concerning the points of view on the terms and means of social policy. All
three models involve consideration of work ethics and the institution of
the family in modern society. And, therefore, the configuration of a sensi-
bility in this regard, which explains the social interactions of the last
decades, the passage of the working citizen and the strong appearance of
beneficiaries of some form of state social intervention aimed at alleviating
situations of poverty.
Years later Esping-Andersen, in his already classic 1993 work “The
Three Worlds of Welfare State”, refers to the welfare regime as an institu-
tional combination of mixed production between the State, the family, the
market and the civil society that depends on three factors: the nature of
the mobilization of social classes, the coalition structures of the political
class and the historical legacy. The author incorporates into the analysis
the concept of demercantilization together with the revision of the social
stratification systems, both elements in strict relation to the conformation
of each regime in correspondence with the class alliances. This explains the
emergence of the three welfare regimes: (1) the social democrat, qualified
as solidary, universalist and de-commercializing; (2) the corporatist, who
considers that social rights are linked to class and status and (3) the liberal,
where the market is the fundamental structure of welfare and the State is
characterized by modest aid and subsidies to people considered poor, dis-
crete universal transfers and limited scope of social rights through assis-
tance access to benefits.
For this author, in the justifications on the Welfare State, two perspec-
tives dominate: one on the structures and systems and the other regarding
institutions and actors. The first makes it clear that industrialization makes
social policy necessary and possible “because pre-industrial modes of social
reproduction, such as families, the church, noblesse oblige, and union soli-
darity is destroyed by the forces that are part of modernization, such as
social mobility, urbanization, individualism and market dependence”
(Esping-Andersen 1990: 31). The Welfare State affirms itself as a valid and
effective provider of services and goods also thanks to the growth of the
bureaucratic apparatus as a form of rational, universalistic and effective
organization. The second, the institutional perspective, reviews the weight
of political decisions and, therefore, their relevance. He returns to Polanyi
when considering that the economy must be assembled in social commu-
nities so that social policies are necessary for social integration, a kind of
dispute between the citizen and the assisted.
For Offe, “the Welfare State has served as the main pacifying formula
of the advanced capitalist democracies for the period following the Second
World War. This peace formula consists, in the first place, of the explicit
obligation assumed by the apparatus state to provide assistance and sup-
port (in money or in-kind) to citizens who suffer specific needs and risks
characteristic of the commercial society, such assistance is provided under
legal claims granted to citizens”. Along these lines, it incorporates unions
as another key element to mitigate class conflict and the asymmetry
between work and capital, that is, it is a ‘political solution to social contra-
dictions’” (1990: 135–136).
Martínez Franzoni (2005), when referring to Latin America, makes a

distinction between three types: (1) a State welfare regime of a single pro-
vider where the State continues allocating most of its resources to univer-
sal services; (2) a Liberal welfare regime as a single provider, in which
there is an accelerated and radical displacement from the State towards the
private provision of services. It reflects a “thinning” of the State and an
expansion of the market sphere that leads to levels of inequality and pov-
erty, and (3) an Informal welfare regime of double providers that show
levels of extreme socioeconomic inequality.
In Argentina, in principle after the Great Depression, a Keynesian model
of the Welfare State was established, first timidly and then with a greater
presence in the early post-war period and first Peronist government, where
the State intervened in the economy and the productive process, with the
creation of a large number of state-owned companies. An extension of the
coverage of the pension system, the development of health schemes, hous-
ing policies and infrastructure in the areas of education and health was
promoted. Towards the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of
the twenty-first with the period called neoliberal, this model is interrupted
by a system characterized by the liberalization of foreign trade, deregula-
tion of markets, and the transfer of public monopolies to private ones.
This new model, through strategies of targeting, decentralization and
privatization of social spending, broke with the attempts of the State to
“demercantilize” the market, and that is why they underwent major
changes in the structures within them (Isuani 2009). On the other hand,
Isuani (2009), analyses social spending and public spending and states that
these in the Welfare State in Argentina, always accompanied the growth
and decline of the capitalist system that prevailed in the national economy.
He continues to argue that the Welfare State in Latin America, and espe-
cially in Argentina, was built through a hybrid between the three ideal
types proposed by Esping-Andersen, explaining three principles:
1. Discretionality: the one who grants the good or service does not
have the obligation to give it, just like the one who receives it is not
obliged to do so, thereby generating the basis of charity and welfare,
so it groups here the social assistance programmes.
2. Contribution: the benefit is accessed by those who participate in
their financing, here is social security.
3. Citizenship: all inhabitants have the right to social policies; here are
the health and public education expenses.
Now, Argentina is one of the Latin American countries where the

Welfare State had a great expansion with the extension of the coverage of
the social security system, the development of social security health schemes,
called social works; the expansion of housing policy and the development
of public infrastructure in health and education (Isuani 2009). But also
with “ruptures” and “forgetfulness” of universalist and compensatory poli-
cies, arming a certain “Welfare State to the Creole”, which led to a style of
“dealing” with the needs of the “poor” that privileges fragmentation and
exclusion; perhaps, this is why Isunai (2009) assimilates it to the conserva-
tive-corporate model proposed by Esping-Andersen.
Beyond the criticisms of the model Welfare State, it is clear that they are
approximate ways of calling emerging social policies that aim to protect
the worker from market uncertainties (unemployment, disease and pov-
erty), and that this form of the State appears as an institutional safety net
against the risk of societies, but also as a set of institutions that articulate
capitalist development and political democracy. “For Heimann, social pol-
icy introduces an element foreign to capitalist economic policy. It is a
Trojan horse that can penetrate the border between capitalism and social-
ism” (Esping-Andersen 1990: 29).
It is clear here that beyond the specific forms that the State takes in each
country in its bureaucratic modalities in reference to a certain universal
protector, it is based on a certain solidarity based on social security tied to
a policy of full employment and employee status, a subject occupied in his
labour activity a working citizen, and on this the bases of well-being are laid.
What Are Social Policies?

Referring to Social Policies means getting involved in a debate where, from
its definition, it summons multiple views and, therefore, approaches. From
an analytical perspective, public policies in general and social policies, in
particular, can be considered as a process that begins when a government
detects the existence of a “problem” that deserves its attention and under-
takes a series of actions, with the aim of eliminating or mitigating it (Tamayo
Saez 1997). In this way, public policies are formulated by the different
governmental powers and respond to a specific political project, within the
framework of a political–administrative system that responds to the current
accumulation system. Therefore, they necessarily reinforce the political
power of some group to the detriment of another, while generating inter-
nal processes to the State, which intersect complexly with the social phases
related to the emergence, treatment and resolution of the “issue” that poli-
tics publicly tries to solve (Oszlak and O’Donnell 1976).
The social issue begins to appear in the nineteenth century realizing the
risk of destruction of liberal society, due to the new tensions generated by
industrialization, thus “the social” begins to be located as a different mode
of regulation to the market with the intention to compensate for the gap
between the political and the economic.
The starting point for Danani (2004) is that social policies make society
since they are “those specific social interventions of the State that are ori-
ented (in the sense that they produce and mould) directly to the living and
reproduction conditions of the life from different sectors and social
groups, and they do operate especially at the time of the secondary distribu-
tion of income. This means that what distinguishes them is that this process
configuration does not work in the income distribution circuit directly
derived from the production process, by means of retribution to the fac-
tors (primary distribution), but by redistribution mechanisms that they
overlap (or, rather, only analytically distinguishable from it, but not identi-
cal)” (Danani 2004: 11). In this way, it is possible to make a distinction
“between social and political policies immediately and traditionally recog-
nized as economic and, partially, between social and labour policies in a
general sense (since the latter, by regulating directly the income of capital
and labour, they develop mainly in the sphere of primary distribution)”
(Danani 2004: 11). This definition gives an account of an amplitude that
forces us to look for the specificity of social policy, for which Danani pro-
poses that “The first vector of differentiation between types of policy is
that of the object on which they act directly (…) what is the recipient of
the subject’s action or operation” (Danani 2009: 29).
Sojo (1990) starts by considering that economic and social policy are
dimensions of development and affirms that the primary distribution of
income or employment are dimensions of economic policy, but with great
social effects, therefore, they determine the social politics. In a similar
sense, Garretón affirms that “if the purpose of the economic policy is to
direct the economy towards the satisfaction of the material needs of the
individuals (…) the social policy aims to produce the conditions that
ensure the existence of society as such. This means a certain level of equal-
ity among its members, a quality of life defined according to the cultural
diversity of those who form it and the existence and development of actors
and social networks that support citizens” (1990: 42).
On the other hand, Grassi (2000) affirms that two elements make the
social question in capitalism, and that challenge the legitimacy of the mod-
ern democratic State. They are: the question of poverty, as it refers to the
conditions of reproduction of life; that is, the limitations in access to goods
and services and socio-cultural participation and integration; and the ques-
tion of work, understood as a human capacity that, organized by the mar-
ket, enables and legitimizes access to resources, protection and safety of the
subjects and the conditions of their participation in socio-cultural life. The
author analyses the Argentine period called neoliberal—between the years
1990 and 2000—in which the problem of poverty is constituted and
addressed as a social problem, which admits the possibility of actions of
state assistance or private charity, and the problems of the sphere of work
linked to illegality in hiring, unemployment, the crisis of protection systems
and the level of wages. The latter were treated strictly as an economic (mar-
ket) problem, that is, reduced to a relationship between supply and demand,
both in quantitative terms (jobs in relation to active people) and qualitative
(qualifications required by the positions with respect to the offer available);
and of costs of this factor for the competitiveness of production.
Additionally, in recent years, the problem related to the “human rights
approach” has been installed in academic and political debates, both in
terms of analysis and implementation of public policies, in connection
with development models, and relationship with the areas of the enforce-
ability of rights. This approach considers that the conceptual framework
that human rights provide as rights legitimized by the international com-
munity, offers a coherent system of principles and guidelines applicable in
development policies and at the same time specifies the obligations of
States in the field of compliance with economic, social and cultural rights
(Abramovich and Pautassi 2009). From there, a varied spectrum of rela-
tions between rights and policies is opened, evaluation systems under stan-
dards of law; accountability (horizontal and vertical) and various spheres
of responsibility at the State level and internationally. This approach marks
a turning point in the dynamics of the social processes of the last decades,
particularly about the targeted social policies promoted by the international
credit assistance organizations and adopted by the different governments.
Among the various discussions, one can observe some concern about
not reducing the definition of social policy to the policy against or poverty
alleviation, as a concept that expresses the hegemony of neoliberal ideol-
ogy in social policy (Danani 2009).
Regarding the discussions about its design, there is a strong presence of
two concepts: “efficiency” and “equity”. But, for this, it is necessary to
create functional relationships between production, distribution and redis-

tribution of income, and consider the poor population not only as lacking
but also as an economic subject. In this way, the efficiency of the State is
related not only to its momentary action but also to the long-term dynamic
effects, aimed at increasing physical and human capital. It is possible to
establish that “the objectives and instruments of social policy refer to an
agreement about socially desirable well-being and the optimal means to
achieve it, which can crystallize in the formulation of social rights” (Sojo
2007: 127).
What has been said so far makes it possible to characterize social policies
as a “set of ideological conceptions that are embodied in normative and
institutional designs that seek to limit the social consequences produced
by the free play of market forces; conceptions that, at the same time, are
useful for building political legitimacy” (Ramacciotti 2010: 193).
In other words, social policies are “political”, therefore, they involve a
set of actions, omissions and interests of multiple actors that express politi-
cal, economic and social needs of a given moment, in a historical and
cultural construction that determines a terrain in which it summons alli-
ances and struggles, giving way to definitions about the nature of social
interventions with the consequent inclusion of certain population centres
and the marginalization of others (Ramacciotti 2010). We can add that
both the actions and omissions of each social policy build senses and form
individual and social subjects while consolidating a collective imaginary.
Likewise, it is possible to determine three centres of interest of social poli-
cies: welfare, the impact they produce, and institutionalization, organiza-
tion and implementation, so that multiple actors with different interests
and resources are involved in them, both public and non-public
(Adelantado 2009).
Therefore, for some years from the Group of Studies on Social Policies and
Emotions (GEPSE),3 an inaugural commitment has been initiated towards
sociology of social policies analysed from and through emotions; which
seeks to contribute to the study and understanding of the structuring mech-
anisms in current capitalism, particularly in the Argentine case. This is based
on trying to combine a view of social policies and how they build and con-
solidate ways of being, doing, thinking, feeling, that structure bodies and
emotions in the subjects. The proposal is the study of social policies seeking
a triple convergence between a sociological analysis of them, an inquiry
3
http://gepse-cies.blogspot.com.ar/.
from and of the sensitivities they produce and research from their design,
management and execution. In this context, we deal with the crossings and
articulations between the redefinitions of the “social issue”, the elaboration
of social policies within the framework of the state regulation processes of
the conflicts between capital and labour, the necessary and desired sensitivi-
ties for this to happen, and the policies of the bodies that they imply.
Modern States are founded on the idea of equality and freedom, but
the process of capitalist accumulation is constitutive of structural inequal-
ity and dependence that results from the subordination of labour to capi-
tal, exposing conflicts and tensions around the distribution of wealth and
opportunities (Grassi 2003; Oszlak 1997). Thus, then, the interventions
of these states are placed in the effort to achieve social cohesion and this
refers to addressing the “failures” typical of the capitalist system in relation
to the market. In this sense, social policies are interventions by the State as
a way of moderating the processes of inequality and expulsion generated
in the structuring of a society based on the commodification of life and the
conflictual breaks that must be remedied systemically. The ways of
“addressing” social problems, among which are those related to health,
education, housing and poverty, and in recent decades unemployment
have joined (Grassi 2003; De Sena 2011); they condense the possibilities
of nominating, meaning and doing, as practices that perform the social.
Therefore, they can build realities. The State, as manager of the resolution
of these problems, consolidates an order and a geometry of the bodies
(sensu Scribano) that places “some” of the members of a society in the
position of “assisted”, “helped”, “target population”, “beneficiaries” (just
to mention some of the denominations offered by the recipients and pro-
fessionals of the design and management of social programmes), that is, a
way of structuring societies. Therefore, the social issue (sensu Castel) is
related to social integration. In this sense, undertaking an analysis of social
policies implies placing it within the current accumulation mode, to
explain its link with the processes of social structuring.
The State becomes an actor (and in one area) in the definition, produc-
tion and reproduction of social problems, in the delimitation of their
responsibilities, in the enunciation of those worthy of their interventions
and the conditions for this. Therefore, social policies have a central place in
the definition of the characteristics that the process of social production
and reproduction will have in a given historical context, generating the
conditions for this and developing sociabilities, acting on and being a result
of the models of structuring and social accumulation. At the same time,
these social policies operate on the symbolic aspects of life and also on
those associated with the cognitive-affective; and in doing so they institute
and reproduce (provoking, imposing and/or cancelling and repressing)
certain images, models and stereotypes of society, of subject, of woman, of
work, of family, of emotions and so on, thus configuring structures of sen-
sibilities (De Sena 2014a; Scribano and De Sena 2013) that affect the ways
of experiencing (themselves) of the intervened subjects (Scribano 2010).
We start considering a relationship between the subjects and the State,
while this designs social interventions and a type of link and interaction
with who is/will be the recipients of them is established. Each with their
interests. The State configures a mode of sociability, which emphasizes
aspects such as joy, vivacity, happiness, cordiality and kindness; inscribed in
each historical context that grants a kind of vital experience, elaborates a
mode of interaction and exchanges (Simmel 2002). Meanwhile, the soci-
ology of emotions places emotional life at the centre of sociological reflec-
tion, understanding that feelings and affections are part of a constructive
process, in which the sphere of the emotional is permanently crossed by an
enormous rationality that is “activated” by the individual as a social actor,
and by the great ideological and institutional devices on which the social
order rests (Luna Zamora 2010). Emotions when connecting with sensa-
tions as their base and result are bodily states and the body implies a set of
perceptual processes on which it depends, so that it can be designated as
such in its multiple states, then regulate behaviours and promote expected
attitudes according to the social order (Scribano 2012). Therefore, social
interventions develop ways of being and doing that lead to the constitu-
tion of social sensibilities.
From these sociological perspectives on social policies, what we will
analyse here is based on the findings of the research carried out in the last
10 years, some sensibilities and forms of sociability (without claims of
completeness) that have been building the continuous implementation of
the social programmes in populations determined as vulnerable, in various
places in Argentina (in Metropolitan Zone of Buenos Aires, City of Buenos
Aires and in the city of Córdoba). Among the findings, we observe that
there is a population that over the decades does not cease to be vulnerable
and assisted through a social programme, initially with changes in the
name of the intervention and/or the benefit, and in the last decade with
continuity of the Conditional Cash Transfers Programmes. Consolidating
a trajectory from Plan to Plan and “lifetime coverage”, given the increase
in people in poverty, the number of people under some massive pro-
gramme also increased, giving way to “massiveness”. The third element as

a result of this is the passage of programmes—through decades—from one
generation to another (from mothers or fathers to daughters and grand-
children) given the continuity of a poverty situation in the same home:
“intergenerationality”. Finally, and as a way to cushion the conflict, keep-
ing the subject “helped”4 and “occupied” is in some programmes installed
as the primary object of social policies.
In this framework, the next chapter seeks to clarify the connections
between emotions and social policies by developing a conceptual view that
allows it, together with Chap. 4 to serve as an analytical and conceptual
framework for the whole book.
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CHAPTER 3
Social Policies, Bodies/Emotions

and Politics of Sensibilities
Introduction
The increasingly evident presence of emotions in the media, social net-
works, advertising, the entertainment business, political speeches and the
market, in general, makes it easier to argue that such presence is verified
and is central to the development of public policies in general, and specifi-
cally of social policies.
This chapter aims to provide the reader with a synthetic approach to
how the connections between emotions and social policies are under-
stood. In order to achieve the stated objective, the following argumenta-
tive strategy has been followed: first some of the central approaches of the
sociology of emotions are summarized, then our view on the bodies/emo-
tions is synthesized, and we finish by explaining the social connections
between emotions and policies that the book as a whole supposes.
As can be seen, this chapter is located between our view on the State,
social policies and social issues, and what is exposed in respect to normal-
ized societies organized in immediate enjoyment through consumption
implies the explanation of why we consider that social policies build
sensibilities.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34739-0_3
Sociology of Emotions and Social

Structuration Process
The current state of the processes of social structuration at the planetary
level shows tremendous and renewed efforts to market the design, produc-
tion, reproduction and management of bodies and emotions. Bodies have
not only turned into “objects” to be advertised, sold and bought in multiple
markets, but they have also become the cornerstone for the entire edifice of
market transactions and profits. In pursuit of profits, corporations through-
out the world focus on the production of sensibilities: from McDonald’s
“unique experience”, through Coca-Cola’s call to “open happiness”, to
Nestlé’s encouragement of “Good food, Good life”. These efforts have cre-
ated and shaped diets, drinks and taste management for several decades.
L´Oréal Paris promises “a new way to experience beauty”, Armani
announces “a new and delicate interpretation of the original”, for its new
fragrance and Pantene commits to “repair extreme damage instantly”. As
they show, powerful production of the senses cuts across body-image,
body-skin and body-movement and has become central to business. At the
same time, we see Fortune magazine featuring “the most powerful firms”
and their “glocal” expressions, in direct connection to pharmaceutical,
petrochemical, energy, food and “retail” industries that are part of the
research and development groups devoted to genetics, nanotechnology
and to “the study of biodiversity”. The main goal of these groups is the
modification of all living beings to make their production and manage-
ment easier and more efficient.
However, the most vivid expression of these global policies of bodies
and emotions strike us in other, more dramatic phenomena. We see them
in the hundreds of millions of human beings living on state subsidies and
conditioned income transfers, the tens of millions of children and preg-
nant women suffering from malnutrition or under-nutrition; the masses
throughout the planet forced to migrate every day; and the thousands
who die each day from preventable causes, mostly associated with poverty.
Within this frame, it is necessary to observe that connections and rela-
tions between the management of bodies and the marketization of emo-
tions have turned into a central axis of the current process of social
structuration, and thus constitute one of the basic challenges for social
sciences in our century.
In the context of the overall process described, this book aims to anal-
yse the relationship between the politics of sensibilities and social policies
3 SOCIAL POLICIES, BODIES/EMOTIONS AND POLITICS OF SENSIBILITIES 33
in the Global South, taking Latin America as the focus of inquiry. In this
book, it is possible to see how “the political” is intertwined with “the
emotional”. The globalization of emotionalization serves as the central
axis of the current metamorphosis of relations between state and capital-
ism, between politics and market, and between “ideology” and social and
political marketing.
In this explicit context, before resuming the connections between social
policies and emotions, a very synthetic approach to what is understood by
sociology of emotions is essential.
The multiple connections between bodies, emotions and society are
one of the central legacies of sociology in particular and social sciences in
general. Beyond the controversy about the affective turn, our view on
bodies/emotions is sustained in this legacy.
In moving from social philosophy to social sciences, there are three
deeply influential authors: Pascal, La Mettrie and Darwin.
These three authors shed light on three topics crucial for the emer-
gence of the political economy of morality, which capitalism presupposes
in its development. They compel our attention towards the fundamental
place that the policies of bodies and the emotions will occupy in it.
In the first place, they allow us to observe how capitalism concentrates
the moral order that must be built on activity from and on bodies. Pascalian
charity is a clear indicator of the break-in moral orders where action and
its motivation remained in the “inner circle” of the subject-God relation-
ship. Any act that transforms the affectivities, and the relationships between
bodies and emotions, is moral.
In the second place, enjoyment—and its associated conflicts—is under-
lined as the fundamental axis for social structure. The acceptance of the
social construction of the possible articulations between sensations, cor-
poreality and morality become definitively inaugurated. They will be fun-
damental to the architecture of disputes for the world of things.
In the third place, the basis is set for understanding how social interac-
tions configured around civilized versions of relationships among men are
the product of a “management of expressiveness”. The ways of expressing
themselves are the means for capturing the differences between what is
human and what is non-human: gesture and difference begin to be the
features of a society based on bodily sensibilities.
From the classic reflections of Mauss on the “techniques of the body”
to the biopolitics of Foucault, up to the present state of studies, explora-
tions of the human body as the centre of processes for production and
reproduction of society have been institutionalized in the social sciences.
There are diverse ways to systematize the theoretical orientations on
which the studies of the body/emotions are based. A possible one, having
in mind the Latin American context and without intent of exhaustiveness,
is the following: (1) a line of work connected to Foucault and his concepts
of control, discipline and technologies of the self; (2) an approach con-
nected to Bourdieu and his notions of habitus, body hexis and social fields;
(3) a set of investigations in the field of biopolitics referring to Esposito
and Agamben on the one hand, and to Negri and Hardt on the other; and
(4) the investigations that, from a post-colonial standpoint, take up corpo-
rality on a track towards anti-hegemonic thought.
A different perspective towards understanding the theoretical traditions
that usually support the studies in this field of inquiry is to turn to the
classic authors on the theme: Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza and
Marx. An additional view is gained in the presence of contemporary
authors of sociology such as Goffman, Simmel and Elias, from the phi-
losophy of Derrida, Butler and Deleuze, or the psychoanalysis of Freud,
Lacan and Zizek.
As is often seen in Latin America as well as in other regions of the
world, body(ies) and society(ies) are systematic objects of research where
affectivity and sensibility are strongly present.
Along the same lines, social studies regarding the emotions have also
been the object of diverse treatments, from Darwin through Sartre and
arriving at the proposals of Collins, Hochschild, Kemper and/or Illouz,
just to mention a few of their best-known reference points.
Smith and Schneider (2009) maintain that the numerous theories on
emotions can be grouped within a tripartite classification: determinism,
social constructionism and social interaction.
Gross and Barret (2011), with the intent to evaluate the differences of
perspective on the “generation” and/or “regulation” of emotions, classify
current perspectives for studying emotions into four broad areas: models
of basic emotions, evaluative models, models of psychological construc-
tion and models of social construction.
Another way to inquire about emotions is found in the neurosciences.
There are also different ways of understanding neurosciences, such as neu-
roanthropology, as the result of a cross between the humanities and the
sciences. Domínguez Duque, Turner, Douglas Lewis and Egan describe
this diversity as follows:
The first generation of cultural neuroscience studies has yielded several

important insights. First, culture seems to have a pervasive effect on all levels
and dimensions of neural activity: from low-level perceptual (Gutchess et al.,
2006; Goh et al., 2007; Sui and Han, 2007) and attentional (Hedden et al.,
2008) processes to high-level cognitive, affective and social functions includ-
ing language (Shaywitz et al., 1998; Paulesu et al., 2000; Temple et al.,
2003; Mechelli et al., 2004; Siok et al., 2004, 2008; Tan et al., 2005; Hoeft
et al., 2007), music (Morrison et al., 2003; Nan et al., 2006, 2008), mental
calculation (Tang et al., 2006), emotions (Chiao et al., 2008), mental attri-
bution (Kobayashi et al., 2006, 2007) and self-knowledge and awareness
(Zhu et al., 2007; Han et al., 2008; Chiao et al., 2009; Chiao et al., 2008).
(Domínguez Duque et al. 2010: 138)
From the perspective of Warren TenHouten, who inaugurated and

named the subfield of socioneurology in 1972, the current situation of
disciplines connecting the brain, emotions and society can be understood
as follows:
The neurosciences chiefly concern the brain and central nervous system and
investigate the interrelationships between mind and brain. Social neurosci-
ence adds a third level of analysis, as it “addresses fundamental questions
about the mind and its dynamic interaction with the biological systems of
the brain and the social world’(Cacioppo and Berntson, 2002: 3, emphasis
added). These three levels of analysis—of mind, brain, and the social
world—also characterize the emerging interdisciplinary fields of neuropoli-
tics (Connolly, 2002; Vander Valk, 20l2), neuroeconomics (Glimcher et al.,
2009), neuroanthropology (Laughlin and d’Aquili L974; Lende and
Downey, 2012), and neurosociology (TenHouten 1997, 1999, 2013;
Franks, 2010; Franks and Turner, 2013; Kalkhoff et al., 2012; Verweij et al.,
2015). Social neuroscience, neurosociology, neuroanthropology, neuroeco-
nomics, and neuropolitics share their common topic spans mind, brain, and
society. (TenHouten 2017: 94)
McColl-Kennedy and his colleagues have recently offered an interest-

ing classification of theories of emotions systematized according to their
explanation of what stimulates these emotions or how they are regulated.
Their effort is a classification into two main groups of theory created from
the “emotion elicitation” perspective and the “emotion regulation”
viewpoint. Each of them has been divided into different approaches as fol-
lows: theory, theory originator and academic discipline criteria. Regarding
theories, these authors record for the first group Cognitive Appraisal
Theory, Conservation of Resources Theory and Affective Events Theory;

and for the second group Emotion Regulation, Emotional Contagion and
Affect Control.
From another perspective, it is also possible to identify “areas” of
inquiry that have been consolidated in the sociology of emotions, for
example, those reported by Bericat:
In short, through analyzing the emotions involved in social phenomena,

sociology has broadened, deepened and renewed knowledge in different
areas of study. The following particularly stand out: the sociology of gender
(…), work (…), organizations (…), social movements (…) and mass media
(…). Other areas, like health, law and justice, crime, politics, economy, con-
sumption, leisure, religion, sport or space (…) are also incorporating the
analysis of affective structures and emotional dynamics. (Bericat 2016: 505)
This plurality of diverse theories and versions of the sociology of emo-

tions allows us to advance the understanding of at least three basic com-
ponents of the structure of this book:
1. The processes of social structuration are clearly connected with the

individual, collective and societal elaboration of emotions and
sensibilities.
2. The transversality of the emotional phenomena in the key areas of
worldviews in the current situation of complexity transforms them
into a key factor of politics and power.
3. States, markets and civil societies “compete for” and offer ways of
managing emotions.
Bodies, Emotions and Politics of Sensibilities

The policies of bodies and emotions are inscribed and elaborated in cer-
tain geopolitical and geocultural contexts. In the current situation of the
Global South, we can partially characterize this context, comprising the
transformations of two of its most important edges: the social regime of
accumulation and the political regime in which it develops. The first refers
to a set of economic, social, cultural and legal institutions through which
the process of production, distribution and accumulation (reproduction)
of material goods and values of a society is carried out. The political regime
can be understood as the set of institutions and processes, governmental
and non-governmental, performed by social actors endowed with a certain

capacity for power, through which the political domination of society is
constituted and exercised.
In generic terms, “politics” as a state practice refers to a set of actions
developed in a planned manner and following deliberately designed strate-
gies in pursuit of the objectives that are intended as their results. And it is
the State, which—due to its coercive capacity and the general scope of its
intervention—is constituted as the political institution par excellence and
the main executor of policies aimed at producing effects that involve soci-
ety as a whole, contributing in such a way to decisively model the public
(and private) scope of it. Consequently, when we talk about “policies” in
a narrower sense, reference is made more specifically to a normative and/
or executive attribution of general and public competence, in principle,
exclusive to the State.
In this way, social policies constitute forms of intervention in modern
Latin American states, which due to their particular place in social struc-
turing processes are highly ambiguous; they express, define and institute
the so-called social issue; they have a strong normative potential since it
nominates and normalizes what at a given moment constitutes a social
problem, who will specify it, and also which topics are likely to be posi-
tioned as governmentally recognized rights. Then, these policies express
interventions that by action or omission account for the medium result of
the class struggle, by setting the limits of the constitutional dispossession
of capitalism. Finally, it circulates a series of satisfiers from some spheres of
the social structure towards others, thus configuring the networks of
responsibility for welfare.
One of the most forceful “effects” of the “Social Plans”1 is to keep the
subjects in the basic energy and nutritional limits for their survival, this is
one of the multiple meanings which these plans express, and at the same
time constitute a policy of and about the bodies (Scribano and De Sena
2016; De Sena 2014).
Social agents know the world through their bodies. Impressions of
objects, phenomena, processes and other agents, structure the perceptions
that the subjects accumulate and reproduce. From this perspective, a
perception constitutes a naturalized way of organizing the set of impressions
that occur in an agent. This configuration consists of a dialectic between
impression, perception and the result of these, which gives the “sense” of
1
An expression that we advance in Chap. 2.
surplus to the sensations. That is to say, it places them beyond here and
beyond the aforementioned dialectic. Sensations as a result and as the back-
ground of perceptions give rise to emotions as an effect of the processes of
adjudication and correspondence between perceptions and sensations.
Emotions understood as consequences of sensations can be seen as the puz-
zle that comes as action and effect of feeling or feeling. They are rooted in
the states of feeling the world that allow the sustaining of perceptions associ-
ated with socially constructed forms of sensations. In turn, the organic and
social senses also make it possible to convey what seems unique and unre-
peatable as are the individual sensations, and elaborate on the “unnoticed
work” of the incorporation of the social made emotion.
Identifying, classifying and making the game critical among percep-
tions, sensations and emotions is vital to understand the devices for regu-
lating the sensations that capitalism has as one of its contemporary features
of social domination (Scribano 2012).
The connections and disconnections between perceptions, sensations
and emotions operate daily in a “pre-reflexive” state that becomes con-
crete practices in the flow of social life crossed by class position and condi-
tion (sensu Bourdieu) of the subjects and the groups to which they belong.
Here, the need to distinguish and connect the possible relationships
between sociability, experientiality and social sensibilities appears strongly.
Sociability is linked to social interaction and “is a way of explaining how
agents act and live by acting” and therefore the need to revise the notion
of experientiality as a whole. a way of “expressing the senses acquired by
being-in-body with others as a result of ‘experiencing’ the dialectic
between individual, social and subjective bodies, on the one hand; and the
logic of appropriation of bodily and social energies” (Scribano 2010: 174).
In this sense, the body requires for its reproduction the bodily energy as
“the force necessary to preserve the state of ‘natural’ things in systemic
functioning” (Scribano 2007a: 110). Regarding the social body, it is based
on “in body energy and refers to its distribution processes as a substrate
for movement and action conditions” (Scribano 2007a: 110).
In this way, the sensations are distributed according to the specific
forms of bodily capital, while the impact of the body on sociability and
experientiality, refers us to an analytical distinction between body image,
body skin and body movement (sensu Scribano). Then, the forms of sociabil-
ity and experientiality are stressed and distorted as a Moebius strip with
the sensibilities that emerge from the sensory regulation devices.
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farm the loss wouldn’t be great. It might even be used in some way. I
just wanted to mention it; we can talk out the details after you’ve
thought it over.”
In his anxiety to make himself clear Shepherd had stammered
repeatedly. He waited, his face flushed, his eyelids quivering, for
some encouraging word from his father. Mills dropped his cigarette
into the tray before he spoke.
“What would such a house cost, Shep?”
“It can be built for twenty thousand dollars. I got a young fellow in
Freeman’s office to make me some sketches—Storrs—you met him
at the country club; a mighty nice chap. If you’ll just look at these
——”
Mills took the two letter sheets his son extended, one showing a floor
plan, the other a rough sketch of the proposed building, inspected
them indifferently and gave them back.
“If you’d like to keep them——” Shepherd began.
“No; that isn’t necessary. I think we can settle the matter now. It was
all right for those people to use the farm as a playground during the
summer, but this idea of building a house for them won’t do. We’ve
got to view these things practically, Shep. You’re letting your
sentimental feelings run away with you. If I let you go ahead with that
scheme, it would be unfair to all the other employers in town. If you
stop to think, you can see for yourself that for us to build such a
clubhouse would cause dissatisfaction among other concerns I’m
interested in. And there’s another thing. Your people have done
considerable damage—breaking down the shrubbery and young
trees I’d planted where I’d laid out the roads. I hadn’t spoken of this,
for I knew how much fun you got out of it, but as for spending twenty
thousand dollars for a clubhouse and turning the whole place over to
those people, it can’t be done!”
“Well, father, of course I can see your way of looking at it,” Shepherd
said with a crestfallen air. “I thought maybe, just for a few years——”
“That’s another point,” Mills interrupted. “You can’t give it to them and
then take it away. Such people are bound to be unreasonable. Give
them an inch and they take a mile. You’ll find as you grow older that
they have precious little appreciation of such kindnesses. Your
heart’s been playing tricks with your head. I tell you, my dear boy,
there’s nothing in it; positively nothing!”
Mills rose, struck his hands together smartly and laid them on his
son’s shoulders, looking down at him with smiling tolerance.
Shepherd was nervously fumbling Storrs’s sketches, and as his
father stepped back he hastily thrust them into his pocket.
“You may be right, father,” he said slowly, and with no trace of
resentment.
“Storrs, you said?” Mills inquired as he opened a cabinet door and
took out his hat and light overcoat. “Is he the young man Millie
introduced me to?”
“Yes; that tall, fine-looking chap; a Tech man; just moved here—
friend of Bud Henderson’s.”
“I wasn’t quite sure of the name. He’s an architect, is he?” asked
Mills as he slowly buttoned his coat.
“Yes; I met him at the Freemans’ and had him for lunch at the club.
Freeman is keen about him.”
“He’s rather an impressive-looking fellow,” Mills replied. “Expects to
live here, does he?”
“Yes. He has no relatives here; just thought the town offered a good
opening. His home was somewhere in Ohio, I think.”
“Yes; I believe I heard that,” Mills replied carelessly. “You have your
car with you?”
“Yes; the runabout. I’ll skip home and dress and drive over with
Connie. We’re going to the Claytons’ later.”
When they reached the street Shepherd ordered up his father’s
limousine and saw him into it, and waved his hand as it rolled away.
As he turned to seek his own car the smile faded from his face. It
was not merely that his father had refused to permit the building of
the clubhouse, but that the matter had been brushed aside quite as a
parent rejects some absurd proposal of an unreasoning child. He
strode along with the quick steps compelled by his short stature,
smarting under what he believed to be an injustice, and ashamed of
himself for not having combated the objections his father had raised.
The loss of shrubs or trees was nothing when weighed against the
happiness of the people who had enjoyed the use of the farm. He
thought now of many things that he might have said in defence of his
proposition; but he had never been able to hold his own in debate
with his father. His face burned with humiliation. He regretted that
within an hour he was to see his father again.
II
The interior of Franklin Mills’s house was not so forbidding as
Henderson had hinted in his talk with Bruce. It was really a very
handsomely furnished, comfortable establishment that bore the
marks of a sound if rather austere taste. The house had been built in
the last years of Mrs. Mills’s life, and if a distinctly feminine note was
lacking in its appointments, this was due to changes made by Mills in
keeping with the later tendency in interior decoration toward the
elimination of nonessentials.
It was only a polite pretense that Leila kept house for her father. Her
inclinations were decidedly not domestic, and Mills employed and
directed the servants, ordered the meals, kept track of expenditures
and household bills, and paid them through his office. He liked
formality and chose well-trained servants capable of conforming to
his wishes in this respect. The library on the second floor was Mills’s
favorite lounging place. Here were books indicative of the cultivated
and catholic taste of the owner, and above the shelves were ranged
the family portraits, a considerable array of them, preserving the
countenances of his progenitors. Throughout the house there were
pictures, chiefly representative work of contemporary French and
American artists. When Mills got tired of a picture or saw a chance to
buy a better one by the same painter, he sold or gave away the
discard. He knew the contents of his house from cellar to garret—
roved over it a good deal in his many lonely hours.
He came downstairs a few minutes before seven and from force of
habit strolled through the rooms on a tour of inspection. In keeping
with his sense of personal dignity, he always put on his dinner coat in
the evening, even when he was alone. He rang and asked the
smartly capped and aproned maid who responded whether his
daughter was at home.
“Miss Leila went to the Country Club this afternoon, sir, and hasn’t
come in yet. She said she was dining here.”
“Thank you,” he replied colorlessly, and turned to glance over some
new books neatly arranged on a table at the side of the living-room.
A clock struck seven and on the last solemn stroke the remote titter
of an electric bell sent the maid to the door.
“Mr. and Mrs. Shepherd Mills,” the girl announced in compliance with
an established rule, which was not suspended even when Mills’s son
and daughter-in-law were the guests.
“Shep fairly dragged me!” Mrs. Mills exclaimed as she greeted her
father-in-law. “He’s in such terror of being late to one of your feasts! I
know I’m a fright.” She lifted her hand to her hair with needless
solicitude; it was perfectly arranged. She wore an evening gown of
sapphire blue chiffon,—an effective garment; she knew that it was
effective. Seeing that he was eyeing it critically, she demanded to
know what he thought of it.
“You’re so fastidious, you know! Shep never pays any attention to
my clothes. It’s a silly idea that women dress only for each other; it’s
for captious men like you that we take so much trouble.”
“You’re quite perfectly turned out, I should say,” Mills remarked.
“That’s a becoming gown. I don’t believe I’ve seen it before.”
Her father-in-law was regarding her quizzically, an ambiguous smile
playing about his lips. She was conscious that he never gave her his
whole approval and she was piqued by her failure to evoke any
expressions of cordiality from him. Men usually liked her, or at least
found her amusing, and she had never been satisfied that Franklin
Mills either liked her or thought her clever. It was still a source of
bitterness that Mills had objected strongly to Shepherd’s marrying
her. His objections she attributed to snobbery; for her family was in
nowise distinguished, and Constance, an only child, had made her
own way socially chiefly through acquaintances and friendships
formed in the Misses Palmers’ school, a local institution which
conferred a certain social dignity upon its patrons.
She had never been able to break down Mills’s reserves, and the
tone which she had adopted for her intercourse with him had been
arrived at after a series of experiments in the first year of her
marriage. He suffered this a little stolidly. There was a point of
discretion beyond which she never dared venture. She had once
tried teasing him about a young widow, a visitor from the South for
whom he had shown some partiality, and he hadn’t liked it, though
he had taken the same sort of chaff from others in her presence with
perfect good nature.
Shepherd, she realized perfectly, was a disappointment to his father.
Countless points of failure in the relationship of father and son were
manifest to her, things of which Shepherd himself was unconscious.
It was Mills’s family pride that had prompted him to make Shepherd
president of the storage battery company, and the same vanity was
responsible for the house he had given Shepherd on his marriage—
a much bigger house than the young couple needed. He expected
her to bear children that the continuity of the name might be
unbroken, but the thought of bearing children was repugnant to her.
Still, the birth of an heir, to take the name of Franklin Mills, would
undoubtedly heighten his respect for her—diminish the veiled
hostility which she felt she aroused in him.
“Where’s Leila?” asked Shepherd as dinner was announced and
they moved toward the dining-room.
“She’ll be along presently,” Mills replied easily.
“Dear Leila!” exclaimed Constance. “You never disciplined her as
you did Shep. Shep would go to the stake before he’d turn up late.”
“Leila,” said Mills a little defensively, “is a law unto herself.”
“That’s why we all love the dear child!” said Constance quickly. “Not
for worlds would I change her.”
To nothing was Mills so sensitive as to criticism of Leila, a fact which
she should have remembered.
As they took their places Mills asked her, in the impersonal tone she
hated, what the prospects were for a gay winter. She was on the
committee of the Assembly, whose entertainments were a
noteworthy feature of every season. There, too, was the Dramatic
Club, equally exclusive in its membership, and Constance was on
the play committee. Mills listened with interest, or with the pretense
of interest, as she gave him the benefit of her knowledge as to the
winter’s social programme.
They were half through the dinner when Leila arrived. With a
cheerful “Hello, everybody,” she flung off her wrap and without
removing her hat, sank into the chair Shepherd drew out for her.
“Sorry, Dada, but Millie and I played eighteen holes this afternoon;
got a late start and were perfectly starved when we finished and just
had to have tea. And some people came along and we got to talking
and it was dark before we knew it.”
“How’s your game coming on?” her father asked.
“Not so bad, Dada. Millie’s one of these lazy players; she doesn’t
care whether she wins or loses, and I guess I’m too temperamental
to be a good golfer.”
“I thought Millie was pretty strong on temperament herself,”
remarked Shepherd.
“Well, Millie is and she isn’t. She’s not the sort that flies all to pieces
when anything goes wrong.”
“Millie’s a pretty fine girl,” declared Shepherd.
“Millicent really has charm,” remarked Constance, though without
enthusiasm.
“Millie’s a perfect darling!” said Leila. “She’s so lovely to her father
and mother! They’re really very nice. Everybody knocks Doc Harden,
but he’s not a bad sort. It’s a shame the way people treat them. Mrs.
Harden’s a dear, sweet thing; plain and sensible and doesn’t look
pained when I cuss a little.” She gave her father a sly look, but he
feigned inattention. “Dada, how do you explain Millie?”
“Well, I don’t,” replied Mills, with a broad smile at the abruptness of
the question. “It’s just as well that everything and everybody on this
planet can’t be explained and don’t have to be. I’ve come to a time of
life when I’m a little fed up on things that can be reduced to figures. I
want to be mystified!”
Leila pointed her finger at him across the table.
“I’ll say you like mystery! If there was ever a human being who just
had to have the facts, you’re it! I know because I’ve tried hiding
milliners’ bills from you.”
“Well, I usually pay them,” Mills replied good-humoredly. “Now that
you’ve spoken of bills, I’d like to ask you——”
“Don’t!” Leila ejaculated, placing her hands over her ears with
simulated horror. “I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to
ask why I bought that new squirrel coat. Well, winter’s coming and
it’s to keep me from freezing to death.”
“Well, the house is well heated,” Mills replied dryly. “The answer is
for you to spend a little time at home.”
Leila was a spoiled child and lived her own life with little paternal
interference. After Mills had failed utterly to keep her in school, or
rather to find any school in which she would stay, he had tried tutors
with no better results. He had finally placed her for a year in New
York with a woman who made a business of giving the finishing
touches to the daughters of the provincial rich. There were no
lessons to learn which these daughters didn’t want to learn, but Leila
had heard operas and concerts to a point where she really knew
something of music, and she had acquired a talent that greatly
amused her father for talking convincingly of things she really knew
nothing about. He found much less delight in her appalling habit of
blurting out things better left unsaid, and presumably foreign to the
minds of well-bred young women.
Her features were a feminized version of her father’s; she was dark
like him and with the same gray eyes; but here the resemblance
ended. She was alert, restless, quick of speech and action. The
strenuous life of her long days was expressing itself in little nervous
twitchings of her hands and head. Her father, under his benignant
gaze, was noting these things now.
“I hope you’re staying in tonight, Leila?” he said. “It seems to me
you’re not sleeping enough.”
“Well, no, Dada. I was going to the Claytons’. I told Fred Thomas he
might come for me at nine.”
“Thomas?” Mills questioned. “I don’t know that I’d choose him for an
escort.”
“Oh, Freddy’s all right!” Leila replied easily. “He’s always asking me
to go places with him, and I’d turned him down until I was ashamed
to refuse any more.”
“I think,” said her father, “it might be as well to begin refusing again.
What about him, Shep?”
“He’s a good sort, I think,” Shepherd replied after a hasty glance at
his wife. “But of course——”
“Of course, he’s divorced,” interposed Constance, “and he hasn’t
been here long. But people I know in Chicago say he was well liked
there. What is it he has gone into, Shep?”
“He came here to open a branch of a lumber company—a large
concern, I think,” Shepherd replied. “I believe he has been divorced,
Father, if that’s what’s troubling you.”
“Oh, he told me all about the divorce!” interposed Leila
imperturbably. “His wife got crazy about another man and—biff! Don’t
worry, Dada; he isn’t dangerous.”
III
When they had gone upstairs to the library for coffee, Leila lighted a
cigarette and proceeded to open some letters that had been placed
on a small desk kept in the room for her benefit. She perched herself
on the desk and read aloud, between whiffs of her cigarette,
snatches of news from a letter. Shepherd handed her a cup and she
stirred her coffee, the cigarette hanging from her lip. Constance
feigned not to notice a shadow of annoyance on her father-in-law’s
face as Leila, her legs dangling, occasionally kicked the desk frame
with her heels.
“By the way, Leila,” said Constance, “the Nelsons want to sell their
place at Harbor Hills. They haven’t been there for several years, you
know. It’s one of the best locations anywhere in Michigan. It would
solve the eternal summer problem for all of us—so accessible and a
marvelous view—and you could have all the water sports you
wanted. And they say the new clubhouse is a perfect dream.”
Shepherd Mills’s cup tottered in its saucer with a sharp staccato. He
had warned his wife not to broach the matter of purchasing the
northern Michigan cottage, which she had threatened to do for some
time and had discussed with Leila in the hope of enlisting her as an
ally for an effective assault upon Mills.
“It’s a peach of a place, all right,” Leila remarked. “I wonder if the
yacht goes with the house. I believe I could use that yacht. Really,
Dada, we ought to have a regular summer place. I’m fed up on
rented cottages. If we had a house like the Nelsons’ we could all use
it.”
She had promised Constance to support the idea, but her sister-in-
law had taken her off guard and she was aware that she hadn’t met
the situation with quite the enthusiasm it demanded. Mills was
lighting a cigar in his usual unhurried fashion. He knew that
Constance was in the habit of using Leila as an advocate when she
wanted him to do something extraordinary, and Leila, to his secret
delight, usually betrayed the source of her inspiration.
“What do the Nelsons want for the property?” he asked, settling
himself back in his chair.
“I suppose the yacht isn’t included,” Constance answered. “They’re
asking seventy thousand for the house, and there’s a lot of land, you
know. The Nelsons live in Detroit and it would be easy to get the
details.”
“You said yourself it was a beautiful place when you were there last
summer,” Leila resumed, groping in her memory for the reasons with
which Constance had fortified her for urging the purchase. “And the
golf course up there is a wonder, and the whole place is very
exclusive—only the nicest people.”
“I thought you preferred the northeast coast,” her father replied.
“What’s sent you back to fresh water?”
“Oh, Dada, I just have to change my mind sometimes! If I kept the
same idea very long it would turn bad—like an egg.”
Constance, irritated by Leila’s perfunctory espousal of the proposed
investment, tried to signal for silence. But Leila, having undertaken to
implant in her father’s mind the desirability of acquiring the cottage at
Harbor Hills, was unwilling to drop the subject.
“Poor old Shep never gets any vacation to amount to anything. If we
had a place in Michigan he could go up every week-end and get a
breath of air. We all of us could have a perfectly grand time.”
“Who’s all?” demanded her father. “You’d want to run a select
boarding house, would you?”
“Well, not exactly. But Connie and I could open the place early and
stay late, and we’d hope you’d be with us all the time, and Shep,
whenever he could get away.”
“Shep, I think this is only a scheme to shake you and me for the
summer. Connie and Leila are trying to put something over on us.
And of course we can’t stand for any such thing.”
“Of course, Father, the upkeep of such a place is considerable,”
Shepherd replied conciliatingly.
“Yes; quite as much as a town house, and you’d never use it more
than two or three months a year. By the way, Connie, do you know
those Cincinnati Marvins Leila and I met up there?”
Connie knew that her father-in-law had, with characteristic deftness,
disposed of the Harbor Hills house as effectually as though he had
roared a refusal. Shepherd, still smarting under the rejection of his
plan for giving his workmen a clubhouse, marveled at the suavity
with which his father eluded proposals that did not impress him
favorably. He wondered at times whether his father was not in some
degree a superman who in his judgments and actions exercised a
Jovian supremacy over the rest of mankind. Leila, finding herself
bored by her father’s talk with Constance about the Marvins, sprang
from the table, stretched herself lazily and said she guessed she
would go and dress.
When she reached the door she turned toward him with mischief in
her eyes. “What are you up to tonight, Dada? You might stroll over
and see Millie! The Claytons didn’t ask her to their party.”
“Thanks for the hint, dear,” Mills replied with a tinge of irony.
“I think I’ll go with you,” said Constance, as Leila impudently kissed
her fingers to her father and turned toward her room. “Whistle for me
at eight-thirty, Shep.”
Both men rose as the young women left the room—Franklin Mills
was punctilious in all the niceties of good manners—but before
resuming his seat he closed the door. There was something ominous
in this, and Shepherd nervously lighted a cigarette. He covertly
glanced at his watch to fix in his mind the amount of time he must
remain with his father before Constance returned. He loved and
admired his wife and he envied her the ease with which she ignored
or surmounted difficulties.
Connie made mistakes in dealing with her father-in-law and
Shepherd was aware of this, but his own errors in this respect only
served to strengthen his reliance on the understanding and
sympathy of his wife, who was an adept in concealing
disappointment and discomfiture. When Shepherd was disposed to
complain of his father, Connie was always consoling. She would say:
“You’re altogether too sensitive, Shep. It’s an old trick of fathers to
treat their sons as though they were still boys. Your father can’t
realize that you’re grown up. But he knows you stick to your job and
that you’re anxious to please him. I suppose he thought you’d grow
up to be just like himself; but you’re not, so it’s up to him to take you
as the pretty fine boy you are. You’re the steadiest young man in
town and you needn’t think he doesn’t appreciate that.”
Shepherd, fortifying himself with a swift recollection of his wife’s
frequent reassurances of this sort, nevertheless wished that she had
not run off to gossip with Leila. However, the interview would be
brief, and he played with his cigarette while he waited for his father
to begin.
“There’s something I’ve wanted to talk with you about, Shep. It will
take only a minute.”
“Yes, father.”
“It’s about Leila”—he hesitated—“a little bit about Constance, too. I’m
not altogether easy about Leila. I mean”—he paused again—“as to
Connie’s influence over your sister. Connie is enough older to realize
that Leila needs a little curbing as to things I can’t talk to her about
as a woman could. Leila doesn’t need to be encouraged in
extravagance. And she likes running about well enough without
being led into things she might better let alone. I’m not criticizing
Connie’s friends, but you do have at your house people I’d rather
Leila didn’t know—at least not to be intimate with them. As a
concrete example, I don’t care for this fellow Thomas. To be frank,
I’ve made some inquiries about him and he’s hardly the sort of
person you’d care for your sister to run around with.”
Shepherd, blinking under this succession of direct statements, felt
that some comment was required.
“Of course, father, Connie wouldn’t take up anyone she didn’t think
perfectly all right. And she’d never put any undesirable
acquaintances in Leila’s way. She’s too fond of Leila and too deeply
interested in her happiness for that.”
“I wasn’t intimating that Connie was consciously influencing Leila in a
wrong way in that particular instance. But Leila is very
impressionable. So far I’ve been able to eliminate young men I
haven’t liked. I’m merely asking your cooperation, and Connie’s, in
protecting her. She’s very headstrong and rather disposed to take
advantage of our position by running a little wild. Our friends no
doubt make allowances, but people outside our circle may not be so
tolerant.”
“Yes, that’s all perfectly true, father,” Shepherd assented, relieved
and not a little pleased that his father appeared to be criticizing him
less than asking his assistance.
“For another thing,” Mills went on. “Leila has somehow got into the
habit of drinking. Several times I’ve seen her when she’d had too
much. That sort of thing won’t do!”
“Of course not! But I’m sure Connie hasn’t been encouraging Leila to
drink. She and I both have talked to her about that. I hoped she’d
stop it before you found it out.”
“Don’t ever get the idea that I don’t know what’s going on!” Mills
retorted tartly. “Another thing I want to speak of is Connie’s way of
getting Leila to back her schemes—things like that summer place,
for example. We don’t need a summer place. The idea that you can’t
have a proper vacation is all rubbish. I urged you all summer to take
Connie East for a month.”
“I know you did. It was my own fault I didn’t go. Please don’t think
we’re complaining; Connie and I get a lot of fun just motoring. And
when you’re at the farm we enjoy running out there. I think, Father,
that sometimes you’re not—not—quite just to Connie.”
“Not just to her!” exclaimed Mills, with a lifting of the brows. “In what
way have I been unjust to her?”
Shepherd knew that his remark was unfortunate before it was out of
his mouth. He should have followed his habit of assenting to what his
father said without broadening the field of discussion. He was taken
aback by his father’s question, uttered with what was, for Franklin
Mills, an unusual display of asperity.
“I only meant,” Shepherd replied hastily, “that you don’t always”—he
frowned—“you don’t quite give Connie credit for her fine qualities.”
“Quite the contrary,” Mills replied. “My only concern as her father-in-
law is that she shall continue to display those qualities. I realize that
she’s a popular young woman, but in a way you pay for that, and I
stand for it and make it possible for you to spend the money. Now
don’t jump to the conclusion that I’m intimating that you and Connie
wouldn’t have just as many friends if you spent a tenth of what you’re
spending now. Be it far from me, my boy, to discredit your value and
Connie’s as social factors!”
Mills laughed to relieve the remark of any suspicion of irony. There
was nothing Shepherd dreaded so much as his father’s ironies. The
dread was the greater because there was always a disturbing
uncertainty as to what they concealed.
“About those little matters I mentioned,” Mills went on, “I count on
you to help.”
“Certainly, father. Connie and I both will do all we can. I’m glad you
spoke to me about it.”
“All right, Shep,” and Mills opened the door to mark the end of the
interview.
IV
In Leila’s room Constance had said, the moment they were alone:
“Well, you certainly gummed it!”
“Oh, shoot! Dada wouldn’t buy that Nelson place if it only cost a
nickel.”
“Well, you didn’t do much to advance the cause!”
“See here,” said Leila, “one time’s just as good as another with
Dada. I knew he’d never agree to it. I only spoke of it because you
gave me the lead. You never seem to learn his curves.”
“If you’d backed me up right we could have got him interested and
won him over. Anybody could see that he was away off tonight—
even more difficult than usual!”
“Oh, tush! You and Shep make me tired. You take father too
seriously. All you’ve got to do with him is just to kid him along. Let’s
have a little drink to drown our troubles.”
“Now, Leila——”
Leila had drawn a hat-box from the inner recesses of a closet and
extracted from it a quart bottle of whiskey.
“I’m all shot to hell and need a spoonful of this stuff to pep me up!
Hands off, old thing! Don’t touch—Leila scream!” Constance had
tried to seize the bottle.
“Leila, please don’t drink! The Claytons are having everybody of any
consequence at this party and if you go reeking of liquor all the old
tabbies will babble!”
“Well, darling, let them talk! At least they will talk about both of us
then!”
“Who’s talking about me?” Constance demanded.
“Be calm, dearest! You certainly wore the guilty look then. Let’s call it
quits—I’ve got to dress!”
She poured herself a second drink and restored the bottle to its
hiding place.
CHAPTER SIX
I
Several interviews with Freeman had resulted in an arrangement by
which Bruce was to enter the architect’s office immediately. As
Henderson had predicted, Mrs. Freeman was a real power in her
husband’s affairs. She confided to Bruce privately that, with all his
talents, Bill lacked tact in dealing with his clients and he needed
someone to supply this deficiency. And the office was a place of
confusion, and Bill was prone to forgetfulness. Bruce, Mrs. Freeman
thought, could be of material assistance in keeping Bill straight and
extricating him from the difficulties into which he constantly stumbled
in his absorption in the purely artistic side of his profession. Bruce
was put to work on tentative sketches and estimates for a residence
for a man who had no very clear idea of what he wanted nor how
much he wanted to spend.
Bruce soon discovered that Freeman disliked interviews with
contractors and the general routine necessary to keep in touch with
the cost of labor and materials. When he was able to visualize and
create he was happy, but tedious calculations left him sulky and
disinclined to work. Bruce felt no such repugnance; he had a kind of
instinct for such things, and was able to carry in his head a great
array of facts and figures.
On his first free evening after meeting Millicent Harden at the
Country Club he rang the Harden doorbell, and as he waited glanced
toward the Mills’ house in the lot adjoining. He vaguely wondered
whether Franklin Mills was within its walls.
He had tried to analyze the emotions that had beset him that night
when he had taken the hand of the man he believed to be his father.
There was something cheap and vulgar in the idea that blood speaks
to blood and that possibly Mills had recognized him by some sort of
intuition. But Bruce rejected this as preposterous, a concession to
the philosophy of ignorant old women muttering scandal before a
dying fire. Very likely he had been wrong in fancying that Mills had
taken any special note of him. And there was always his mother’s
assurance that Mills didn’t know of his existence. Mills probably had
the habit of eyeing people closely; he shouldn’t have permitted
himself to be troubled by that. He was a man of large affairs, with
faculties trained to the quick inspection and appraisment of every
stranger he met....
The middle-aged woman who opened the door was evidently a
member of the household and he hastily thrust into his pocket the
card he had taken out, stated his name and asked if Miss Harden
was at home.
“Yes, Millie’s home. Just come in, Mr. Storrs, and I’ll call her.”
But Millicent came into the hall without waiting to be summoned.
“I’m so glad to see you, Mr. Storrs!” she said, and introduced him to
her mother, a tall, heavily built woman with reddish hair turning gray,
and a friendly countenance.
“I was just saying to Doctor Harden that I guessed nobody was
coming in tonight when you rang. You simply can’t keep a servant in
to answer the bell in the evening. You haven’t met Doctor Harden?
Millie, won’t you call your papa?”
Millicent opened a door that revealed a small, cozy sitting-room and
summoned her father—a short, thick-set man with a close-trimmed
gray beard, who came out clutching a newspaper.
“Shan’t we all go into the library?” asked Millicent after the two men
had been introduced and had expressed their approval of the
prolonged fine weather.
“You young folks make yourselves comfortable in the library,” said
Mrs. Harden. “I told Millie it was too warm for a fire, but she just has
to have the fireplace going when there’s any excuse, and this house
does get chilly in the fall evenings even when it’s warm outside.”
Harden was already retreating toward the room from which he had
been drawn to meet the caller, and his wife immediately followed.
Both repeated their expressions of pleasure at meeting Bruce; but
presumably, in the accepted fashion of American parents when their
daughters entertain callers, they had no intention of appearing again.
Millicent snapped on lights that disclosed a long, high-ceilinged room
finished in dark oak and fitted up as a library. A disintegrating log in
the broad fireplace had thrown out a puff of smoke that gave the air
a fleeting pungent scent.
The flooring was of white and black tiles covered with oriental rugs in
which the dominant dark red brought a warmth to the eye. Midway of
the room stood a grand piano, and beyond it a spiral stair led to a
small balcony on which the console of an organ was visible. Back of
this was a stained glass window depicting a knight in armor—a
challenging, militant figure. Even as revealed only by the inner
illumination, its rich colors and vigorous draughtsmanship were
clearly suggested. And it was wholly appropriate, Bruce decided, and
altogether consonant with the general scheme of the room. Noting
his interest, Millicent turned a switch that lighted the window from a
room beyond with the effect of vitalizing the knight’s figure, making
him seem indeed to be gravely riding, with lance in rest, along the
wall.
“Do pardon me!” Bruce murmured, standing just inside the door and
glancing about with frank enjoyment of the room’s spaciousness.
The outer lines of the somewhat commonplace square brick house
had not prepared him for this. The room presented a mingling of
periods in both architecture and furnishing, but the blending had
been admirably done.
“Forgive me for staring,” he said as he sat down on a divan opposite
her with the hearth between them. “I’m not sure even yet that I’m in
the twentieth century!”
“I suppose it is a queer jumble; but don’t blame the architect! He,
poor wretch, thought we were perfectly crazy when we started, but I
think before he got through he really liked it.”
“I envy him the fun he had doing it! But someone must have
furnished the inspiration. I’m going to assume that it was mostly
you.”
“You may if you’ll go ahead and criticize—tear it all to pieces.”
“I’d as soon think of criticizing Chartres, Notre Dame, or the hand
that rounded Peter’s dome!” Bruce exclaimed. “Alas that our
acquaintance is so brief! I want to ask you all manner of questions—
how you came to do it—and all that.”
“Well, first of all one must have an indulgent father and mother. I’m
reminded occasionally that my little whims were expensive.”
“I dare say they were! But it’s something to have a daughter who can
produce a room like this.”
He rose and bowed to her, and then turning toward the knight in the
window, gravely saluted.
“I’m not so sure,” he said as he sat down, “that the gentleman up
there didn’t have something to do with it.”
“Please don’t make too much of him. Everyone pays me the
compliment of thinking him Galahad, but I think of him as the
naughty Launcelot. I read a book once on old French glass and I just
had to have a window. And the organ made this room the logical
place for it. Papa calls this my chapel and refuses to sit in it at all. He
says it’s too much like church!”
“Ah! But that’s a tribute in itself! Your father realizes that this is a
place for worship—without reference to the knight.”
She laid her forefinger against her cheek, tilted her head slightly,
mocking him with lips and eyes.
“Let me think! That was a pretty speech, but of course you’re
referring to that bronze Buddha over there. Come to think of it, papa
does rather fancy him.”
When she smilingly met his gaze he laughed and made a gesture of
despair.
“That was a nice bit of side-stepping! I’m properly rebuked. I see my
own worshiping must be done with caution. But the room is beautiful.
I’m glad to know there’s such a place in town.”
“I did have a good time planning and arranging it. But there’s nothing
remarkable about it after all. It’s merely what you might call a refuge
from reality—if that means anything.”
“It means a lot—too much for me to grasp all at once.”
“You’re making fun of me! All I meant was that I wanted a place to
escape into where I can play at being something I really am not. We
all need to do that. After all, it’s just a room.”
“Of course that’s just what it isn’t! It’s superb. I’ve already decided to
spend a lot of time here.”
“You may, if you won’t pick up little chance phrases I let fall and
frighten me with them. I have a friend—an awful highbrow—and he
bores me to death exclaiming over things I say and can’t explain and
then explaining them to me. But—why aren’t you at the Claytons’
party?”
“I wasn’t asked,” he said. “I don’t know them.”
“I know them, but I wasn’t asked,” she replied smilingly.
“Well, anyhow, it’s nicer here, I think.”
Bruce remembered what Henderson had said about the guarded
social acceptance of the patent medicine manufacturer and his
family; but Millicent evidently didn’t resent her exclusion from the
Claytons’ party. Social differentiations, Bruce imagined, mattered
little to this girl, who was capable of fashioning her own manner of
life, even to the point of building a temple for herself in which to
worship gods of her own choosing. When he expressed interest in
her modeling, which Dale Freeman had praised, Millicent led the way
to a door opening into an extension of the library beyond the knight’s
window, that served her as a studio. It was only a way of amusing
herself, she said, when he admired a plaque of a child’s profile she
confessed to be her work. The studio bore traces of recent use.
Damp cloths covered several unfinished figures. There was a

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Social Policies and Emotions: A Look

from the Global South 1st Edition

From Colonialism To International Aid: External Actors

Urban Planning in the Global South 1st ed. Edition

Informal Workers and Organized Action: Narratives From

Theorising Urban Development From the Global South

Learning to Look. Dispatches from the Art World Alva

Disinformation in the Global South 1st Edition Herman

Economic and Social Upgrading in Global Value Chains:

Poverty, Inequality, and Innovation in the Global South

Social Policies and

ISBN 978-3-030-34738-3 ISBN 978-3-030-34739-0 (eBook)

1 Social Policies and Emotions: A Look from the Global

2 State, Public Policies and Social Policies: Synthesis of

3 Social Policies, Bodies/Emotions and Politics of

4 Normalized Societies and the Assisted Citizen 49

5 Compensatory Consumption: A New Way of Building

6 Poor Already Hits: The Voice of Violented Women 93

7 Educational Practices and Management of Sensibilities:

8 Universality, Targeting or Massiveness? An Unfinished

9 The Aid as Central Axis of the Politics of the Sensibilities

10 Weak Bodies: Energy, Food Policies and Depredation of

11 The Occupability as a Form of Social Policy187

Fig. 7.1 Sensibilities 122

Social Policies and Emotions: A Look

The central objective of this book is to make evident the connections

Social Policies, Emotions and the Global South

© The Author(s) 2020 1

its current colonial situation. Beyond the proximities and distances,

1. Capitalism has been transformed (emphasizing some of its previous

The occupation and expropriation to which the entire populations of

It is not our interest here to discuss “philosophically, punctually and in

lowing argumentative strategy: (1) we outline a pattern of connections

synthesize the school experiences of poor women giving some clues to

analysed. It ends by reviewing how the Conditional Cash Transfers

argumentation: firstly, we summarize the diverse views on the welfare

Stampini, M., and L. Tornarolli. 2012. The Growth of Conditional Cash

State, Public Policies and Social Policies:

© The Author(s) 2020 13

curriculum” (metaphorically retaking the concept used in the analysis of

State, Social Issues and Public Policies

In both cases, the task of the state is evident.

Titmuss (1974), one of the great scholars in this regard, developed a

1. Residual or public assistance model: based on the premise that there

According to Titmuss (1974), these three models are an approximation

Martínez Franzoni (2005), when referring to Latin America, makes a

Now, Argentina is one of the Latin American countries where the

What Are Social Policies?

create functional relationships between production, distribution and redis-

gramme also increased, giving way to “massiveness”. The third element as

Horizons. Sociological Studies Editor. Argentina. http://estudiosociologicos.

Oszlak, O. and G. O’Donnell. 1976. Estado y Políticas Estatales en América

Social Policies, Bodies/Emotions

© The Author(s) 2020 31

Sociology of Emotions and Social

The first generation of cultural neuroscience studies has yielded several

From the perspective of Warren TenHouten, who inaugurated and

McColl-Kennedy and his colleagues have recently offered an interest-

Theory, Conservation of Resources Theory and Affective Events Theory;

In short, through analyzing the emotions involved in social phenomena,

This plurality of diverse theories and versions of the sociology of emo-

1. The processes of social structuration are clearly connected with the

Bodies, Emotions and Politics of Sensibilities

1 Social Policies and Emotions: A Look from the Global

2 State, Public Policies and Social Policies: Synthesis of

3 Social Policies, Bodies/Emotions and Politics of

4 Normalized Societies and the Assisted Citizen 49

5 Compensatory Consumption: A New Way of Building

6 Poor Already Hits: The Voice of Violented Women 93

7 Educational Practices and Management of Sensibilities:

8 Universality, Targeting or Massiveness? An Unfinished

9 The Aid as Central Axis of the Politics of the Sensibilities

10 Weak Bodies: Energy, Food Policies and Depredation of

11 The Occupability as a Form of Social Policy187

Fig. 7.1 Sensibilities 122