Alexis Spire

Keywords: State, Tax, Public Spending, Consent, Inequalities

From the perspective of fiscal sociology, the tax system and the modalities of public spending are two fundamental dimensions of modern states. Three major areas of this multidisciplinary approach are addressed in this chapter. First, we look at the link between the legitimacy of the state and its capacity to collect money in the name of the general interest. Second, we discuss the relationship between the taxpayer and the state, tax revolts and consent to taxation. The third area is that of the consequences of taxation on social groups and inequalities.

Introduction

Fiscal sociology is a multidisciplinary approach that views taxation as a structuring characteristic of democratic states. This line of research, which emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, is based on the hypothesis that the fiscal prerogatives of the state are not merely technical issues but rather reflect the power relations at work within contemporary Western societies. The challenge for fiscal sociology is to reflect simultaneously on tax collection, public spending and the relationship that taxpayers have with taxation. A central hypothesis of this research programme is that the conditions of implementation of the tax system and the modalities of public spending are two fundamental dimensions for understanding modern states and the transformations of society. A crucial element of the approach of fiscal sociology is the use of comparative analysis across several countries. From this perspective, taxation is not merely considered as a sovereign prerogative of individual states, but is studied as an instrument of public policy that is subject to both circulation between countries and appropriation by taxpayers.

The term "fiscal sociology" was popularized by Joseph Schumpeter in a text written just after the First World War: The Crisis of the Tax State (1991State ( [1918]]). This theorist of innovation actually borrowed the term from another Austrian economist, Rudolf [START_REF] Goldscheid | Staatssozialismus oder Staatskapitalismus[END_REF], who had placed the issue of taxation at the heart of his evolutionary theory of the state. For this Marxist economist, society could be divided into two social classes: "the workers", who contribute to the functioning of the state through paying taxes and performing military service, and "the capitalists", who benefit from the service provided by the state. From this viewpoint, the tax system constitutes the material manifestation of the link between state finances and the social order, and it is through this mechanism that certain classes become richer at the expense of others (Goldscheid 1917: 203). In his text on the crisis of the tax state, [START_REF] Schumpeter | The crisis of the tax state[END_REF] takes up Goldscheid's idea that "the budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies". For Schumpeter, the state and taxation are so closely intertwined and interdependent that the expression "tax state" appears almost as a tautology. For almost a century, several authors have taken up the principles of fiscal sociology, and in particular the objective of reflecting simultaneously on tax policy, public spending and debt. However, this work has remained outside the fields of economics and sociology, two disciplines that have long considered taxation to be a technical matter that is not a suitable subject for theoretical reflection. However, fiscal sociology is not a fixed paradigm and can be combined with very different theoretical frameworks, "such as public choice, neo-Marxist, institutional, transaction-cost, exchange, and rational choice theories" (Campbell 1993: 180). In recent years, fiscal sociology has undergone a profound renewal, to the point of becoming an important field in economic sociology.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the issue of taxation has returned to the centre of public debate, and several authors are now working to extend the perspective pioneered by Schumpeter, in a field that has been named The New Fiscal Sociology (Martin et al. 2009). The challenge for these authors, who are strongly attached to the study of the long history of social phenomena, is to renew classical approaches "by placing the social relations of taxation at the centre of any historical or comparative account of social change" (Martin et al. 2009: 2). One of their objectives is to bring together different disciplinary currents -notably economics, history, sociology and political science -by considering taxation as the equivalent of a social contract binding the members of a given society and playing a key role in the historical evolution of states. This "new fiscal sociology" therefore attempts to produce new readings of the history of each country, from a comparative perspective, taking the tax system as a starting point and showing all the social and political implications that have arisen from it over time. Several works have successfully provided a history of fiscal policies encompassing the evolution of economic growth, the development of political institutions and the transformation of power relations between social groups [START_REF] Brownlee | Federal Taxation in America: A Short History[END_REF][START_REF] Daunton | Trusting leviathan, The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799-1914[END_REF][START_REF] Daunton | Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914-1979[END_REF]. Rather than limiting itself to reassessing the economic and political history of a country, work in fiscal sociology favours the use of comparative analysis in order to highlight the role of fiscal policies beyond national differences [START_REF] Steinmo | Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British and American Approaches to Financing the Modern States[END_REF][START_REF] Prasad | The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States[END_REF]Martin et al. 2009). To this end, three major areas of research have been opened up and continue to drive the renewal of work on taxation, which we shall address in turn in this chapter.

The first of these areas is fiscal sociology's grounding in the principle that any fiscal policy is intrinsically linked to the legitimacy of the state and its capacity to collect money in the name of the general interest. Each tax system is thus analysed in a historical perspective as the product of compromises between the social forces that make up society. This results in different forms of sovereignty, democracy and social solidarity. Second, we will discuss fiscal sociology's interest in the relationship between the taxpayer and the state, a relationship that has led to tax revolts from time to time but which, during calmer periods, is based on consent to taxation. Whereas economics studies fiscal policy in terms of major aggregates such as the rate of compulsory levies, the growth rate or price stability, fiscal sociology is more concerned with social groups and the practices and perceptions of taxpayers. The third area opened up by fiscal sociology, discussed in the final part of this chapter, is that of the consequences of taxation on social groups and inequalities. Indeed, taxation is not only an instrument for implementing public policies (in favour of certain economic sectors or in order to encourage certain practices considered as being beneficial, particularly for economic growth or the environment); it is also a tool for redistribution by means of social welfare benefits or the financing of public programmes and, as such, it is capable of changing the balance and inequalities between social groups.

After the 2008 financial crisis, fiscal sociology experienced a resurgence of interest because it appeared to offer answers to questions arising from the need to rely on taxpayers to support the banks and revive the economy. The same thing has happened in 2020 in the wake of the crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic: the use of lockdowns to stop the spread of disease was accompanied by a shutdown of the economy, which led to a very large intervention by states. This has led to record levels of public debt, which in the longer term raises the question of how to draw on taxpayers once again and convince them to bail out the public finances that have been ravaged by the pandemic. One criticism of the new fiscal sociology is that it focuses too much on examples from the history of the United States. In this chapter, care will be taken not to privilege any particular country, since the theoretical questions raised by fiscal sociology and the conceptual tools provided for answering them go far beyond the scope of American national history and have inspired work on many other societies.

The legitimacy of the tax state

From the perspective of fiscal sociology as it was elaborated in 1917 by Rudolf Goldscheid, the main actor of capitalism is the tax state. At the end of the First World War, the necessities of reconstruction forced the Austrian political authorities to draw on the help of its taxpayers, and it was in this context that Joseph Schumpeter developed the founding principles of fiscal sociology, which he conceived as a reflection on the legitimacy of the state's ability to collect and spend the money of its citizens. For many authors claiming to work in fiscal sociology, this definition remains valid and has even regained a certain topicality since Theda [START_REF] Skocpol | Bringing the state back in[END_REF] call to put the state back at the centre of theoretical discussion in political science ("Bringing the State Back In").

Theorizing the tax state

Schumpeter's work first made it possible to formalize the fundamental questions on which fiscal sociology is based: "What is the nature of the tax state? How did it come about? Must it now disappear and why? What are the social processes which are behind the superficial facts of the budget figures?" [START_REF] Schumpeter | The crisis of the tax state[END_REF][START_REF] Schumpeter | The crisis of the tax state[END_REF]: 100). The answers he gives to these questions are situated at the macroeconomic level: by guaranteeing a supply of revenue to the state, taxes ensure its survival. The tax system and the ways in which it is applied therefore provide the best key to understanding modern states. This approach presupposes a clear separation between the public and private spheres, even though this boundary can be porous and can change over time: by means of taxation, the state becomes involved in the private economy and thus it acquires more and more means to regulate and direct it in the direction of greater growth. For Schumpeter, the structure of public finances reveals the power relations that exist within a society: "public finances are one of the best starting points for an investigation of society, especially though not exclusively of its political life" [START_REF] Schumpeter | The crisis of the tax state[END_REF][START_REF] Schumpeter | The crisis of the tax state[END_REF]: 101). Fiscal policy, far from being at the exclusive service of a single social class, is the cornerstone of the government's economic policy, allowing it to intervene in the interests of certain groups. A few years before Schumpeter, Edwin Seligman, professor of economics and founder of the American Economic Association, had also given much thought to the relationship between the development of states and that of tax systems. In his Essays in Taxation (1895), he emphasized that fiscal justice is not a fixed and immutable concept: it evolves as social and economic conditions change (Seligman 1895: 1). Until the end of the 18th century, at a time when the market was still in its infancy, states imposed taxes on people and things, and required payments in kind (such as "corvee", the provision of unpaid labour to a feudal lord in the medieval era). The characteristic feature of modern states, on the other hand, is that they apply levies on transactions, thereby obliging taxpayers to pay their dues in money rather than in kind. The state was then able to extend its functions, to the point of becoming indispensable: "the state is as necessary to the individual as the air he breathes" (Seligman 1895: 73). In this new configuration, the taxpayer consents to taxation not with a view to receiving protection or benefits in return, but because "the state is a part of us" (Seligman 1895: 72). This reversal paves the way for a principle of taxation in which each taxpayer pays according to their abilities (based on one's "faculty") and no longer according to what they receive in exchange, or in other words, a principle of progressive taxation that would later become established internationally [START_REF] Woker | Edwin Seligman, initiator of global progressive public finance[END_REF].

The framework of fiscal sociology laid down by Schumpeter and Seligman has greatly inspired sociologists who have worked on the links between the history of states and the development of fiscal systems. For example, Charles Tilly's work contributed to establishing the idea that wars played a crucial role in consolidating the legitimacy of states and their ability to levy taxes ("extraction"): the emergence of the state as a centralized organization capable of imposing its rules and its power of "coercion" on a given territory can be viewed as an unintended effect of the armed conflicts that took place across Europe between the 15th and 19th centuries [START_REF] Tilly | Coercion, Capital and European States[END_REF]. Pierre Bourdieu extends this analysis by emphasizing that modern states were able to introduce taxation and persuade the public to accept it precisely because they were able to create state bodies and institutions capable of bringing about a recognition of their legitimate monopoly over the management of society (Bourdieu 2012: 117). The origin of modern states cannot, however, be reduced to their monopoly of tax collection guaranteed by their powers of coercion: the success of states also stems from their capacity to establish the rules of the market, and to act as arbiters of conflicts and as defenders of private property (Bonney 1999: 6). By generating new demands for infrastructure, the development of markets and economic growth has led to the expansion of tax systems. Having been developed as a tool for studying the history of European countries, this analysis of the modern tax state was later extended to apply to other national spaces, particularly China and Japan [START_REF] He | Paths Toward the Modern Fiscal State: England, Japan, and China[END_REF].

In more recent periods, and especially in the 20th century, wars once again played a crucial role in the transformation of states. In the United States, as in the United Kingdom, France and Belgium, the advent of the redistributive tax state, embodied in the rise of progressive taxes, was only able to overcome the resistance of conservatives in the exceptional period ushered in by the First World War. Using tax data from 20 countries located in Western Europe and North America, [START_REF] Scheve | Taxing the Rich. A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe[END_REF] show the sharp increase in top marginal income and inheritance tax rates during the two World Wars and then their decrease after the 1970s. Nevertheless, it was not the situation of war itself that led to increased taxation of the wealthiest: although the rich were taxed more during the two World Wars, this was conceived as being in compensation for the systematic mobilization of a whole generation of men of military age. In Scheve and Stasavage's view, this argument proved decisive -at least until the end of the 20th century -in convincing public opinion of the legitimacy of highly progressive direct taxation.

The crisis of the tax state

When the rapid growth of the post-war decades began to falter in the 1970s, the radical critique of public intervention began to enjoy greater success, leading to a renewed reflection on the legitimacy of the tax state (Hürlimann et al. 2018). From a Marxist perspective, O'Connor pointed out that states had come to take on an ever-increasing number of prerogatives: protecting the private accumulation of capital, guaranteeing the reproduction of the economic system and at the same time preserving social harmony: "The socialization of costs and the private appropriation of profits creates a fiscal crisis, or 'structural gap', between state expenditures and state revenues" (O'Connor 1973: 9). The increase in public spending and the growing difficulty of raising taxes force the state to go into debt. Since political elites are more dependent for their re-election on taxpayers and beneficiaries of public spending than on bondholders, governments are more likely to increase public debt than to raise taxes or reduce spending. The crisis of the tax state lies in this structural need for debt, which pushes governments to borrow even in times of economic growth. The existence of public debt is not new, however, and it can even be argued that it is almost as old as the birth of states [START_REF] Stasavage | Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688-1789[END_REF]. Like taxation, the development of public debt has often gone hand in hand with the resolution of conflicts and the work of reconstruction that follows: in the aftermath of the First World War, the governments of the warring countries were all faced with the need to borrow. It then became clear that the power of the state to spend public money depended not only on its ability to raise taxes but also on its legitimacy to contract debts from private investors [START_REF] Barreyre | A World of Public Debts[END_REF].

The value of comparative work based on fiscal sociology is that it shows that this crisis of the tax state started to occur at the same time in different countries, even though the sources and methods of taxation were constructed in very different ways. Sven Steinmo's pioneering work on Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States showed that differences in the structures of state institutions and modes of electoral organization can largely explain the variations observed in the tax systems on either side of the Atlantic [START_REF] Steinmo | Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British and American Approaches to Financing the Modern States[END_REF]. However, in these three countries, the social compromise that was established during the three decades following the Second World War came to an end with the economic crisis of the 1973 recession, which led to a re-politicization of the issue of taxation. The terms of this debate varied, however, depending on the long history of compromises on taxation in each country, and an account of these debates can sometimes challenge received wisdom. For example, for most of the 20th century, the United States relied on a system of direct taxation, whereas France never succeeded in reducing the burden of taxation on consumer goods and social security contributions [START_REF] Morgan | The origins of tax systems: A French-American comparison[END_REF]. Furthermore, the tax rate on capital was much higher in the United States than in Europe, where labour and consumption were taxed more heavily: "over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent. It is important to emphasize that no continental European country has ever imposed such tax rates" (Piketty 2014: 507).

The crisis of legitimacy of the tax state cannot be explained solely as the result of a particular economic cycle or situation. The application of Schumpeter's concepts to the situation in Eastern European countries in the 1990s, with their abrupt transition to a market economy, shows the importance of the political dimension of the crisis of the tax state (Ganev 2011: 246). The importation into these formerly socialist countries of the sort of flat tax that Milton Friedman had envisaged in the 1960s cannot be understood without taking into account the strategies employed by the former elites to secure a new place for themselves. The success of such a transfer owed much to the international circulation of experts and ideas. For these countries that had recently converted into market economies, the widespread adoption of the flat tax should not be seen as the simple transposition of a tax mechanism but as a general reform of the state "including bureaucratic, legislative and ideological elements" (Thorndike 2007: 201).

The crisis of legitimacy of the tax state once again came to the fore in the wake of the Greek government's confrontation with European institutions [START_REF] Varoufakis | Adults in the Room: My Battle With Europe's Deep Establishment[END_REF]. It then became clear that the question of public debt is no longer just one dimension among others of state financing, but explicitly contradicts the principle of national sovereignty. Collective resources no longer depend only on taxpayers but also on the trust of bondholders. The crisis of the tax state can then turn into a crisis of democratic legitimacy: the constraints placed on public budgets due to these high levels of indebtedness no longer depend solely on the sovereignty of the people but are subject to the decisions of creditors who act without any process of democratic deliberation [START_REF] Streeck | The politics of public debt: Neoliberalism, capitalist development and the restructuring of the state[END_REF].

The internationalization of fiscal policies

Since fiscal sociology adopted comparatism from the outset as its preferred method of investigation, many studies have sought to understand the ways in which tax mechanisms can be imported from one country to another.

Although the power to levy taxes has long been presented as a national prerogative, the internationalization of tax policies is not a recent phenomenon: every tax system is the product of transfers from other countries and of intellectual controversies that have unfolded at the international level (Nehring and Schui 2007). Already in the 18th century, Frederick II of Prussia sought the help of French tax collectors to help him set up a system of indirect taxes on consumer items [START_REF] Schui | Rebellious Prussians: Urban Political Culture under Frederick the Great and his Successors[END_REF]. A century later, the relationships that developed between imperial metropolises and their colonies also facilitated an internationalization of tax policies, with some local adaptations. In the case of the United Kingdom, British administrators used taxation as a tool for transforming the economic and social structures of conquered territories, as evidenced by the novel implementation of an income tax in New Zealand as a means of limiting the power of large landowners [START_REF] Daunton | Trusting leviathan, The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799-1914[END_REF]. International intellectuals and experts can also contribute to fostering transfers from one country to another, as we can observe from the relative contemporaneity of reforms introducing a progressive income tax: within a few years, the United Kingdom in 1909, the United States in 1913 and France in 1914 adopted this form of redistribution, which was debated internationally by many experts influenced by Seligman's 1894 book Progressive Taxation in Theory and Practice [START_REF] Woker | Edwin Seligman, initiator of global progressive public finance[END_REF]).

In the contemporary context of an ever greater internationalization of trade and interpenetration of national economies, more and more researchers are reconsidering the questions raised by Schumpeter by going beyond the framework of a national tax system. The success of Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and his call to establish a wealth tax based on a global register of wealth are forcing a reconsideration of the role of states in implementing reforms capable of providing tax justice. Schumpeter, writing a century earlier, had in fact envisaged the possibility of a wealth tax, which he considered to be not only compatible with a liberal economy, but even perfectly in line with its principles [START_REF] Schumpeter | The crisis of the tax state[END_REF][START_REF] Schumpeter | The crisis of the tax state[END_REF]). In European countries, however, the current tendency is towards the removal of wealth taxes: Italy in 2001, Portugal in 2003, Sweden in 2004, Austria in 2008 and France in 2017. Attempts to coordinate tax systems internationally are still in their infancy, and predictions of an inevitable downward harmonization are still far from being realized, as competition between firms is based not only on costs but also on the institutional context [START_REF] Campbell | Fiscal sociology in an age of globalization: Comparing tax regimes in advanced capitalist countries[END_REF]).

Concerns about climate change may provide another strong argument for thinking about taxation from an international perspective. Indeed, in a world where goods and capital can move instantaneously from one continent to another, ecological taxation, in order to be effective, must necessarily be the subject of concerted action between states. But this concerted action can only happen if it is supported by national public opinion, and the levels of acceptance of ecological taxation still vary greatly from one country to another: support for binding measures for citizens and companies depends not only on their perception of the urgency of reducing greenhouse gases, but also on the confidence that each population has in its government to implement such an objective [START_REF] Fairbrother | Political trust and the relationship between climate change beliefs and support for fossil fuel taxes: Evidence from a survey of 23 European countries[END_REF].

Taxation as a social relationship between the taxpayer and the state

Fiscal sociology has taken great interest in the social relations that develop between taxpayers and public authorities. The aim of this research is to understand the conditions in which taxpayers agree to give up part of their income in order to participate in the financing of public goods. Depending on the historical period in question, this relationship has been either more or less conflictual, and has sometimes given rise to collective mobilizations against taxation, which are privileged moments for understanding the organization of a society, the place occupied by public authorities and the trust placed in them by taxpayers. In calmer periods, the question of consent to taxation still remains crucial, even though the modes of resistance to taxation may take other, more discreet forms such as fraud or "fiscal flight".

Mobilizations against taxation

From the perspective of fiscal sociology, which considers that taxes symbolize the social contract, tax revolts provide a privileged point of observation for understanding the conditions in which the tax state was constituted as the historical result of struggles and reforms [START_REF] Delalande | Tax resistance: A global history?[END_REF]. Indeed, movements of rebellion against taxation are as old as the constitution of states [START_REF] Burg | A World History of Tax Rebellions: An Encyclopedia of Tax Rebels, Revolts, and Riots from Antiquity to the Present[END_REF] and have punctuated the history of many countries, sometimes leading to real revolutions: 1215 for England [START_REF] Daunton | Trusting leviathan, The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799-1914[END_REF], 1774 for the United States [START_REF] Beito | Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance during the Great Depression[END_REF]) and 1789 for France [START_REF] Delalande | Histoire Sociale de l'Impôt[END_REF]. However, resistance to taxation in these three countries should not be seen as an immutable component of each national history. The initiators of anti-tax mobilizations have always adapted their demands and the forms of their protests to the particularity of each period and to the reality of contemporary power relations. We can also note similarities between these different national histories.

During the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, France and the United States experienced very similar anti-tax protest movements. On both sides of the Atlantic, a cluster of associations emerged to defend taxpayers, in both cases calling for a tax strike in order to challenge the obligation to declare one's income (Delalande 2012: 82).

Far from belonging to a bygone era, tax revolts constitute a privileged object for studying contemporary forms of resistance to taxation. The particularity of fiscal sociology consists in breaking with the generic vision of an interchangeable taxpayer and instead closely examining the resources, dispositions and practices of those who mobilize [START_REF] Tilly | The Politics of Collective Violence[END_REF]. For example, the movement against Proposition 13 that emerged in California at the end of the 1970s could then be analysed as a rebellion by small property owners aimed at defending a system of informal privileges, that is, advantageous provisions that were not written into the law [START_REF] Martin | The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics[END_REF]: the starting point of the movement was opposition to a change in the methods for calculating property taxes and a demand to restore a customary form of welfare state. Whereas this mobilization in the United States was organized on a residential basis (through "community organizations"), the mobilization that emerged at the same time in France, centred around craftsmen and tradesmen, developed on the basis of membership of a profession [START_REF] Spire | The spread of tax resistance: The antitax movement in France in the 1970s[END_REF]. A comparison of these two movements brings to light the place occupied by public authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the tax revolt was largely fuelled by opposition between the local state (in this case, California) and the centralized (federal) state bureaucracy, with the Constitution serving as a source of legitimacy [START_REF] Martin | Redistributing toward the rich: Strategic policy crafting in the campaign to repeal the sixteenth Amendment, 1938-1958[END_REF]. In France, the rejection of taxation took the form of opposition to the inquisitorial power of the tax administration [START_REF] Morgan | The origins of tax systems: A French-American comparison[END_REF], in the name of respect for privacy and defence of the "small" against the "big".

Starting from the classic question "who mobilizes?", fiscal sociology can also show to what extent struggles centred around taxation contribute to making, or breaking, alliances between groups [START_REF] Prasad | Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution[END_REF][START_REF] Martin | How the great American tax revolt crossed the Atlantic[END_REF]. By setting aside the idea that taxpayers mobilize solely because of their individual interests, we can seriously address a conundrum that has appeared in many Western countries in the 20th century: how do the richest people manage to enlist the rest of society in their fight against high tax rates? Based on a retrospective analysis of five protest movements against the taxation of the richest people in the United States, Isaac [START_REF] Martin | Rich People's Movements: Grassroots Campaigns Yo Untax The One Percent[END_REF] offers several explanations. First, "policy threats" play a dominant role: those who own property or some capital perceive any increase in taxes on the richest as a harbinger of measures that could be extended to affect them in the future if they too become sufficiently wealthy. Furthermore, when these populations experience financial difficulties linked to the economic situation, it is easier for them to turn against the political power in place, which is then held responsible for the level of taxation, than to attack abstract entities such as the economic situation, the change in prices or increased competition. Another factor that can amplify a mobilization in favour of the rich is the appeal to tradition. For example, the idea of a cap on the tax rate was conceived by taxpayers' associations in the 1920s and then taken up by the anti-tax movements of 1936 and again in 1975. The success of anti-taxation movements also lies in their capacity to ally themselves with other causes and to imagine popular forms of mobilization. Thus, in the 1950s, the proposal to abolish income tax, cleverly renamed the "Liberty Amendment", gave rise to rallies and lively parties where participants sang a rousing protest song ("You and I cannot relax/We must repeal the income tax"). Finally, Isaac [START_REF] Martin | Rich People's Movements: Grassroots Campaigns Yo Untax The One Percent[END_REF] places great importance on the charisma of anti-tax activists. One might add that, in the United States, the success of these movements can also be explained by the very strong hostility to progressive taxation, which has long been a unifying idea for all components of conservative parties [START_REF] Huret | American Tax Resisters[END_REF].

Since the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent rapid rise in inequalities in income and wealth [START_REF] Piketty | Capital in the Twenty-First Century[END_REF], mobilizations around taxation have taken on a different meaning, linked to social justice and redistribution. In Southern European countries faced with plans for the restructuring of public finances, the issue of taxation has thus become the centre of gravity of social movements [START_REF] Narotzky | Between inequality and injustice: Dignity as a motive for mobilization during the crisis[END_REF]. In France, anger regarding an increase in fuel taxes was at the origin of the "gilets jaunes" (yellow vests) movement, which in November 2018 brought together 300,000 people to demand more tax justice and political democracy. These mobilizations, directed against political elites, have called for a fairer redistribution of public money and have shown that tax-related demands are not necessarily synonymous with challenging the provision of public services or social welfare systems [START_REF] Spire | Résistances à l'Impôt, Attachement à l'Etat[END_REF].

Whereas anti-tax movements have often targeted the administrations and agents directly involved in collecting taxes, recent mobilizations have been targeted more at governments and the way they allocate (without redistributing) public money. Rather than challenging a particular tax, they are broader calls for tax justice.

Consent to taxation

The analysis of the relationship between taxpayers and the state is not limited to the study of mobilizations against taxes. For most of the time, resistance to taxation remains subterranean, and in the absence of open conflict over fiscal policy, it is important to understand what motivates taxpayers to fulfil their obligations.

Many economists have approached the question of consent to taxation as the result of an individual assessment of the costs and benefits of complying with obligations. Breaking with this utilitarian logic, works in the field of fiscal sociology approach consent to taxation from the point of view of a social contract rather than an individual calculation, referring to the pioneering work of Margaret Levi, who takes an institutionalist perspective [START_REF] Levi | Of Rule and Revenue[END_REF]). Modern states are not capable of forcing all taxpayers to pay their dues, but must instead seek to convince them that taxation is fair, that it is allocated equitably and that it is also paid by other taxpayers [START_REF] Slemrod | Why People Pay Taxes. Tax Compliance and Enforcement[END_REF]. For a tax system to endure and prosper, it must be based on "institutional procedures and social norms, which sustain cooperative solutions to the problems of collective action, and provide some assurance that fellow taxpayers and the government may be trusted" (Daunton 2001: 10-11). Trust in institutions rests on the assumption that they are predictable and stable over time, and trust in other members of society rests on the assumption that the latter cannot be suspected of fraud.

In this perspective, which views consent to taxation as an act that is indicative of the social contract, the place accorded to racial minorities can play a decisive role, as shown by the political and legal history of both Brazil and South Africa [START_REF] Lieberman | Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation in Brazil and South Africa[END_REF]. The emphasis that fiscal sociology places on the collective dimension of consent to taxation raises the question of trust in political elites and their ability to defend the public interest when it comes to spending taxpayers' money.

Effects on social groups and inequalities

From the perspective of fiscal sociology, taxation must also be analysed in terms of the effects that tax policy has on the balance between groups and between inequalities [START_REF] Campbell | The state and fiscal sociology[END_REF][START_REF] Martin | Taxes and fiscal sociology[END_REF]. The history of tax systems can thus be read not only as a succession of devices entrenching gender, class and racial inequalities, but also as the evolution of the means deployed to mitigate these same inequalities through both incentives and disincentives.

Inequalities related to gender and family structure

The legal framework of tax systems has long been explicitly gender-biased. In many countries, it has effectively reinforced sexist relations of domination that were already entrenched in society. In Britain, for example, the 1799 Act for Taxing Income attributed all the income of married couples to the husband, and until 1978 the tax authorities refused to return tax refunds to women, accepting correspondence only with their husbands (McCaffery 2009: 216-217). Such longstanding laws helped to shape social norms that continue to this day and have had a lasting impact throughout the former British Empire, including in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia and Singapore. Around the world, joint taxation for couples has long contributed to the assignment of women to domestic work. In the United States, this policy was implemented in 1948 as a return to stricter gender norms, breaking with the previous period when women had worked to help the war effort (McCaffery 1997: 76-78). During the 1980s, an increasing number of European countries opted for married women to report their income independently of husbands [START_REF] Rubery | Women and recession revisited[END_REF], but in France, Portugal and Poland, provisions remain in force for married couples to report their earnings jointly.

In most OECD countries, families consisting of a married couple living with their legally recognized children receive the best tax advantages [START_REF] Maldonado | Family policies and single parent poverty in 18 OECD countries, 1978-2008[END_REF], whereas single parents, most often women, and unmarried couples are treated less well. There are, however, considerable variations between countries: on the one hand, "family-friendly" tax policies usually encourage women to stay home to care for children, and on the other hand, "neutral" tax policies, or those that are indifferent to family structures, effectively promote individual autonomy. Even though France has extensive infrastructure for providing childcare for infants from birth to the age of three, as a whole it still seems to conform to the "male breadwinner model" also found in Germany, as opposed to the dominant model in the Scandinavian countries [START_REF] Kangas | Social Policy and Economic Development in the Nordic Countries[END_REF]. However, this binary opposition is not sufficient to explain the different family models found in each country: the influence of fiscal policy on the structure and size of families can only be understood when it is viewed in relation to other public policies connected to the labour market and especially to the provision of child care [START_REF] Dingeldey | European tax systems and their impact on family employment patterns[END_REF].

Class inequalities

Addressing the issue of fiscal inequalities from the perspective of social class involves breaking with the use of a whole lexical field that tends to erase social differences: "taxpayers", "the fight against fraud" and "fiscal civic-mindedness" are all generic terms that can lead one to believe that taxes transcend social divisions and differences in wealth.

Even if the poor are not directly affected by the most visible taxes, such as income tax, their purchasing power can be significantly affected by indirect taxation. This tax burden can have consequences for criminal behaviour or everyday hardship and contributes, along with other factors, to the reproduction of poverty [START_REF] Newman | Taxing the Poor[END_REF]. At the other end of the social scale, differences in the taxation of millionaires depending on the fiscal policies of individual states of the United States have little effect on the mobility of these top income earners, who are, for reasons related to their economic activity, less mobile than other taxpayers [START_REF] Young | Millionaire migration and taxation of the elite: Evidence from administrative data[END_REF]. Tax policies can therefore have varying impacts on different categories of taxpayers; they can generate inequalities that do not necessarily coincide with those arising from an individual's position in the social space or in the labour market. For example, an increase in property tax may penalize those who own their main residence, which potentially includes low-skilled manual and blue-collar workers, while leaving unaffected richer people who continue to rent their homes.

There is therefore a specificity to the social inequalities generated by tax policies. On the basis of an analysis of the rise in market regulation through taxation after the Second World War, Monica [START_REF] Prasad | The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States[END_REF] has shown that each fiscal policy must be judged according to the inequalities it creates through its particular modes of taxation and redistribution: thus, the most generous welfare states in terms of redistribution are also those which, in the 20th century, set up tax systems based mainly on proportional taxes on consumption, which are particularly unfair to the working and middle classes. By comparison, the welfare states that are much less redistributive are also those that have set up tax systems that are much more progressive and therefore, in appearance, more unfavourable to the dominant classes, but in reality much less protective of the most vulnerable.

Racial inequality

Since racial discrimination is illegal in Western democracies, there are no explicit differences in treatment by race, but some authors point out that seemingly universal tax provisions can lead to more unfavourable situations for minorities. In the United States, for example, marriage penalizes couples where the two spouses have the same level of salary, and since this situation is more frequent in black households, Dorothy Brown interprets it in terms of racial inequality: "black taxpayers are more likely to receive a marriage tax, whereas white tax payers are more likely to receive a marriage bonus" (Brown and Fellow 1996: 45). Similarly, in states marked by a history of segregation, variations in the allocation of public budgets to schools can be interpreted as a privilege afforded to white citizens as opposed to people of colour, where the former are seen as taxpayers and the latter as populations supported by the state [START_REF] Henricks | Mechanisms of the racial tax state[END_REF]. The same authors add that mobilizations against property tax have resulted in a downward trend for this type of tax and an increase in consumption taxes, where the former are more paid by whites, who are more likely to own property, and the latter fall more heavily on people of colour (174). In the much more recent period, comparisons of tax policies across states suggest that increases in the proportion of racial minorities within a state are likely to result in a more regressive tax system and an increased tax burden on low-income households (O'Brien 2017). These inequalities, which stem from implicit mechanisms rather than explicit legal provisions, are far less visible and far less often provoke outrage compared with acts of violence perpetrated by law enforcement, yet they contribute, in their own way, to the reproduction of racial inequalities.

Nevertheless, acts of violence carried out by police during stop and search operations have been interpreted in relation to fiscal considerations, notably as a consequence of drastic tax cuts [START_REF] Prasad | Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution[END_REF]: 2): Sandra Bland's and Michael Brown's deaths occurred in Texas and Missouri, respectively, two states that have seen their tax rates plummet, leading state police to change their focus to petty offenses by ordinary citizens -including traffic offenses -which can be profitable owing to the fines that are collected, but which can also lead to violent confrontations with black members of the public. In many areas, fiscal sociology has renewed the study of inequality by highlighting the implicit and explicit effects of taxation on people's behaviour.

Conclusion

Fiscal sociology is more than the application of sociological reflection to the subject of taxation or public finance, and now constitutes a well-established and institutionalized programme of research, with its own foundational authors, hypotheses, principles of understanding and aims. Its main originality lies in its use of taxation as a tool for making visible the principles and divisions that structure society as a whole, with particular emphasis on a long historical perspective. In a context where the crisis of Covid-19 has upset the balance of public finances in most Western countries, future debates on the need to resort to taxation or indebtedness could usefully be illuminated by approaches inspired by fiscal sociology. After more than a century during which states have been radically transformed, the longevity of the concepts developed by Schumpeter suggests that fiscal sociology will continue to develop and has a bright future.

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