Rights and Reciprocity in the Political and Philosophical Discourse of Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

Both historians and philosophers have long recognized the profound link between Lockean theories of rights and the policies and discourse surrounding English attempts to counter poverty through statutory poor relief and charity. From the historical side, many have agreed with Paul Slack that the generosity of English poor relief in the eighteenth century (which supported some 8 percent of the population of England and Wales in 1750) was unprecedented, and was closely connected to a particular English view of natural rights: “the notion that the poor had an entitlement to subsistence … rested as much on the Elizabethan statues as on the writings of John Locke….”¹ From the standpoint of political philosophy, James Tully explains, “Each man [in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries] possessed Locke’s claim right in a legal form. The parish authorities had a duty, not merely to provide the local poor with welfare, but to provide them with the means by which they could make bread and so on, and so preserve themselves and their families.”²