Memoir on Pauperism (1835)
Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent
basis and gives it administrative form
thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at
the expense of the industrial and working class.
-Alexis De Tocqueville,
Memoir
on Pauperism
Gertrude Himmelfarb has written a most helpful introduction to this little known work (it was not even translated into English until 1968) by the great Alexis de Tocqueville, and I rely on her for the background to the book. Visiting England in 1833, de Tocqueville was struck by the prevalence of pauperdom in this most prosperous of nations. In 1835, shortly after the first volume of Democracy in America was published, he delivered this lecture to the Royal Academic Society of Cherbourg. Himmelfarb suggests that he may have been influenced by J. B. Say's Cours d'economie politique, in which Say offered what Himmelfarb refers to as a "supply-side theory of pauperism" :
England is the country that has the most havens available
to the unfortunate, and it is perhaps the
one where most unfortunates demand aid. Let
public welfare or private associations open, a
hundred, a thousand others--all--will be filled;
and there will remain in society equally as many
unfortunates who will request permission to enter
or who will claim it as a right if one recognized it
as such.
De Tocqueville addresses himself to this quandary with his typical insight and foresight in a brief work which is as pertinent today as on the day he delivered the speech.
He starts out by surveying human history to determine why it should be the case that pauperism arises in advanced industrial societies, rather than in relatively backwards agrarian ones. He concludes that the phenomenon is paradoxically a result of the advances. Where a subsistence society requires the labor of the whole population just to feed itself, an industrial society can do so with less and less laborers.
The combination of idled hands among the many and a growing amount of disposable wealth among the few then leads to a situation where people will create new products in the hope that the wealthy will desire them. These endeavors are inherently more risky than basic food production, which must obviously go on regardless of changing tastes or hard times. In addition to forcing a significant portion of the population into a tenuous economic position, this manufacture of what are essentially superfluous goods creates a series of artificial desires. No one actually needs all of the consumer products of the modern economy, but once produce them and get the rich to buy them and soon they are viewed as necessities by the society as a whole. So, though the poorest in an industrial economy may be better off in terms of their standard of living than even the richest in a pre-industrial economy, they will nonetheless perceive themselves as destitute because they don't have all the gewgaws and doo dads that others have. Thus, societal wealth breeds desires, wants, "needs", which are unknown in cultures which must devote all of their energies to just satisfying true physical needs.
And what do these parallel trends portend for the industrialized world ? :
If all these reflections are correct, it is easy
to see that the richer a nation is, the more the number of
those who appeal to public charity must multiply,
since two very powerful causes tend to that
result. On the one hand, among these nations,
the most insecure class continuously grows. On the
other hand, needs infinitely expand and diversify,
and the chance of being exposed to some of them
becomes more frequent each day.
We should not delude ourselves. Let us look
calmly and quietly on the future of modern society.
We must not be intoxicated by the spectacle of its
greatness; let us not be discouraged by the sight of
its miseries. As long as the present movement
of civilization continues, the standard of living of the
greatest number will rise; society will become more
perfected, better informed; existence will be
easier, milder, more embellished, and longer.
But at the same time we must look forward to an
increase of those who will resort to the support
of all their fellow men to obtain a small part of these
benefits. It will be possible to moderate
this double movement; special national circumstances will
precipitate or suspend its course; but no one can
stop it. We must discover the means of attenuating
those inevitable evils that are already apparent.
In the second part of the Memoir, Tocqueville considers what forms of welfare will best attenuate these evils. As a starting point it is important to note Tocqueville's rather blunt assessment of human nature :
Man, like all socially organized beings, has a natural
passion for idleness. There are, however, two
incentives to work: the need to live and the desire
to improve the conditions of life. Experience has
proven that the majority of men can be sufficiently
motivated to work only by the first of these
incentives. The second is effective only with
a small minority.
It should also be noted that he does accept the notion that there is a legitimate role for charity :
I recognize not only the utility but the necessity
of public charity applied to inevitable evils such as
the helplessness of infancy, the decrepitude of
old age, sickness, insanity. I even admit its
temporary usefulness in times of public calamities
which God sometimes allows to slip from his
hand, proclaiming his anger to the nation.
State alms are then as spontaneous as unforeseen, as
temporary as the evil itself.
I even understand that public charity which opens
free schools for the children of the poor and gives
intelligence the means of acquiring the basic physical
necessities through labor.
But even as he recognizes that there will be a proper role for charity, he warns that it must take a particular form :
I think that beneficence must be a manly and reasoned
virtue, not a weak and unreflecting
inclination. It is necessary to do what is
most useful to the receiver, to do what best serves the
welfare of the majority, not what rescues the few.
In practice this means that charity should never be made a right, to which the "needy" are entitled, but should instead always be considered to be a gracious gesture on the part of society. This is necessary because rights must be based on the idea of equality of individuals, while a "right to charity" would be based on the inferiority of certain individuals. When I assert a right to speak, or to own property, or to worship my God, I am stating that I am the equal of any man and so am entitled to be treated equally under the law. But to assert a claim upon my fellow men for assistance is to assert my own inferiority and my dependence upon them. This would degrade, rather than uplift, the supplicant.
Tocqueville also cites the qualitative difference between public and private charity as regards their effect on the sinews which hold society together :
[I]ndividual alms-giving established valuable ties
between the rich and the poor. The deed itself
involves the giver in the fate of the one whose
poverty he has undertaken to alleviate. The latter,
supported by aid which he had no right to demand
and which he had no hope to getting, feels
inspired by gratitude. A moral tie is established
between those two classes whose interests and
passions so often conspire to separate them from
each other, and although divided by circumstance
they are willingly reconciled. This is not
the case with legal charity. The latter allows the alms to
persist but removes its morality. The law
strips the man of wealth of a part of his surplus without
consulting him, and he sees the poor man only as
a greedy stranger invited by the legislator to share
his wealth. The poor man, on the other hand,
feels no gratitude for a benefit that no one can refuse
him and that could not satisfy him in any case.
Public alms guarantee life but do not make it
happier or more comfortable than individual alms-giving;
legal charity does not thereby eliminate
wealth or poverty in society. One class still
views the world with fear and loathing while the other
regards its misfortune with despair and envy.
Far from uniting these two rival nations, who have
existed since the beginning of the world and who
are called the rich and poor, into a single people,
it breaks the only link which could be established
between them. It ranges each one under a banner,
tallies them, and, bringing them face to face, prepares
them for combat.
As is so often the case, de Tocqueville seems to have perceived social trends and understood where mankind's character would lead with the clarity of a prophet. To a remarkable degree, the arguments he presents in the Memoir have become the accepted wisdom that lay behind Welfare reform and ideas like President Bush's Faith-Based Initiative. We can only imagine how much different, how much better and more productive, the last two hundred years might have been had the industrialized world heeded his warning :
I am deeply convinced that any permanent, regular
administrative system whose aim will be to
provide for the needs of the poor will breed more
miseries than it can cure, will deprave the
population that it wants to help and comfort, will
in time reduce the rich to being no more than the
tenant-farmers of the poor, will dry up the sources
of savings, will stop the accumulation of capital,
will retard the development of trade, will benumb
human industry and activity, and will culminate
by bringing about a violent revolution in the State...
Precisely such a fate did claim many of the states of Europe, and most
of the rest still groan beneath the suffocating weight of their cradle
to grave welfare systems. As Tocqueville expected, America has been
able to slow the onset of this fate, and the current climate of enthusiasm
for privatizing social services offers some hope that we will be able to
avoid it altogether, but until we actually do privatize Social Security
and re-privatize health care, this sword of Damocles still dangles overhead.
(Reviewed:15-Jul-01)
Grade: (A+)
