An end to poverty

This article argues that the first non-utopian proposals to eliminate poverty through the universal provision of social insurance appeared in the seventeen-nineties. They formed part of a novel programme which linked the pursuit of equality with commercial society and a republican polity found both in Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) and in the so-called 'social chapter' of Tom Paine's Rights of Man: Part Two (1792). Little attention has generally been paid to the similarity between these proposals. Most immediately, this was the result of the common association of Condorcet and Paine with the Girondin party during the French Revolution. But as a new form of republican radicalism, it was also rooted in two major intellectual and institutional advances in the second half of the eighteenth century. The first was a more confident belief in the control over chance through the coming together of the collection of vital statistics and the mathematics of probability. The second was the great impetus given to positive future-oriented conceptions of 'commercial society' following Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Turgot's reforming liberal ministry of 1774-6. But neither of these developments was in itself sufficient to account for programmes of universal social insurance. This was the product of the radicalization of political thinking in the light of the American and French revolutions. As a result of Louis XVI's attempted flight to Varennes in 1791, the French had to consider moving to an American-style republic without a hereditary executive. Sceptics, however, most prominently the Abbé Sieyès, argued that it was impossible to transfer American institutions to Europe; the only result of attempting to abolish monarchy in Europe would be the formation of a new aristocracy which in turn would breed corruption and civil war. The Girondin answer to Sieyès attempted to demonstrate that a programme of progressive taxation, social insurance and universal education could enable the replication in Europe of the more equal social conditions of America

Political radicalism · Polity · Radicalization · European Political History Analysis · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · Political Theory and Influence

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