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Within the framework of the « new » government line of thought which developed in the 1970s-1980s, the term « integration » is a label for the government’s successive answers to « youth unemployment » and « new poverty » (« exclusion »). The present outline of a social history of « integration » attempts to bring out the many implications of these new ways of managing the lack of jobs, the keystone being « planning logic », to show how the figure of the « unemployable » person has come to replace that of someone simply out of work. The author begins by the analysis of the collective effort that went into making « integration » an « official problem », a category of government thinking which impressed itself in the arenas of politics, unions, CEOs, the media and science. He then seeks to show the debt owed by the successive « integration mechanisms », in particular to the conflicts within the political field and to the different categories of « professional integration workers », in other words, to bring out the inseparable political, professional and « ethical » stakes bound up with « integration ». It ultimately appears that these « healing » policies and their successive transformations all combined to « aggravate the disease » they claimed to treat by contributing to the destabilization of salaried work.