Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Garsten, Bryan
Abstract
This dissertation traces the imprint of Adam Smith on modern political theories of poverty and uplifting the poor to provide an original account of the surprising synergies between conservative, liberal, and radical perspectives on redressing poverty. Offering the first manuscript-length study of poverty and the poor in the history of political thought since the 2000s, it examines how claims about the degradation of the poor have paradoxically animated while limiting ideas of uplift and perfectibility. I show how, by focusing on the moral condition of the poor and effects of poverty, conservatives, liberals, and radicals alike reproduced hateful stereotypes about the poorest among us. This raises the question: how do we condemn poverty without condemning the poor? The dissertation is separated into four chapters. Chapter I begins by contextualizing Adam Smith’s language of “hard-heartedness” to present two arguments: that (I) Smith’s approach to uplifting the poor belied his own commitment to their improvement, yet simultaneously (II) established human nature and its perfection as the principal criterion by which bettering the poor’s condition is judged. The dissertation provides a necessary complication of the now-prevailing view of Smith as a “friend of the poor.” Chapter II traces the influence of Smith among several notable representatives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economic liberalism, Joseph Townsend, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville. I argue that they imbued Smith’s principles with the language of civilizational development, thus supposing that the poor should be viewed and treated like barbarians amid civilization. The language of barbarism often had racial inflections, but not necessarily in every case. These authors saw inculcating the mores attached to private charity as the primary means of uplifting the poor. Chapter III examines Thomas Robert Malthus to argue three points. First, that despite his reputation as arch-parson of the "dismal science," his political thought was much closer to that of so-called "friends of the poor." Second, that he elaborated a post-Smithian idiom of poverty discourse, in which the poor are feared to be so degraded by their poverty that they may no longer be human. This meant for Malthus and his contemporaries that attention should not only be afforded to the systemic and structural production of poverty but also the effects of the conditions of poverty. Anticipating the early Engels and Marx, Malthus argued that some poor could be improved morally and economically while others fell into conditions of "hopeless poverty." Finally, I examine Malthus in context to show how his preoccupation with the stability of society informed welfare legislation in his time and provides a crucial backdrop to twentieth and twenty-first century approaches to poverty. Chapter IV provides an original reading of Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class of England and the early Marx to reveal the deep continuities between their political thought on poverty and Smithian ideas. Centering their contemptuous statements about the Karrenbinder and lumpenproletariat, I argue that Engels and Marx theorized human nature and revolutionary mobilization in terms that excluded the poorest and most isolated of society. I then consider how these issues resonate with twentieth- and twenty-first century debates about the underclass. The dissertation concludes by considering the questions of pathology, deviance, and popular agency this historical account raises, and briefly sketches the genealogy of modern poverty studies that bridges Engels and the underclass debate. It looks, in the end, to Richard Wright for normative guidance on these questions. Wright crystalizes the idea that the effects of the conditions of poverty raises the question of hope versus despair—as distinct from wealthy versus poverty—and points to the psychiatric analysis of trauma as a means of theorizing poverty-based pathologies without pathologizing the poor.
Recommended Citation
Chambers, Chris Anthony, "Specters of Degradation: Poverty and Uplift in Modern Political Thought" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1240.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1240
