This chapter presents the grammar of seven ‘cities of unemployment’, which are mapped and composed on the basis of condensing the coded material of the four cases. The chapter is structured around four key dimensions. First, it outlines the overall principle and normative foundations. Second, it describes how the city qualifies the reality of unemployment and how policies are put to the test. Third, the role of governing in the city is presented: what does it take to govern best and what kind of governing should be avoided, and when is it necessary (and legitimate) for the ‘governor’ to exercise authority by means of coercion? Last, the chapter examines the implications of being unemployed in each city, in other words, what characterises the unemployed subject and what is the path towards a state of worthiness? And on the other hand, what conduct makes the unemployed individual less worthy?

While all the cities provide answers to these questions, their radically different qualifications imply that they sometimes (prefer to) operate on different levels, from macroeconomic policy and taxation to workfare schemes and the counselling of the unemployed individual. Along this line of reasoning, the cities may appear ‘incomparable’ and, hence, unfit for a typology such as that presented here. However, as the chapter shows, the cities all induce different moral subjects that are mutually exclusive. This means that although it is possible to identify more or less stable compromises (such as the golden age compromise) with what appears as a stable division of labour between various cities, they are compromises with in-built tensions. To understand the tensions and compromises, it is first necessary to bracket and categorise the processes of justification and critique into the various normative yardsticks forged by a city of governing, tests and subjects. This is the aim of the chapter.

In order to tie the grammar of the cities of unemployment to intellectual ideas the primary source of the statements from the four cases is occasionally supplemented by secondary literature from canonical texts of ‘grammarians’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006, p 71).

The rest of the chapter presents a condensed extract of the justification and critique taking place ‘inside’ the walls of each city of unemployment in selected debates on Danish and French reforms of their unemployment systems.