FROM ONE CENTURY TO ANOTHER: MINIMUM WAGE, ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND PUBLIC DEBATES IN THE UNITED STATES, FRANCE AND THE UNITED KINGDOM (1890-2015)

The article focuses on the history of minimum wage debates since the end of the 19th century in the United States, France and the United Kingdom (and its Commonwealth), focusing on their empirical and theoretical contents as well as on their methodological and epistemological stakes. The analysis also relies on an historical sociology of science, taking into account the relations and interactions of the academic sphere with three other spheres: the political sphere, the administrative sphere, and the sphere of the civil society and of the economic and social world. Three key periods are distinguished: around World War I, the period from the 1940s to the 1980s, and the current period starting in the mid-1990s.