Ideas of Poverty in the Age of Enlightenment

This excellent collection of essays originated at a conference held at King’s College London in September 2018. The essays cover a variety of chronological and regional contexts across Enlightenment Europe, but they are held together by a shared sense of purpose: to enhance social historians’ engagement with the intellectual history of the era, and to ensure that intellectual historians pay sufficient attention to Enlightenment debates on poverty and its amelioration. The editors, and the volume as a whole, emphasize the importance of getting the chronology right, avoiding the tendency of previous works to focus on the 1790s, and instead examining the entirety of the “First Poverty Enlightenment” (the term borrowed from Martin Ravallion’s The Economics of Poverty 2016, which is frequently cited throughout the book), which started at least in the 1740s and stretched to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Across Europe, Enlightenment authors shared significant preoccupations in debates over sources of and solutions to poverty, with a consistent focus on getting the most national benefit from the labor of the poor. Both humanitarian and exploitative utilitarian motivations were at play. At the same time, local circumstances and particular social, economic, and demographic contexts determined the timing and characteristics of regional responses to poverty. The volume clearly demonstrates that “though poverty did not emerge as a distinct field of study, the theme of poverty played an important role in many of the era’s critical debates, and many of the traditional assumptions about ‘the poor’ were coming under sustained attack” (14).The clear and helpful introduction by the editors sets out the key historiographical divisions within both social and intellectual history, and, indeed, every essay in the volume connects this broader historiographical framing to specific debates within the subfield. It is a strikingly even collection, and each essay contributes meaningfully to the project of demonstrating that the topic of poverty was a significant concern not only of Enlightenment thinkers but also of civil servants and government actors who formulated and oversaw a wide array of diagnoses and solutions to the problem of poverty.As the editors explain, from the 1740s, across Europe, “poverty was increasingly conceived as the consequence of human decision-making, rather than as a fixed feature of life on Earth, and thus as something that could be ameliorated, if not eradicated, if dealt with in different ways” (3). This more secular approach to poverty during the Enlightenment was linked with the expanding role of increasingly centralized states, according to nearly all of the authors, but in distinctively different forms and chronologies across the highly disparate regions of Europe. In the Enlightened absolutist states of central and eastern Europe, T. J. Hochstrasser shows, the mid-eighteenth century saw new movement on key priorities: the question of who should receive relief, on what terms and from whom, and the relationship of the relief of the poor to national improvement (specifically as a way to make the population as efficient, healthy, and productive as possible). Absolutist central Europe still conceived of poverty as a moral issue when faced with the able-bodied poor, but the Habsburg monarchy’s significant efforts to change both state provision of welfare and conceptions of poverty shifted the region in important ways. The Habsburg governors of Milan are held up similarly as important reformers in Alexandra Ortolja-Baird’s meticulous study, titled “Poverty, Rights and the Social Contract in Austrian-Habsburg Lombardy.” She emphasizes the degree to which Lombardy shifted toward rights-based policies and practices as the state increasingly adopted obligations to provide work and self-improvement, “as well as more tangible aid, which signaled shifting perceptions of the nature and scope of social rights” (78). Ortolja-Baird’s welcome analysis of visual evidence is echoed in James Stafford’s insightful and beautifully written essay on poverty and the Irish landscape (ca. 1720–1820), which examines the ways that poverty “could be experienced as a spatial and aesthetic problem” (189).To borrow a phrase from Joanna Innes’s terrific essay on Patrick Colquhoun’s Treatise on Indigence (1806), the authors here are all interested in both “doers and thinkers,” and especially in the importance of figures (like Colquhoun) who connected theory and practice in formulating and testing out Enlightened political economy. Ortolja-Baird’s analysis of Ceasare Beccaria, Jesús Astigarraga and Javier Usoz’s treatment of leading thinkers of Spanish economic regalism (especially Campomanes), and Conor Bollins’s focus on the Scottish minister Robert Wallace provide important case studies demonstrating the virtuous cycle of theorizing and practicing poor relief among this common genre of Enlightened servants of the state. One of the shared themes of each essay (which could have been highlighted a bit more emphatically in the introduction) is the extent to which these figures—and virtually all of their compatriots—relied on new practices of gathering and analyzing quantitative evidence in diagnosing and treating poverty. Another shared theme, perhaps most important to Koen Stapelbroek’s treatment of the role of the Oeconomische Tak (Economic Branch of the Dutch Society of Sciences) in Dutch economic patriotism, is the central role in these debates and actions played by civil society groups—the clubs, academies, and societies that decades of historians have deemed central to the intellectual and cultural history of the long eighteenth century’s growing public sphere.From Bourbon Spain to physiocratic France, through British-controlled territories, and even to Russia, European states were all preoccupied with a particular variety of the poor, variously known as the laboring, able-bodied, or working poor. These terms are usefully unpacked in Anna Plassart’s essay on Montesquieu, Smith, and Burke, and the contrast between eastern and western Europe is clearest in Ben Dew’s essay, “Conceptions of Polish and Russian Poverty in the British Enlightenment.” As in nearly all other historiography on poverty, the authors in this volume reflect their subjects’ concerns with the never-ending effort to make the poor person “industrious,” and they pay relatively little attention to those sometimes described as the “real” or worthy poor: the aged, widowed, disabled, and orphaned (88, 89). Indeed, one of the few weaknesses of the volume is the relative lack of interest in those whom all agreed were entitled to assistance (however that assistance varied across time and space).A few essays are more dialed in on the particular importance of certain key theorists, and essential concepts, such as the transformative notion of bienfaisance in France as a new “moral watchword” from about 1760 (36). Arnault Skornicki convincingly demonstrates that “the great rhetorical achievement of the Physiocrats was to separate charity from donation, and bienfaisance from almsgiving”; this chapter reveals the variety and complexity of physiocratic thought on poverty (45). Bollins, Stafford, and Dew highlight the connections between theories and analyses of population and poverty, nicely setting up Niall O’Flaherty’s essay on the reception of the “much-expanded and definitive” second edition of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1803) (213). While that sounds like a very narrow way to close out the volume (it is the penultimate essay), in fact, because of the centrality of Malthus’s thought to so much subsequent writing and administration concerning the poor, this essay actually makes some of the clearest historiographical interventions. In direct contrast to modern historians like Gertrude Himmelfarb, O’Flaherty argues that Malthus was a “moderately optimistic poverty theorist,” and that “the science of poverty which the 1803 edition sought to inaugurate was ably and accurately represented in political discourse, at least by those who were not ideologically allergic to it” (214, 220). Importantly, this allows for the inclusion of Malthus within a framework of Enlightenment optimism regarding the possibility of ameliorating (if not entirely solving) the problem of poverty. This also allows O’Flaherty the opportunity to come back to some of the originating historiography on political economy that he and Mills discussed in the introduction in their initial plea to resist binary characterizations of changing ideas of poverty during the Enlightenment. Refuting E. P. Thompson’s seminal work that saw the moral economy succumb to political economy, O’Flaherty suggests, “A simple revision of our termes d’art that may promote a more nuanced understanding of the debate on Enlightenment ideas on poverty would be to speak of old and new moral economies; the old committed to compensating vast inequality with relief as a matter of right, the new to scrapping such entitlements as part of a plan for raising the poor out of the poverty cycle for good” (227).This wonderful collection of essays should be essential reading for subscribers to this journal, who will appreciate the tight focus on the topic of labor and the treatment of poor workers. If those of us who focus on issues such as the intersection of aging and poverty may feel like such concerns should have received more attention, the volume can perhaps serve as a useful spur to drive us in writing a companion volume on the “real” poor of the Enlightenment.