Poverty

The "problem of the poor" was always one of a threat to social order and thus always had a political dimension. For example, in Aristotle's classification of constitutions in The Politics, democracy was identified as a perverse form, since it was rule by the "many" for the good of the many (not "all"). The many are immediately said to be the poor. This association between the poor and inferior political order endured. The "mob" was perceived as an ever present threat and European history has been marked by the recurrent eruptions of urban riots and peasant uprisings.

One of the striking things about the ideal of poverty was that very often in practice it served to underwrite a hierarchical status quo. For example, innumerable sumptuary laws were passed in the Roman republic and empire, and all European "states" followed suit throughout the early modern period. This legislation sought to preserve the extant social pecking-order, to attempt to confine the incidence of a good and prevent its diffusion. Luxury, "new" wealth, always threatened to overturn this hierarchy; Hume's defense of luxury, as part of his reconfiguration of poverty from ideal to a state of necessitousness, was a critique of this rationale. From the "ideal" perspective, those in the lower ranks of these societies may well want some of those privileged goods but that "wanting" was a mark of their unworthiness; their lack of the requisite self-control, and if self-control is lost then the stability of the social order is under threat. Hume's view contains a rebuttal of that disparagement. In so doing he was representing the "modern" view of human nature. Humans are motivated by their desires and the work of reason is not to control these but to steer them effectively. It is this same understanding of the effective springs of human motivation that underpins the shift in moral sensibilities that displaced the ideal view of poverty by one which conceived of it as state of material distress.

Poor laws.

Sumptuary laws were only indirectly concerned with the question of the poor and poverty. More overt measures were undertaken. A petition to the English Parliament of 1376 linked poverty with idleness and criminality. This was before the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, which had been preceded by an uprising in France in 1358, and there were similar revolts in Florence in 1378 and the Low Countries in 1382. In early modern Europe, attempts were made to deal with poverty administratively. The Elizabethan Poor Law (1601), which Perkins, in Treatise of the Vocations, called an "excellent statute" and "in substance the very law of God," charged each parish with the responsibility to support their own poor. Adam Smith put its origin down to Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, which had previously been the major source of charitable relief for the impoverished and destitute. This law was revisited over the years. The Act of Settlement of 1662 enabled parishes to eject immigrant paupers—ostensibly to counteract inequality of provision. The whole system was overhauled in 1834 after a royal commission into the Poor Laws. The new poor law nonetheless retained the basic distinction, made by Perkins and other advocates of the original poor law, between the deserving poor who worked (independent laborers) and the undeserving who were dependent on "public largesse" (paupers, sturdy beggars). The latter were less "eligible" for relief than the former; that is, the relief had to be less attractive than that available to even the poorest laborer (otherwise there would be no incentive to work). The tenability of the distinction was assailed from its origins, and a further commission in 1909 was divided in its recommendations. The majority view still distinguished between unwilled and willful incapacity and saw an important role for charity. The minority view, led by Beatrice Webb (1858–1943), an early leader of the Fabian Society, which published a cheap and best-selling version of her "view," wanted a radical break with the past both administratively and with respect to the principle that the causes of poverty lay in individuals (in some moral defect) rather than having a social origin. With the emergence of explicitly welfare states in the second half of the twentieth century the basic thrust of the minority view was implemented.

Polizei.

Because Britain was the most advanced industrial society, it is there that many of the issues surrounding the problem of poverty were articulated and why so many British sources and experience figure so prominently in its history. Britain, however, had no monopoly. The French, for example, had a system of hôpiteux and the Dutch spinhausen, which functioned like English workhouses, although the parish-based localism of the English system was distinctive. While most of the associated literature dealt with practical issues, such as curbing the spread of begging, there were more theoretical treatments. Prominent among these is the systematic development by a group of theorists, known as the cameralists, of the notion of Polizei (police). The task of the Polizei was to care for the "order, security and welfare of subjects" (the German philosopher and administrator Johann Justi [1720–1771], quoted in Knemeyer). The Prussian code of 1794 institutionalized the idea, and the best-known theoretical appropriation of the term was by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who used the idea of Polizei to refer, in general, to the administration of the contingencies of "civil society" (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) and included, more particularly, therein an examination of the question of "modern poverty." What is "modern" is not being destitute but in having a "disposition" toward one's plight, attributing it (say, a failed harvest) not to fate or God's punishment but to a social cause. This attitude to poverty breeds what Hegel calls a "rabble" (die Pöbel) and he is, uncharacteristically, indeterminate when it comes to finding a solution. Marx, Hegel's most famous critic, saw the solution (implicitly) in a cooperative society based on the common ownership of the means of production, where, it follows, there would be no exploitative relations, and where the organizing principle would be, in a famous—if unoriginal—phrase, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."