La sécurité sociale entre solidarité et marché

This article analyzes, through a socio-historical approach, the process of political delegitimization of the French social security system. In 1945, following the path of ?solidarism,? such a system embodied, along with labor law, the project of a new social order based on equal protection for all, necessary for the freedom and citizenship of each and every individual. Since the 1970s, this system has undergone a profound and advanced philosophical and political reorientation towards a simple paying agency subject to the market?s laws. This shift originates in an initial dilemma from the time of the Liberation, between a form of protection conceived as the workers? right or as a human right, and between a categorial or a national solidarity. The generalization of the system has since been differential, unequal, and dual. Facing the profound changes of society and the financial imbalance of the system, a series of reactive measures and adjustments have been used and presented as political necessities. These reforms have deepened the original ambivalences of the social security system and limited its transformative and democratic goals. The principle of solidarity tends to be replaced with a budgetary logic, leading to the possibility of the commodification of welfare.