The Constitution of Poverty (Routledge Revivals)

Towards a genealogy of liberal governance

Mitchell Dean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317831433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

First published in 1991, This book looks at how capitalism has affected the organization of the poor. It also explores what the links are between notions of poverty and notions personal responsibility, philanthropy, morality and state forms. An intruiging work for anyone interested in the foundations and long-term progression of the welfare state.

Chapter one

The discourse of the poor

The liberal transformation of the government of poverty was first signalled by a radical inversion of the way in which arguments concerning population figured in discussions of poor policy. This can be evidenced by a note David Ricardo was to enter in the second edition of his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Ricardo 1951, 1). After arguing that the operation of the poor laws increased the frequency of improvident and early marriages, Ricardo asserted that

The progress of knowledge manifested upon this subject in the House of Commons since 1796 has happily not been very small, as may seen by … the following sentiments of Mr Pitt, in that year. ‘Let us,’ said he, ‘make relief in cases where there are a number of children a matter of right and honour, instead of a ground of opprobrium and contempt. This will make a large family a blessing, and not a curse; and this will draw a proper line of distinction between those who are able to provide for themselves by their labour, and those who after having enriched their country with a number of children, have a claim upon its assistance for support.’

(Ricardo 1951, 1: 109)

Pitt’s statement had been made in argument for allowances for large poor families. His ill-fated Poor Bill (1796–7), vigorously attacked by Bentham and others, had among its various provisions allowances for every child after the second for poor men, and after the first for widows (Bahmueller 1981: 42–52; Hammond and Hammond 1978: 99). For Ricardo, a policy based on the assertion that poor relief should reward the poor for their fecundity appears not only as backward and naive but as dangerous. The political economist of 1818 is separated from the statesman of 1796 by a gulf which renders the latter’s ‘sentiments’ almost incomprehensible. The aim of the first three chapters of this book is to bridge that gulf by providing a way of understanding the form of discourse which could sustain pronouncements such as that made here by the younger William Pitt.

How did it come about that, in only a few years, the objective of poor policy shifted from the encouragement to the discouragement of the poor's fecundity? It is well known that Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, espoused the view that the poor laws encouraged the poor to procreate without regard to the availability of the means of subsistence. The nature of Malthus’ theoretical transformation of conceptions of population and his subversion of earlier poor policy, together with the relation of this shift to the formation of economic discourse, will be discussed in chapters four and eight. For the present, however, Ricardo’s satisfaction at the progress on this subject in parliament raises many other, no less important, questions. His footnote forces us to ask what conception of the poor, what notion of population, and what theory of state policy, could have allowed such a view to be expressed by so prominent a political figure only two years before the publication of Malthus’ doctrine. Is it possible to construct the form of discourse by which statements such as this can be made intelligible? If so, can we discover the mode of government to which such statements were connected?

It will be argued in this and the next chapter that in the century and a half before the publication of Malthus’ first Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), poor policy was discussed, formulated, and undertaken in a remarkably consistent fashion. In numerous pamphlets petitioning parliament, discourses on trade, and in the works of statesmen, political oeconomists, and jurists, can be found a single but accommodating conceptual architecture in which a notion of ‘the Poor’ was constructed in relation to the concerns of national policy, chief among which stood the augmentation of national wealth.

This form of discourse will be called the Discourse of the Poor, the capitalisation of which will distinguish it from the mass of historical discourses concerning poverty and denote the specific character of the object of this discourse.¹ Many of the texts which exemplify its features are commonly designated by the term ‘mercantilist’. There is no reason to object to the application of this term to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts and policies which define national wealth in terms of a favourable balance of trade and an industrious population. However, in this study it has been necessary to join those who have taken a distance from those conventional, retrospective histories of economic thought which treat mercantilism as merely a flawed prevision of classical economics and as a body of doctrine solely concerned with trade and international exchange, or as a pre-modern policy of state tutelage of the economy (George 1985; Meuret 1981/2). As will be shown here, the key terms of these texts cannot be read as simple precursors of economic theories of value, profit, and production. Moreover, the content of this mercantilist discourse covers themes of internal political ‘oeconomy’, among which stands the central issue of ‘the Poor’. The term Discourse of the Poor thus may be thought of as distinguishing from among mercantilist writings those statements which directly construct the Poor as an object of knowledge, and as a field of national policy and practice.

In order to maintain vigilance against anachronistic use of the discourses of the period, it is necessary to address certain fundamental premises of particular historical and sociological approaches to their historical context. This is the first task of the present chapter. We shall then summarise this foreign terrain and detail its conceptions of the ‘numbers of the Poor’ and the ‘wealth of nations’. The next chapter will examine the policy implications of this discourse as encapsulated in the aim of ‘setting the Poor to work’ and the problem of idleness. Chapter three will show how the archaic signification of the term ‘police’ provides a viable alternative framework for understanding the mode of government to which this discourse is wedded.

History and genealogy

The texts under analysis here date from the middle of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century. This is the period following the English Civil War of the early 1640s, especially after the ‘settlement’ of 1688, until the late eighteenth century.

For the Marxist historian, Christopher Hill, the 1640s and 1650s ‘marked the end of medieval and Tudor England’, a veritable ‘revolution in government’ (1969: 135; Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 72–3). He argues that this was true in many different dimensions, including agrarian relations (146), trade, colonial, and foreign policy (155), finance and taxation (180), and, importantly for our present purposes, industry and internal trade, when the central government lost its power to grant monopolies and to administer poor relief in 1641 (169). For Hill all this, coupled with ‘the religious and intellectual revolution of the sixteen-forties and fifties’ (190), makes this a time of bourgeois revolution, the beginnings, it might be said, of a ‘capitalist modernity’.

Some caution needs to be expressed over applying such a schema to the course of the governance of the Poor. This period certainly marked the end of one phase of the English poor law. However, as we shall show, the style of administration of relief it inaugurated was hardly conducive to capitalist relations and could not be said to have embodied a capitalist economic rationality. Indeed, it was this very aspect of government which would form the central focus of the political economists’ attacks in the early nineteenth century. Let us briefly summarise its main features before returning to the problem of the relation between the eighteenth-century governance of the Poor and capitalism.

While the celebrated Act of 1601 (43 Elizabeth c.2) is often taken to mark the beginning of the old poor law, it is in fact a re-enactment of a 1597 Act (39 Elizabeth c.3) which, as Webb and Webb note (1963a: 64), did little more than systematise and simplify the legislation of 1572–1576. The one important difference in the later legislation is that it brings to the fore civil authority by requiring the appointment, for the first time, of overseers of the Poor in every parish. The duty of these officers was to see to it that all classes of the Poor were provided for, that those who were able be set to work, that the sick be relieved, and that children receive an education. This comprehensive measure for the relief of the indigent was one of a ‘package’ of legislative measures of 1597–1601, including measures concerned with the punishment of rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, the regulation of charitable endowments, the erection of hospitals or ‘abiding and working houses’ for the Poor, the maintenance of tillage, and the prevention of the decay of townships.

The period 1590–1640 was also marked by what Webb and Webb call the ‘administrative hierarchy’ which sought a centralised control and supervision of the governance of the Poor by a national authority under the Privy Council (1963a: 65–70). While there is some dispute over whether the effect of the Puritan Revolution was a collapse in the institutional framework of the poor law (Pearl 1978: 206–209), it is true that central control broke down during the Civil War. A continuing feature of the old poor law was the high degree of discretion exercised by the local agents of the governance of the Poor, the justices of the peace, and the parish overseers. Moreover, after the Restoration, a second pillar of this localised administration was put in place, the law of settlement.

This law, which dated from 1662 legislation (14 Charles II c. 12) ironically entitled ‘An Act for the Better Relief of the Poor of this Kingdom’, sought to specify who were the legitimate members of the Poor of each parish, and thereby to identify potential or actual applicants for the relief the parish was bound to provide (Oxley 1974: 18–21, 39–43; Hammond and Hammond 1978: 70–77; Webb and Webb 1963a: 314–349; Bahmueller 1981: 20–28). It thus sought to prevent potential relief applicants from wandering from their place of birth or usual place of abode and empowered the justices to order forcible removal. To obtain a settlement was a complex procedure, caught in a web of apparently contradictory regulations concerning birth, legitimacy, the marital status of women, the payment of taxes, the serving of apprenticeships, and the holding of public office. The usual way of obtaining a settlement on the part of the labourers, however, was the notification of their new place of abode to the churchwardens or overseers of the Poor, who would then deliver a certificate forty days after the date on which a settlement would be granted. During that time, these officials could apply to the justices for the removal of the new inhabitants unless the newcomers rented a tenement over ten pounds a year or gave security to the parish, attested to by two justices, for indemnity against relief.

Can such changes in state administrative practices be regarded as the consequence of a ‘bourgeois revolution’? Does the poor law after 1640 abruptly turn towards creating the conditions of a capitalist modernity? These are very large questions, which will be placed in abeyance for the time being. As Corrigan and Sayer concede when reviewing Hill’s position, it is hard to sustain the claim that the Civil War was such a revolution, if that implies a ‘set-piece struggle between clearly defined class groupings, with the victorious bourgeoisie emerging in secure possession of political power’ (1985: 84–85). Their well-drawn history of English state formation, working largely within the umbrella of a Marxist historical sociology, finds that it is simply not possible to match political actors with economic interests in the events spanning from 1640 though the Restoration of 1660 to the settlement of 1688–9. Further, such an approach notices that capitalism was still fundamentally mercantile and commercial and had not yet revolutionised production. This is presented as a paradox of an at least partially bourgeois state, or at least a state which ‘fostered both capitalist enterprise and the consolidation of the bourgeois ruling class’, but which could not be understood as a rationalised instrument of the capitalist classes who were its principal beneficiaries (88).

For Corrigan and Sayer (1985: 87–113), nowhere is this paradox more evident than in the particular political formation of the period which later came to be known as ‘Old Corruption’. This formation, found during the century following 1688, has been characterised by E.P. Thompson (1978: 322) in terms of a ‘social stasis’ which witnessed the degeneration of ruling institutions, the spread of corruptions, and the entrenchment of, and increasing dissatisfaction with, a narrow elite comprising the Whig oligarchy which monopolised key positions in the state. Corrigan and Sayer point out, however, that ‘it is not enough … to see capitalist development as something that occurred entirely independently of this “parasitism”. Old Corruption was conducive to capitalism, if in complex and contradictory ways’ (1985: 89). While accepting that such an approach may grant a high degree of intelligibility to the broader history of English state formation, the present study opts for a different line of attack on the genealogy of poor policy. It suggests that it may be possible to understand the government of the Poor during this period in terms of the measures and the goals of the specific programmes and policies in which it is embodied, rather than in its relation – no matter how complex and contradictory we might wish to make it – to capitalism. Despite the evident revolution in government in the mid-seventeenth century, the government of the Poor should not, at least in the first instance, be prematurely judged from the telos of modern political and economic formations.

A similar point could be made about paternalism, the eighteenth-century version of which is so vividly described by Thompson (1974). One of the ways in which this political formation encouraged capitalism, according to these authors, was the constitution of a ‘capitalist ethos’ through ‘theatrical representations of social propriety and deference’ and ‘paternalist paradigms of master and servant’ (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 94). Now while there is certainly an important issue involved in conceptions of proper relations between rich and poor, is it necessary, and indeed helpful, to assume capitalism as their ultimate referent? To answer the question, it is useful to examine a body of written material which is evidence of patriarchalist relations of submission and dominance, of obedience and rule, and of rights and duties. But, as we shall see, there is much to this form of discourse which certainly does not resemble a nascent capitalist ethos, including its notions of labour, wealth, and profit. Such a discourse must be challenged, and its characteristic concepts displaced, before the liberal transformation of governance, which will be conducive to capitalist relations, is complete. Our first aim should be to approach these discourses in such a way that their irreducible otherness to more familiar concepts and categories is maintained.

In order to do so, it is necessary to examine the claim that the discussion of the Poor did not undertake the ‘explicit application of social theories’ and did not offer ‘general economic analysis’ (Poynter 1969: 21). Following our earlier warnings of the dangers of recurrential readings of texts, it would appear that these observations are, at the very least, well-founded starting points. However, we should not draw the conclusion from such lacunae that there were ‘few coherent views on poverty’ at this period, that writings and comment were ‘for specific purposes’ and less systematic than moral literature (21–22).

While it gives explicit recognition to issues of anachronism, this type of intellectual history presupposes the pertinence of categories and concepts drawn from social theory and economics as much as one which reads every text as a precursor of modern knowledges. Thus the reading of the ‘debate before 1795’ is as much filtered through the norms of the social theories and economic discourses of the twentieth century as one which seeks everywhere precursors of scientific knowledge. Here, however, the discourses under analysis are read negatively as those which lack such norms and are hence without any internal order. The consequence of such an approach is profoundly anti-genealogical. It does not allow us to entertain the claims of the history of discourses on poverty and the Poor and to interrogate the formation of economic science from such a standpoint. A far more useful assumption would be that, even in the absence of such things as a theoretical conception of the economy or a notion of social totality, the discourse and mode of government of this period possesses an intrinsic logic or rationality, that is to say, its own form of coherence. A history of ideas which writes from the perspective of the contemporary social sciences, and knows only their rationality, needs to be replaced by a genealogy of government which is able to constitute the immanent rationality which inheres in the diversity of statements and policy formulations available in forms of discourse.

Related to this argument is the issue of the supposed isomorphism between the discourse and institutional treatment of the Poor in the eighteenth century. While our genealogy of government seeks to erase the effects of sterile division of intellectual labours, it is also necessary to avoid a premature elision of aspects of the history of ‘ideas’ with those of ‘institutions’. To do this, we can examine the presumption that the fact that ‘the old Poor Law was constructed by practical men reacting to local problems with varying degrees of intelligence, integrity and zeal’ is enough to demonstrate the lack of explicit theories or general arguments concerning the Poor and their treatment (Poynter 1969: 21).

We have already mentioned the post-Restoration local nature of relief administration. One of the legacies of the revolutionary period was to loosen the governance of the Poor from the ‘administrative hierarchy’ and to place it within the framework of the local social and political order, particularly under the laws of settlement. Poor relief was administered on a mostly local basis for the next century and a half in the tiny administrative unit of the parish by officials elected by ratepayers assembled in ‘vestries’. The next central administration, that of the 1830s, would have to deal with an estimated fifteen thousand parishes and it was something of an achievement that 13,691 parishes had been incorporated into 583 Poor Law Unions before the end o...