AN END TO POVERTY? A historical debate. By Gareth Stedman Jones. 278pp. Profile. Paperback, £9.99. 1 86197 792 8
THE END OF POVERTY. How we can make it happen in our lifetime. Jeffrey Sachs. 396pp. Penguin. Paperback, £.99. (US $27.95). 0 14 101866 6
Players from the past whose spirits should rule the G8
Ye have the poor with you always", said Jesus (Mark 14: 7). Through human history, poverty has been seen as a normal, natural, obvious and unavoidable fact of life.
A counter theory, though, emerged only 200 years ago when the idea of societies without poverty was invented. Poverty, it was suggested, is unacceptable and something that should and could be made away with. We are entitled to call that an invention. It was an idea that had not previously been thought. The inventors were Tom Paine in Britain and Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet in France.
They took their political inspiration from the great Revolutions in America and France, and their intellectual inspiration from Adam Smith, that champion of freedom and justice. A battlefield of ideas was thereby opened up between the old -poverty is obvious - and the new -poverty is unacceptable. Two centuries on we are still fighting the same battle.
Paine was born in England in 1737 but made his mark in America between 1774 and
1787, working against England and for American independence. He fell out of favour because of his stance against religion and returned to England where his book The Rights of Man was completed and published in 1792. It was a bestseller; within a year 250,000 copies had been sold. It also spread fear and loathing. Effigies of its author were burnt in 300 towns and villages in England and Wales, and his book prosecuted. He escaped to France, where he had been elected to the National Convention, but was arrested in 1793. He returned to America in 1802, but found himself abandoned by the cause he had defended and died in isolation in New York in 1809. Condorcet was an aristocrat who joined the Revolution but was devoured by it and died in prison in 1794. He was a philosophe, mathematician and encyclopedist. His Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind was written while he was in hiding from the Terror in 1793 and published the year after his death, in the last months of Robespierre's rule.
Paine and Condorcet were evolutionary optimists and saw history, at least post-Revolution, as a march of progress. The elimination of poverty was for them, writes Gareth Stedman Jones in An End to Poverty?, "part of a pitched battle between enlightenment and the receding powers personified by the aristocracy and the established church". Their invention contained not only an idea but also a programme. Poverty would be eliminated by a political management of the economy so as to redistribute its surplus to everyone. Both drew up detailed blueprints of what we now call the Welfare State.
Stedman Jones explains the Paine-Condorcet invention by referring to "the social question". That had been understood as a problem of order, something that had to be contained so as not to threaten the powers that be. They redefined it as a problem of justice, something that had to be solved so that everyone would have their due. For poverty it was not enough to modify it with relief, it had to be eradicated with redistribution. Their redefinition was ignored when Revolution turned to Reaction. Hence it is in no way paradoxical that the Welfare State was originally an instrument of the Right, specifically of Bismarck in Germany. For him, social insurance was a tool of state building and for controlling die Arbeiterfrage. Not until Reaction was pushed back by the shock of the second thirty years war in Europe, from 1914 to 1945, was the idea of ending poverty taken up again in earnest, although no longer in revolutionary language. In 1942, W. H. Beveridge, in his Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services, proposed again what Paine had proposed 150 years earlier. That too was a bestseller. It was seen to explain what the Second World War was fought for. What was once dangerously revolutionary had become mainstream reformism.
