I have been studying the poor laws of England. From 1601 to 1834 England was unique among European nations in that people in need could receive financial aid, paid for by taxes. Other countries relied almost entirely on charity.
But the cost of relief kept going up. As early as 1662, an act was passed limiting relief to the poor who were born or in the local parish or had lived there long enough to be “settled.” Those from elsewhere had to go home if they wanted relief—or even if the parish overseers suspected they might want relief in the future. The immobility of the poor made it hard to find jobs.
The poor (who became known as paupers) were increasingly viewed as idle and vicious. Over the years, prominent people from John Locke to Jeremy Bentham came up with fanciful schemes for correcting the bad behavior of the poor—educating them, working them, punishing them. Little change occurred, however.
It turns out that Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French author of Democracy in America, probably understood England’s poor laws better than the English did.
Yet historians have little positive to say about Tocqueville’s Memoir on Pauperism, a 36-page pamphlet published in 1835. It wasn’t translated into English until 1968.[1] Tocqueville biographer Hugh Brogan calls the memoir “one of Tocqueville’s weakest efforts.”[2] Paul Slack, a scholar of the poor laws, finds Tocqueville’s ideas in the Memoir provocative, but he doesn’t dwell on them. [3]
Discussion of Tocqueville’s message has been left to historians considered conservative or neo-conservative, such as Max Hartwell and Gertrude Himmelfarb. This is regrettable. Let’s take a look at the memoir.[4]
Tocqueville’s Memoir on Pauperism
Tocqueville began with an astute observation about England. First, England was the richest country in the world—the “Eden of modern civilization.” Yet a traveler “discovers with indescribable astonishment that one-sixth of the inhabitants of this flourishing kingdom live at the expense of public charity.”[4]
There are a number of reasons for this, he wrote, but a major one was the poor laws. Poor people had a legal entitlement to relief in England. That destroyed incentives to work and thus increased the number of the poor, he thought.
Humans, said Tocqueville, have “a natural passion for idleness.” There are only two reasons they will work: “the need to live and the desire to improve the conditions of life.” But only a small portion of humans have the second desire. So if the “need to live” is satisfied by public charity, most will be idle.
In England, he said, the productive segment of the population is “furnishing the means of existence for those who do nothing or who make bad use of their labor.”[5]
Toqueville Was Not Entirely Alone
Tocqueville was not the only thinker to suggest the poor laws were causing or worsening poverty. Thomas Robert Malthus thought the same. He wrote in 1798, “I feel little doubt in my own mind, that if the poor-laws had never existed . . . the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present.”[6] But Malthus thought the safety net of the poor laws encouraged early marriage among the poor and thus helped produce more people. For Tocqueville, the issue was the incentive to idleness caused by assured relief.
Tocqueville was not blaming all poverty on the poor laws. He recognized that England’s shift from a predominantly agricultural country to one supported by manufacturing created risks. Industrial workers, he said, can be “exposed to sudden and irremediable evils.” When fashions and foreign trade change, they may lose their jobs; when food prices go up, the majority of people can’t grow their own food, and they could starve without public aid. But the poor laws were the biggest contributor to poverty, in his view.
Tocqueville suggested that he had some better ideas for mitigating poverty, which he intended to offer in a future publication. Unfortunately, he never did come up with such a pamphlet. But that’s no reason to neglect his insight.
Notes
[1] Chad Alan Goldberg, “Social Citizenship and a Reconstructed Tocqueville,” American Sociological Review 66, No. 2 (April 2001): 289-31.
[2] Hugh Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life. (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006), 301.
[3] Paul Slack, Poverty & Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988), 5.
[4] Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism (London: Civitas, [1835] 1997), with a foreword by Max Hartwell and an introduction by Gertrude Himmelfarb. http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/Tocqueville_rr2.pdf.
[5] Tocqueville, 17.
[5] Tocqueville, 27-28.
[6] Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Reprints of Economic Classics (New York: August M. Kelley, [1798] 1965), 94.
I would add to Ramona M-B’s astute observations that the rigid class system in England placed all sorts of obstacles between the poor and real opportunity. That system is why my maternal grandparents left England for America like so many others. Other European countries had their own class and caste hierarchies.
The British class system was still very much alive when I lived there as a grad student, working summers and in between terms on farms and as a manual laborer. I once saw a Herefordshire wealthy hops farmer beat a Gypsy picker as if the picker were his slave. The class system was, in many ways, a version of slavery or serfdom, especially in de Toqueville’s day.
Ramona and Wallace: Wasn’t the British class system much less rigid than the Continent’s?
Jane, I find it interesting that Tocqueville’s argument against the “poor laws” is the basis for the present argument in Congress re the wisdom of providing more cash payments to the unemployed. Is this kind of “economic” question ever to be resolved ?
Bill: You are right that there is a lot of similarity, but I don’t think they are quite the same. Tocqueville was arguing that the poor laws created disincentives to work. But workers’ families then could be quite destitute, the availability of jobs was more uncertain, and many people lived on “the edge.” So he may have been right, but that doesn’t totally eliminate justification for the poor laws. Today, the issue in Congress is whether people who receive unemployment should receive payments that may exceed what they earn normally. That seems to me to be a very clear-cut effect (for those who fit that description). In that case, why work? (I’m open to more discussion about this!)
Jane: Very interesting. England also tried “work for benefits,” leading to the establishment of “work houses.”
De Tocqueville is regarded for his astute observations of the behavior of people . It is too bad he did not flesh out his ideas for mitigating poverty. This is a question countless people around the world have wrestled with for at least a century.
A book that helped me understand the importance of sufficient food and motivation among the poor was Orwell’s Down and Out in London & Paris. Also, Sowell and de Soto’s work, among others, emphasize the importance of property rights. At the minimum sufficient nutrition and property rights are necessary to get ahead. Rule of law is key to protecting property rights.
What are the barriers for getting ahead if one is impoverished? Talents, abilities , IQ, ability to see a path out if there is one, opportunities, disposition to work ——these are a few important factors. I wonder how the convicts who were shipped to Australia worked their way out of poverty. Easterly, in The White Man’s Burden, documents that top down foreign aid does not work.
Jane, your blog really got me thinking. My work in the Peace Corps helped me understand that this is a very complex problem.