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Ideas of poverty in the Age of Enlightenment
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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. This is because it has 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, as well as 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 in 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 men of letters 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, as well as challenging the binary characterisation of debates in the period as a struggle between humanitarian radicals and cold-hearted reactionaries.
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Keywords
- Capitalism
- Enlightened absolutism
- European Enlightenment
- moral economy
- paternalism
- Physiocrats
- Political Economy
- poor laws
- Poverty
- T. R. Malthus
- thema EDItEUR::1 Place qualifiers::1D Europe::1DD Western Europe
- thema EDItEUR::3 Time period qualifiers::3M c 1500 onwards to present day::3ML 18th century, c 1700 to c 1799
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCC Cultural studies::JBCC9 History of ideas
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBF Social and ethical issues::JBFC Poverty and precarity
- thema EDItEUR::L Law::LA Jurisprudence and general issues::LAZ Legal history
- thema EDItEUR::L Law::LN Laws of specific jurisdictions and specific areas of law::LNT Social law and Medical law::LNTH Social security and welfare law
- thema EDItEUR::N History and Archaeology::NH History::NHT History: specific events and topics::NHTB Social and cultural history
- thema EDItEUR::Q Philosophy and Religion::QD Philosophy::QDT Topics in philosophy::QDTS Social and political philosophy
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