Poverty - Poverty As An Ideal, Changing Conceptions Of Poverty, The Problem Of The Poor, Relativism And Equality
debates social discussion
As an idea, poverty has had an eventful history. From roughly the eighteenth century onward, a change in moral sensibility caused a shift in the understanding of poverty as being an ideal state (for both individuals and communities) to being an execrable condition that societies should seek to ameliorate. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
with the growth of social welfare programs, intense academic debate has focused on the meaning and definition of the term. These debates, though they now dominate the discussion of poverty, nevertheless echo earlier discussion surrounding poor laws and social administration. This article will chart the development in sensibilities and attendant evaluations and then consider how the "problem of poverty" was framed and how it has manifested itself in contemporary debates.
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There is a long-standing discourse within which poverty has a positive moral connotation. Facets of this discourse are delineated below. This idea of self-control, of poverty as a voluntary state, played an important role in Christian teaching and practice. In part this was negative. As St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–1274) expressed it in Summa contra gentiles, poverty is commendable because i…
The most far-reaching call for spiritual renewal was the Reformation, which characterized European Christendom in the sixteenth century. Martin Luther (1483–1546), himself a monk, inveighed against the corruption of Christian practice and advocated a return to a more austere theology. But, as argued in Max Weber's (1864–1920) classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of…
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. …
The idea of needs, while always perhaps implicit in the notion of poverty, has come to the fore in contemporary debates. The crux of these debates is whether poverty is necessarily relative. At the root of Hume's critique of the "severe" morality of poverty was his replacement of the categorical distinction between necessity and luxury to one where these are points on a scale.…
Poverty is an idea with a history that is particularly instructive. In the twenty-first century, poverty as a state of material and social deprivation is regarded as the standard meaning. But when examined historically, it can be seen that this meaning has far from dominated. In the history of Western experience (with echoes elsewhere) poverty had for a long period been considered a preferred cond…
Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa contra gentiles. 1259–1264. Vol. 3. Translated by the English Dominican Fathers. London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1928. Aristotle. The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by J. A. K. Thompson. Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York: Penguin, 1976. ——. Politics. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. Furniss, Ed…
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