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The Birth of the Welfare State out of the Spirit of the Poor Laws
| The middle decades of the 19th century witnessed the creation of a system of poor relief and charity that was designed to mold the lower classes into those industrious, disciplined and providential workers on whom this social formation was believed to depend. However, at the turn of the century this regime, which regarded poverty as the product of individual character and relied upon deterrence and social discrimination to exorcize the specter of pauperism, was challenged by a new paradigm, whose primary strategies were prevention and treatment. In my paper, I will reconstruct the development of this new approach and argue that it provided the rationale for the formation of a network of social welfare programs that, together with social insurance, were one of the two pillars of the modern welfare state.
Across most of the 19th century, poverty was viewed in an individualist, voluntarist manner that identified a weak or perverse will as the primary cause of poverty. However, in the first part of my paper I will argue that this classical liberal approach to the social question was challenged by the emergence of a new form of poverty knowledge that regarded poverty, sickness, and delinquency as specifically social problems attributable to the imperfect organization of society itself, rather than as the product of individual immorality, and to the embeddedness of the individual in social and ecological structures, whose unremitting pressure conditioned the individual to think, believe and act in certain ways. By looking at the work of such influential social reformers as Christian Jasper Klumker, Emil Münsterberg, Othmar Spann and Alfred Grotjahn, I will show how this social perspective on poverty gave rise to a new conception of social rights and social citizenship that could only be secured through the creation of a dense network of preventive social welfare programs that came to form a coherent Progressive alternative to deterrent poor relief.
This logic of prevention was incompatible with the logic of deterrence, and this Progressive refiguring of the liberal social contract and the assistantial practices that supported it was the object of sustained debate within the social reform community. In the second part of my paper, I will analyze the debate over the “social evolution” (soziale Ausgestaltung) of poor relief, which was analogous to the British debate over the “break-up” of the poor laws and the rise of “collectivism.” Here, the advocates of the social evolution of poor relief argued that persons who were disadvantaged by their position in this solidarist community should enjoy a “right to assistance” or a “right to existence” that could only be guaranteed through public preventive social welfare programs, and I will argue that this collectivist reformulation of the role of the community in promoting the welfare of its disadvantaged citizens led to the birth of the German welfare state out of the spirit of the poor laws.
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