An End to Poverty?

A Historical Debate

Gareth Stedman Jones

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9780231510790
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

In the 1790s, for the first time, reformers proposed bringing poverty to an end. Inspired by scientific progress, the promise of an international economy, and the revolutions in France and the United States, political thinkers such as Thomas Paine and Antoine-Nicolas Condorcet argued that all citizens could be protected against the hazards of economic insecurity. In An End to Poverty? Gareth Stedman Jones revisits this founding moment in the history of social democracy and examines how it was derailed by conservative as well as leftist thinkers. By tracing the historical evolution of debates concerning poverty, Stedman Jones revives an important, but forgotten strain of progressive thought. He also demonstrates that current discussions about economic issues—downsizing, globalization, and financial regulation—were shaped by the ideological conflicts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Paine and Condorcet believed that republicanism combined with universal pensions, grants to support education, and other social programs could alleviate poverty. In tracing the inspiration for their beliefs, Stedman Jones locates an unlikely source-Adam Smith. Paine and Condorcet believed that Smith's vision of a dynamic commercial society laid the groundwork for creating economic security and a more equal society.

But these early visions of social democracy were deemed too threatening to a Europe still reeling from the traumatic aftermath of the French Revolution and increasingly anxious about a changing global economy. Paine and Condorcet were demonized by Christian and conservative thinkers such as Burke and Malthus, who used Smith's ideas to support a harsher vision of society based on individualism and laissez-faire economics. Meanwhile, as the nineteenth century wore on, thinkers on the left developed more firmly anticapitalist views and criticized Paine and Condorcet for being too "bourgeois" in their thinking. Stedman Jones however, argues that contemporary social democracy should take up the mantle of these earlier thinkers, and he suggests that the elimination of poverty need not be a utopian dream but may once again be profitably made the subject of practical, political, and social-policy debates.

NOTES

Introduction

1 A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 12th edn (London, 1809), pt IV, ch. 1, pp. 248–9, 250.

2 See B. Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1977); on the conservative reception and recasting of Smith, see E. Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), ch. 2 & passim; on the broader religious and political framing of these changes, see B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988); for its continuing impact upon government and charitable thinking in late Victorian England, see G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study of the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971).

3 On Hegel’s conception of political economy and ‘civil society’, see G. Stedman Jones, ‘Hegel and the Economics of Civil Society’, in S. Kaviraj & S. Khilnani (eds.), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 105–31; on the combination of evangelical Christianity and possessive individualism in Vormärz Prussia and the part it played in the development of Young Hegelianism, see especially W. Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (Cambridge, 1999).

4 Marx to Engels, 18 June 1862, Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 41 (London, 1985), p. 381.

5 See, for instance, F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, 1948); F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (Illinois, 1952); G. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1984).

6 See J. De Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, Journal of Economic History 54 (June 1994), no. 2, pp. 249–271.

7 J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, P. Laslett (ed.), 14th edn (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 296–7; A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), E. Cannan (ed.) (Chicago, 1976), bk 1, ch. 1, p. 16. See the discussion of the significance in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century arguments about commercial society, in I. Hont, Jealousy of Trade (Cambridge, Mass., forthcoming), introduction.

8 T. Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two (1792), M. Conway (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Paine, 4 vols. (London, 1906), vol. 2, pp. 487–8.

9 A.-N. de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), J. Barraclough (trans.), S. Hampshire (ed.) (London, 1955), p. 180.

Chapter I

1 T. Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two (1792), M. Conway (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Paine, 4 vols. (London, 1906), vol. 2, p. 461.

2 A.-N. de Condorcet, Sketch f or a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), J. Barraclough (trans.), S. Hampshire (ed.) (London, 1955), pp. 12, 169.

3 Condorcet, Sketch, pp. 173–4.

4 Condorcet, Sketch, pp. 176–7.

5 See R. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–1848 (London, 1988), p. 170.

6 Condorcet, Sketch, pp. 180–1.

7 Condorcet, Sketch, p. 181.

8 Condorcet, Sketch, p. 182; A.-N. de Condorcet, ‘The Nature and Purpose of Public Instruction’ (1791), K. M. Baker (ed.), Condorcet: Selected Writings (Indianapolis, 1976), p. 106.

9 As above, p. 126.

10 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 456.

11 Paine, Rights of Man: Part One, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 316, 387; Rights of Man: Part Two, pp. 403, 438, 456, 485.

12 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 476, 482–92; on the importance of Sinclair, see I. Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 26–8.

13 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 501–2.

14 As above, pp. 501–2.

15 See A. O. Aldridge, ‘Condorcet et Paine: leurs rapports intellectuels’, Revue de Littérature Comparée 32 (1958), no. 1, pp. 457–65; G. Kates, ‘Tom Paine’s Rights of Man’, Journal of the History of Ideas (1958), pp. 569–87; W. Doyle, ‘Tom Paine and the Girondins’, in W. Doyle, Officers, Nobles and Revolutionaries (London, 1995), pp. 209–19; B. Vincent, ‘Thomas Paine républicain de l’univers’, in F. Furet & M. Ozouf (eds.), Le Siècle de l’avènement republicain (Paris, 1993), pp. 101–26; J. P. Lagrave, ‘Thomas Paine et les Condorcet’, in B. Vincent (ed.), Thomas Paine ou la République sans frontières (Nancy, 1993), pp. 57–65; G. Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (London, 1989), ch. 4; see also A. O. Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine (London, 1959); J. Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (London, 1995).

16 Condorcet, ‘Reception Speech at the French Academy’ (1782), in Baker, Condorcet: Selected Writings, p. 6; the best account of what Condorcet meant by ‘the calculus of probabilities’ is to be found in K. M. Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, 1975); see also L. Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1988), esp. pp. 210–25; Hacking, The Taming of Chance, ch. 5.

17 Condorcet, Sketch, p. 162.

18 As above, pp. 162, 181.

19 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 488–9.

20 T. Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797), M. Conway (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Paine, 4 vols. (London, 1906), vol. 3, pp. 333, 337.

21 See Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, pp. 27–30, 127–9.

22 On Leibniz’s memoir, see Hacking, The Taming of Chance, pp. 18–20.

23 On the significance of changes in eighteenth-century attitudes towards insurance and the importance of The Society for Equitable Insurance, see L. Daston, ‘The Domestication of Risk: Mat...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. The French Revolution and the Promise of a World Beyond Want
• II. The Reaction in Britain
• III. The Reaction in France
• IV. Globalisation: the ‘Proletariat’ and the ‘Industrial Revolution’
• V. The Wealth of Midas
• VI. Resolving ‘The Social Problem’
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index