Ideas of Poverty in the Age of Enlightenment - Hardcover

by Niall O'Flaherty (Editor), Robin Mills (Editor)

This collection of essays examines the ways in which poverty was conceptualised in the social, political, and religious discourses of eighteenth-century Europe and North America.

Back Jacket

Although poverty in the eighteenth century has long been an object of focus for social historians, it has figured only marginally in the intellectual history of the period. It has largely been assumed that the existence of poverty was rarely problematised before the transformative decade of the 1790s. Yet because the theme of poverty played important roles in many critical issues in European history, it was central to some of the key debates in Enlightenment political thought throughout the period, including the controversies about sovereignty and representation, public and private charity, and questions relating to crime and punishment. Indeed, leading thinkers like the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, the French Physiocrats and the Milanese jurist Cesare Beccaria had come to see the fate of the poor as an urgent political question by the middle decades of the century.

This book examines some of the most important contributions to these debates, while also ranging beyond the canonical Enlightenment thinkers, to investigate how poverty was conceptualised in the wider intellectual culture as politicians, administrators and pamphlet writers grappled with the issue. The volume also revisits the question of why and how many governments and thinkers began to address poverty as a social problem in the 1790s. It asks how far the drive to reduce or eliminate want was already underway before the French Revolution, and challenges the binary characterisation of debates in the period as a struggle between humanitarian radicals and cold-hearted reactionaries.

Author Biography

Niall O'Flaherty is Senior Lecturer in the History of European Political Thought at King's College London
R. J. W. Mills is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Intellectual History, University of St Andrews