Description

In the 1790s, for the first time, reformers proposed the bringing of poverty to an end. Inspired by scientific progress, the Revolution in France and the promise of the new international economy, Paine and Condorcet argued that all citizens could be protected against the predictable hazards of poverty and insecurity. This was the founding moment of social democracy. But fear and anger greeted this challenge to age-old religious and political attitudes, and new forms of conservatism, of political economy and of Christianity hastened to consign this programme to oblivion. Soon the strength of this reaction was reinforced by unanticipated anxieties about the future of work and livelihood in the newly globalised economy. The result was the enduring triumph of a harsh policy of laisser faire individualism in state and society. It meant that the formation for the early twentieth-century welfare state owed little or nothing to the revolutionary hopes of a hundred years before.