The Social Production of Crisis: Blood, Politics, and Death in France and the United States

When does epidemic disease disrupt society to the point where it becomes a political crisis? In the early 1980s, almost unnoticed in the larger drama that was AIDS, over half of hemophiliacs and a larger number but smaller percentage of blood transfusion recipients were infected with toxic blood—blood that was contaminated with HIV. The French public’s “discovery” of this catastrophe in the early 1990s created a transformative political crisis; this same discovery in the United States went largely unnoticed. This book presents a detailed case comparative analysis not only of the catastrophe itself and its multiple retrospective interpretations but also of its intimate connection to the history and organization of blood as a consumer product in each country. It answers the question of how and why disease morphed into crisis in France and not in the United States and draws on that answer to develop a more general sociological theory of the social production of political crisis. In so doing, it raises questions about the curious immunity to human suffering as a policy engine in the United States, about the often reiterated weakness of civil society in France, and about theorizing alternative epidemic trajectories.