This dissertation is an international history of the concept of “standard of living” in France from the Age of Empire through the prolonged process of decolonization. Based on archival research in France, Senegal, Switzerland, Britain, and the United States, this dissertation excavates the origin and rise of what it labels the “humanist standard of living.” Through this concept, this dissertation also illuminates the history of specifically French ways of thinking about universalism and difference.Beginning with US and British political economists who coined the term, this dissertation shows that the rise and spread of competitive wage labor markets and racializing civilizational-cultural assumptions shaped the subsequent history of the concept. First, the standard of living was created to help explain the social, political, and economic dislocations wage labor engendered in the North Atlantic. Existing just outside the market, the standard of living was both immutable and malleable: fixed by tradition, race, or culture but, under the right conditions, capable of transformation. After following the concept to metropolitan France, “Levels of Life” argues that interwar French social scientists, colonial administrators, and politicians created the standard of living at the heart of the postwar international order when they first attempted to analyze and assess the standard of living of colonial subjects across France’s overseas empire. Turning to the civilizational-cultural core of the concept, these actors created a “humanist” standard of living that decoupled the concept from wages and money almost entirely. Instead, they expanded the concept to incorporate education, housing, clothing, health, and other components of well-being. The dissertation then explores how the humanist standard of living became international through the work of the United Nations and how this variant of the concept was deployed in development and planning projects during and after decolonization in Senegal. By the 1970s, the standard of living was once again becoming monetary, but the wage was gone. In its place sat macroeconomic calculations of national wealth, and an economistic universalism.