Abstract
From 1782 to 1834, the English social legislation shifted from a safety net devised to deal with emergencies to a social security system implemented to cope with the threat of unemployment and poverty. This chapter analyses the role played by distinguished eighteenth-century British economic thinkers, in particular Adam Smith, in the process of achieving a socio-economic environment whereby power relations between the rich and poor would be different from those sustained by the Mercantilist’s utility of the poor. To what extent could Smith’s theorising on poverty and inequality be regarded as a map for the legislator to design and implement policies meant to transform a social environment geared around social relationships based on the authority-subjection pair, into a less unequal and more inclusive one?
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Notes
- 1.
During the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the poor were those “without income from property or profession and, therefore, dependent upon their manual labour for living” (Cowherd 1977, 2). Providing relief to the most needy was never an issue. The problem was how to deal with the able bodied—no matter whether they were unemployed or working poor.
- 2.
This mindset rested on a biased understanding of the poor’s human nature and their attitude towards work. Excluding any social or economic cause of poverty, the utility of the poor advocates endorsed the a priori view that the poor did not work because they were naturally idle and inclined towards licentious behaviour (Mun 1664; Manley 1669; Dunning 1686; Cary 1695; Locke 1697/1997; Pollexfen 1700; Defoe 1704; Mandeville 1725).
- 3.
Its advocates maintained that wages above bare subsistence would have not only destroyed the poor’s productivity, but they would have also encouraged insolent and impertinent behaviour (Furniss 1920, 118). Thus, low wages were seen as a disciplining tool for transforming the poor into subordinate economic agents.
- 4.
It should be remembered that from the mid-Seventeenth century, Parliament passed The Poor Relief Act (1662), designed to establish to which parish a person belonged. Better known as the Act of Settlement and Removal, it stood at the very heart of the Poor Law until 1795, clarifying—should a poor person be in need—which parish was responsible for his relief. Although the Act of Settlement and Removal firmly established the responsibility to provide the poor with a minimum subsistence, it became the cornerstone for the control of the labouring poor’s mobility on the part of local government (Landau 1988, 391, 407). Even if the law was often emended and poorly enacted (Marshall 1926; Fideler 2006), it deprived vast sectors of the workforce of its freedom to move. Furthermore, when enacted, it was often accompanied by manifest acts of brutality (Parliamentary History 1814, XVII, 844). For these reasons, no other piece of legislation received so much criticism as the Act of Settlement and Removal. See Hay (1735, 10, 119), Bentham (1792 [1823], 234), Eden (1797).
- 5.
To some authors of the day, it was an established fact that workhouses were lacking in expediency and justice. Earlier in the seventeenth century, John White (1630, 20), Samuel Hartlib (1649, 8), and John Graunt (1662, 351) had already expressed their concerns about the economic and administrative rationale governing the system of indoor relief. From the last quarter of the century, other influential writers like Thomas Firmin (1678, in Eden 1797, I 204), John Bellers (1696, 28), Daniel Defoe (1704), and Lawrence Braddon (1722) expressed concern for the results obtained by indoor relief. In 1715, the anonymous drafter of an official Report stated that out of 12,000 babies born in workhouses, only a quarter survived; it also reported of stolen money, falsified accounts, paupers starving to death, or being killed (anon. 1715). In 1732, an unknown Overseer reported that “we have many here who would choose to starve, rather than be maintained in […] the house of correction, as they call it” (anon. 1732, 127).
- 6.
- 7.
This understanding reflects closely the one put forward by Krishna Bharadwaj when she pointed out that power relationships ought to be framed as relationships where “one side possessed of a superior socio-economic position … may even imply the domination or subjugation of the other side” (Bharadwaj 1989, 1).
- 8.
As Christopher Martin noted, while not proving that he read them, both “James Bonar’s and Hiroshi Mizuta’s catalogs show that Smith owned many works that discuss the doctrine of the utility of poverty” (Martin 2015, 568).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
On these premises, he upheld the natural liberty of all British subjects “of exercising what species of industry they please”. To deny such a liberty would have been an “evident violation of natural liberty, and therefore unjust” (ibid., 530).
- 12.
Fiore and Pesciarelli (1999, 95).
- 13.
Smith shared with Hume the concern for unbalanced power relationship. Hume was well aware that in the real world, power relationships did exist. In 1740, he wrote that “… when a person acquires such an authority over me, that not only there is no external obstacle to his actions; but also that he may punish or reward me as he pleases, without any dread of punishment in his turn, I then attribute a full power to him, and consider myself as a subject or vassal”. About ten years later, he still believed that “where the riches are in few hands, these must enjoy all the power, and will readily conspire to lay the whole burthen on the poor, and oppress them still farther, to the discouragement of all industry”, concluding that a “too great disproportion among the citizens weakens any state” (Hume 1752 [1955], 15). Building upon these premises, he offered a powerful statement anticipating a modern concept of welfare economics: “Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labour, in a full possession of all necessaries and many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt, but such equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less from the happiness of the rich than it adds to the poor” (ibid.).
- 14.
Smith believed that economic growth was the goal to be achieved because in it “the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable” (Smith 1776 [1976], 43).
- 15.
(ibid., 35).
- 16.
As Kurz cogently noted in his introductory essay “power relationships […] are typically expressed in the existence and continual reproduction of social classes. These are defined in terms of the roles of their members in the process of the production and appropriation of the social product, their different degrees of information about and understanding of what is going on in the economy and their very uneven participation in public life” (Kurz 7).
- 17.
For an account of these passages, see Fiori and Pesciarelli (1999, 91–95).
- 18.
- 19.
For him, it was a matter of “the greatest delicacy” (Smith 1759 [1976], 734). This said, one cannot but agree with Blaug’s statement that Smith’s overall opinion on the Poor Laws has been either ignored or, worse, misinterpreted (Blaug 1978, 157). Though Smith was uncomfortable with the Act of Settlement and Removal (Smith 1776 [1976], 157), his opposition to it was limited to the hindering of the free circulation of labour throughout the country, which interfered with his system of natural liberty. “To remove a man who has committed no misdemeanour from the parish where he chooses to reside, is an evident violation of natural liberty and justice …” (ibid.). Nothing in this argument can be taken as a general attack on Poor Laws as such. Geoffrey Gilbert’s inference seems to be accurate that Smith had no objections to the principle of Poor Laws, or he would have expressed them explicitly (Gilbert 1997, 287; see also Viner 1927 [1958], 241).
- 20.
Discussing the period from 1753 to 1797, Eden argued that: “the Poor Laws seems to have attracted very general attention both in and out of Parliament” (Eden 1797, I 317–8). In this same period, it would appear that a conspicuous number of wealthy bourgeoisies made their appearance in the House of Commons (Namier and Booke 1963, 103). The issue of who was ruling the country after 1688 has always been a captivating problem for historians. Even if the bourgeoisie took power in 1688, the landed aristocracy continued to control Parliament until the mid-nineteenth century (Pinkham 1963, 85). Engels attempted to provide an explanation to this apparent contradiction, in 1847: “Ever since 1688, separate sections of the bourgeois class have been ruling in England. But, in order to facilitate their seizure of power, the bourgeoisie has allowed the aristocrats, its dependent debtors, to retain their rule in name” (Engels 2010/1848, 520).
- 21.
His first attempt to reform the Poor Law in 1764 was firmly grounded in the workhouse system. It was Richard Burn’s argument that indoor relief was much more expensive than outdoor relief that induced Gilbert’s change of attitude (Slack 1990, 35). In 1781, he wrote that workhouses were “generally inhabited by all Sorts of Persons … Hence arise Confusion, Disorder, and Distresses, not easily to be described. I have long thought it a great Defect in the Management of the common Workhouses, that all Descriptions of poor Persons should be sent thither; where, for the most Part, they are very ill accommodated” (Gilbert 1781, 6–8). What is interesting is that Adam Smith not only praised Burn’s scholarly approach but also quoted his work in the Wealth of Nations. (Smith 1776 [1976], 153). In order to support his preference for allowances rather than indoor relief, Gilbert also pointed out the inadequacy of wages at a time when the changing economic situation pushed entrepreneurs to “rely on the free competitive market to determine the price of labour” (Mencher 1967, 110).
- 22.
Gilbert believed that, in most cases, it was preferable for the impotent poor “to remain in their own Habitations (if they have any) or to be placed with any Friend or Relation, at weekly Allowances, adapted to their Circumstances and Situation; it being understood, in all these Cases, that the Persons who keep them shall have the benefit of such Labour as they are able to perform; and weekly Pay to be fixed accordingly” (Gilbert 1781, 8).
- 23.
- 24.
In Whitbread’s sentence, we find an echo of the longstanding tradition initiated by Berkeley and reiterated by Smith.
- 25.
In 1797, Pitt attempted—and failed—to press the Parliament into passing the Speenhamland system into legislation.
- 26.
Pitt feared “that if once wages were raised to meet the rise in prices it would not be easy to reduce them when the famine was over” (Hammond and Hammond 1911 [1929], 144).
- 27.
Concern for Pitt’s proposal also derived from the fact that it was based on the Speenhamland System (Deane 1965).
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Orsi, C. (2018). Power and Poverty: Social Legislation in the Years of Adam Smith. In: Mosca, M. (eds) Power in Economic Thought. Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94039-7_6
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