Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In Western countries, demographic ageing is seen as pushing social protection systems to their limits. This paper focuses on how the boundaries between a phenomenon (demographic ageing) and its consequences (costs) are blurred, leading to the representation of population ageing as a limit.

Paper long abstract

In Western countries, demographic ageing is seen as pushing social protection and health systems to their limits. Rather than examining the contours of these limits, for example in terms of pension funding or healthcare needs in the next decades, this paper focuses on how the boundaries between a phenomenon (demographic ageing) and its consequences (health needs, housing needs, pension funding, etc.) are blurred by political, scientific, economic and media narratives, leading to the representation of population ageing as a limit.

We will examine four types of rationales at work in these narratives:

- Escaping the limit (debate on the “right to die” and assisted dying)

- Pushing back the limit (policies promoting “ageing at home” and supporting “autonomous” ageing)

- Blowing up the limit (anti-ageing medicine, rejuvenation research)

- Reversing the limit (techno-solutionism, the limit as a technological and economic opportunity).

We will then examine a fifth rationale, which would be that of avowing and caring for the limit, in dialogue with the call by Dominguez Rubio et al. (2025, p.7) for "a radical avowal of fragility".