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James Sm' born 1931, Canada; studied Oxford UniYersity, BA (PPE), London
School of nomics, MSc. (Economics); sistant Research Officer, Board of Trade,
1953-5; t Leccurer in &ono' University of Aberdeen, 1955-7; Leccurer,
1957; Author Housing i" CartlUlJ, 196 and various articles.
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journal.
A genealogy ofthe
government ofpoverty
Mitchell Dean
Abstract
This paper contributes to a genealogy ofthe discourses and government ofpoverty.
It offers a statement ofwhat might be understood by a genealogical perspective and
method, and then focuses on the emergence of a 'liberal mode of government' of
poverty in the early nineteenth century, ofwhich the refonned poor law in England
is emblematic but not exhaustive. The emergence of this mode of government is
followed through a series of related transfonnations of the older systems tf the
relief and admiJUstration of' the Poor', best understood as adimension of, police' in
its archaic sense. The conditions of the problematization of this older of
governance are discussed as are transformations in the language and practice of
government in matters ofpopulation, economy, police, and so on. This emergence
has implications for the fonnation of a national labour market, notions of
self-governance and responsibility, forms of patriarchy and household, and issues
of morality, philanthropy, administration, and the state. Above all, it is within this
liberal mode ofgovernment that we can wilness both the constitution ofpoverty as a
field ofknowledge and intervention, perhaps for the first time, and also the various
surfaces of emergence for what will become 'the social'. The implications of this
liberal mode of government for our present are far from exhausted.
A genealogy ofHberal governance
The approach to what can be said, and what can be done, is that of genealogy.
Genealogy is a form ofuse ofstatements. It is distinguished from other uses of
statements: epistemology, concerned with statements as true knowledge,
intellectual history, concerned with statements as ideas, and the sociology of
knowledge, concerned with statements as ideologies or 'world-views' (Wel
tanschauungen). Genealogy seeks neither to legislate the truth of statements, to
capture the movement of ideas, nor to relativize ideas against general
social-historical processes, e.g. rationalization, the transition to modernity,
the development of capitalism, the clash of divergent groups, classes,
movements, and their interests, etc. For genealogy, whatever their value, these
projects do not exhaust the possibilities ofthe use of statements. For itis also
Possible to take as one's topic the conditions and effects oftruth.
Eamomy and Soddy Volume 21 Numb.tr 3 August 1992
Routledge 19920308-5147/9212103-0215 $3.00/1
216 Mitchell Dean
Such a perspective examines what might be called veridicoJ discourses,
those discourses that are charged with the systematic production of truth,
and by means ofwhich statements are oganized in discipliries or sanctioned
bodies of knowledge (e.g. medicine, 'social policy, criminology). These veri
dical discourses are understood as arising from and seeking to direct what
might be called institutional practices or governitlg practices, i.e. practices
that organize and codifY ways of doing things such as curing, relieving, ad
ministering, punishing, etc., and that involve the government of conduct,
whether of self or others. Genealogy thus examines the mutual inter
penetration of' regimes oftruth' and 'regimes ofpractices', to invoke the lan
guage of Michel Foucault.
l
It places what is held to be true within the
horizon of what can be done.
Genealogy is the methodical problematization of the given, of the
taken-for-granted. One way of doing this is by constituting lineages of those
'assemblages' - madness, criminality, sexuality, poverty, the economic, the
social, etc. - of which we are all too familiar, and which define the lineaments
ofour present.
2
Such assemblages are comprised of diverse and heterogene
ous elements: modes oftraining; forms ofexpertise; systems ofclassification;
administrative practices and principles; laws and juridical practices; theories,
strategies, arid programmes of governance, their targets, aints, ideals, and
effects; and agents and authorities. These assemblages neither form an ideal
unity, follow a smooth trajectory, nor answer a determinative logic, all ofwhich
would lead us back to the terrain of the taken-for-granted. If the language of
Foucault is again deployed, archaeoloKJr, insofar as the discursive forms it
isolates do not possess an ideal unity, might be understood as a technique
concerned with the disruption of the taken-for-granted by the systematic
analysis of the terrain of veridical discourses. Genealogy emplaces the
contents released by this archaeology as components in continuities without
definite origin or end and punctuated by events and ruptures.
To counterpose genealogy to dogmatizing philosophy, as does Nietzsche,
3
is
to issue a double-sided warning. One side is now well-established: the caution
issued by Nietzsche in regard to philosophies of history that place
historiography in the service of monumental, antiquarian, and critical
purposes. Genealogy stands against claims to a veridical history, one which
exhaustively reconstructs the real, or discovers identity within tradition. It
places itself against all the techniques of the colonization and invasion of
historiography by the various enlightenment and post-enlightenment
philosophies of history: ones of 'teleologization', totalization, synthesis,
reconciliation, and promise.
The other side of the genealogical warning is less well established and less
well.heeded. The effects ofthis deafness have not passed without notice by
\. the pa:n-sans of those philosophies that ge?ealogy so disrupts.
4
It is
,one thing to develop the theme of the history of i"egnDes of truth, and hence
I to put into question all values. It is quite another to claim to find the foun
\ dation of all truths in power relations or to uncover the ignoble and base
J
.I'l gt:tICUtlJI!J' VJ J'Jr;. SVVLtU,. ..... u .. VJ I'''--'"J
origin of all values. It makes little sense to tum genealogy into the very
opposite ofthe philosophical uses ofhistory it opposes, to apply a transcendent
concept that vitiates all that is intelligible and thus to proclaim a revaluation of
all values.
Genealogy aims at the construction of intelligible trajectories of events,
discourses, and practices with neither a determinative source nor an unfolding
5
toward finality. As such, it is itself a technique employed by the 'history ofthe
present'.b This should be understood not in the sense of writing history
backwards from the perspective ofpresent-day knowledge, beliefs, or values.
The concerns of the present do give such a history its pertinence. However
this history deliberately and carefully rejects the present, its givenness, its
characteristic features or types ofidentity, as a necessary endpoint or outcome
ofthe trajectories it seeks to chart.
A key aspect of the method, that may distinguish it from the tendencies of
contemporary historians, concerns events.1t invokes a technique described as
the definition and attempted understanding of an event or
The delineation of the event, which of course does
not resemble the great events formerly beloved of historians such as w:frs,
revolutions, and the rise and fall of tyrants and princes, serves as a marker (or
transition, and a means by which self-evidence about the nature of present
social arrangements may be breached. Such an approach lends itself to a
multiplication of causes, a concern for complex conditions ofemergence and
existence, and seeks a progressive, necessarily incomplete understanding of
aspects of the past rather than a reconstruction of a social totality. This
methodology proceeds, then, by case-histories or case-studies. These replace
conventional historiographic criteria of exhaustiveness with those of intelli
gtbility, and are always open to revision and extension.8
In sum, 'eventalization' defines a method that uses the delineation of an
event to pose questions of continuity, rupture and transition, rather than to
construe events as manifestations or expressions ofthe structural principles or
processes that govern a particular concrete society. It defines a method that
seeks to punctuate taken-for-granted determinative logics of conventional
social theory with the identification of singular assemblages of social and
institutional practices and forms of knowledge and discourse, to analyse these
into the elements from which they are composed, and to construct the specific
processes offormation ofthose elements.
In our case, the event is that of pauperism. As Karl Polanyi wrote: 'The
figure of the pauper, almost forgotten since, dominated a discussion the
imprint of which Was as powerful as that of the most spectacular events in
history.9 This event is, to be sure, fairly low in the calendar of significant
OCcurrences for many types of historical and theoretical narratives. Yet, the
more its constituent elements are analysed, and the more the shifting
genealOgies of those elements explored, the more Polanyi's thesis is
vindicated.
This is a genealogy ofliberalgovernance or the liberal mode ofgovernment. The
218 Mitchell Dean
latter tenn may appear somewhat strange. It is not equivalent to the liberal
stale, for governance is a much broader tenn than state, and in principle
includes any relatively calculated practice of the direction of conduct,
10
encompassing but irreducible to political governance, to the government.
Similarly, 'liberal' should not be confused with liberalism. 'Liberal' refers first
of all to a fonn of practice of governance, one which sets itself against older,
paternalistic, hierocratic, fonns of rule, and attempts to specify some limits to
that rule by means of appealing to a personal or private sphere. Here, the tenn
'liberal' coincides, almost exactly, with its use by conservatives in the second
and third decades of the nineteenth century to describe those of advanced
Whiggish or Radical viewS.
11
The fonnation of this 'Whig-liberalism', or
Radicalism, can be wimessed from the 1790s, but its governmental impact was
greatest from the 1830s.J2
The liberal mode of government. then, is an historically specific ensemble
of discursive, legal, administrative, and institutional practices, which crosses
and seeks to co-ordinate dimensions of the state, philanthropy, households,
and the economy, with the objective of promoting particular fonns of the
conduct of life. Central to the realization of this mode of the government is
how it extends the boundaries of rule by placing limits on the action of the
state. Such limits are specified not foremost by a domain of inviolable rights of
the person but by a division of responsibility for subsistence between
categories of individual actors, the state, and other authorities.
The terrain investigated is thus not the classical one explored by socialism
and radical democracy, of the contradiction between the formal rights, justice,
and equality of the liberal state and the substantive relations of inequality and
exploitation. Rather it is the complex and subde interweavings of universalist
discourses, theories; and utopias, and the practical logics of governance,
administration, and programmes of rule. In all of this, the central theme is less
one of universal rights and freedoms and more one of particular responsi
bilities and dependences.
The general thesis here is that the history of the treatment of poverty, and,
by implication, what we call welfare or social policy, cannot properly be
understood within a history of ideologies, within the evolution of morality, or
even within an economic history. It must be understood, above all, in tenns of
governance and the 'forms oflife' which are promoted by it, the latter bringing
13
us close to Weber's concern for the rational 'conduct of life' (Lebensfohru
n
lb
The study sought a history of poverty, then, not as one of guilt, conscience,
public opinion, and social refonn, but as one of the mechanisms of rule, the
fonns and uses of knowledge, and the ethics of the conduct of life. The
problems of poverty, in many ways paradigmatic of those of welfare and social
policy, must be understood in relation to issues of morality and economy, to be
sure, but their constituent domain is one of governance.
The outcome of such an investigation would include a new schema for
grasping transfonnation in modes of government. and an unexpected
discovery. That discovery was that a new object of knowledge and field of
A genealogy ofthe government ofpoverty 219
governance was being constituted within the diverse processes of fonnation of
a liberal mode of government, one distinct from the fixed position occupied by
earlier notions of ' the Poor', that of poverty itself.
The discourse ofthe Poor
But this has taken it too far already. It is not possible to understand the
significance of this event, or the liberal mode of government it announces, or
even this constitution of poverty, without, first, making intelligible the field
that was displaced by all of this. But ifit is practically impossible to understand
this latter field in its oum terms, we can seek to grasp it by means ofits own tenns,
of how such terms operate in concert, not in tenns of that which displaced it.
This is not because these terms exhaust the intelligibility of an assemblage of
governmental practices, but because they fonn a language that is elaborated
on the basis of such practices and that allows such practices to o p e r ~ t e .
Governmental practices inhabit, pass through, transfonn, conserve, or esqpe
the terrain sketched by that language. The language maps the possibility of an
assemblage of heterogeneous elements from within, without ever being
co-extensive with this assemblage.
This anti-anachronistic move has not been the rule among historians.
When confronted with the problem of understanding the discourses, values,
beliefs, relief practices, techniques of administration, etc., of the poor in this
'early modem' or 'mercantilist' period, say from the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries, certain historians have been liable to the effects of what French
historians of science have calJed 'recurrence', i.e. the practice of employing
the present state of knowledge as providing a set of nonns that act as lelos
through which one can filter earlier concepts, beliefs, modes of knowing, and
forms of discourse.
14
The primary effect is to establish the normative standards of the present
state of the social sciences and their antecedents as a means of characterizing
and, less explicitly, judging particular groups of statements or discourses. In
one version, the acceptance of these nonns as a filtering framework for a
history of ideas is disabling in that it is only those discourses that exhibit such
norms that can be given a positive characterization. Those discourses that do
not exhibit such norms can therefore only be characterized by what they lack
in relation in them. For example, one otherwise extremely careful historian
argues that because eighteenth-century ideas of poverty lack a 'general
economic analysis', or an 'explicit application of social theory', they are
unsystematic and incoherent. IS To say that something is incoherent may be to
say more' about the inadequacy of the analYSis to reveal its coherence than
about those statements or discourses themselves. In the case of issues of
poverty, this inadequacy can be further disguised by positing an isomorphism
between a supposedly incoherent set of early modem discourses and the
220 Mitchell Dean
localism, ad hoc nature, and lack ofcentral supervision, of the system of poor
reliefitself.
An alternative version is, on the face ont, superior, in that it seeks a positive
characterization of that which is overtaken by the rationality of the social
sciences, in particular, economics. 1lris second form of recurrence does not
characterize discourses by what they lack, but turns them into the polar
opposite of that which is thought to displace them. The unfamiliar can be
reconstructed as the absolute Other ofthe familiar. In this case, the familiar is
the location of poverty as a concept which must be understood in relation to
economic analysis ofthe production and distribution ofscarce resources. The
favoured Other here is morality. From Elie Halevy, R. H. Tawney and Karl
Polanyi, to E. P. Thompson and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a profoundly
16
discontinuist schema along these lines is adopted. To put it bluntly, these
authors all propose that policies and practices concerning the poor, once
conceived within a moral-political framework, come to be thought ofwithin an
economic one. Such a historical schema is typically combined with the
humanist theme of the effective loss of human control over vital matters of
subsistence and the provision of work. Within this schema, moral economy,
paternalism,and the right to subsistence, are displaced by political economy,
the contract, and the laws of market society.
By contrast with both these moves, it is possible to show that, as far as issues
of the administration of the poor is concerned in this period, the pertinent
statements possess an unusually high degree of systematicity, such that they
constitute a 'discursive formation', Le. a regular system of dispersion of
statements.l7 The key to understanding this discursive formation is not its
absolute otherness to an emergent economic rationality, but the very 'regime
of practices' concerning the poor in which it is embedded. This regime
includes diverse practices of relief, confinement, philanthropy, make-work,
punishment, arrest, transportation, and so on.
Despite this, it is helpful to begin with the form ofdiscourse. It can be called
the discourse of the Poor. The architectonics of this discourse can be
constructed through its 'governing statement': 'Who are the numbers of our
Poor?' or, to make all thing!! explicit, 'Who constitute the numbers of the
nation's Poor?,18 The notion of the numbers of the Poor should be stressed.
'Numbers' isa central term here because it links the address on the Poor to
concerns about populousness, itself an index or sign ofthe prosperity, military
strength and comparative greatness of nations. There are three categories on
which possible answers can be based, and only three (the reasons for this
become clear presently). They are the 'industrious Poor', the 'idle Poor', and
the 'impotent Poor' _ those who will labour , those who won't labour, and those
who cannot labour. Hence Daniel Defoe railed: "Tis the Men that 1VIJn 't 1V/J1't,
not the men that C4n get no 1V/J1'k, which makes up' the number of the Poor.'19
This is but one answer to the question that is the governing statement, not
necessarily the most common.
The discourse of the Poor is a practical form of knowledge (a so
A gazea/ogy ofthe governmazt ofpoverty 221
that each of the possible answers are linked to a prescription: the idle are to be
restrained and then set to work, the industrious are to be encouraged in their
exertions and provided with wQrk, and the impotent relieved. Thus we can cite
two examples provided by Eden at the end of the eighteenth century.21 First,
Dunning in 1685 defined the duties ofthe parishes to provide 'work for those
that will labour , punishment for those that ""ill not, and bread for those that
cannot'. Similarly the jurist, Bum, in his History ofthe Poor of 1764 described
the classes ofthe Poor and the objective oftheir respective types oflegislation
as: servants, labourers, and artificers, for whom employment should be
provided; rogues and vagabonds, who are to be encouraged to labour; and the
impotent, who are to be objects ofmaintenance.
This discourse ofthe Poor must be made intelligible, however, as a practical
form ofknowledge that unites different orders ofdiscourse, principally forms
ofknowledge such as political oeconomy - \\ith its 'distributional' problematic
of the wise administration of the state by the sovereign, its circulatory
conception of wealth, and its patriarchalist, householding conception of
'oeconomy' - "ith the aims of what Weber called 'national mercantilistn',
which sought, among other things, to harness the numbers of the Poor to \he
wealth, strength, and greatness ofthe nation.
22
The key means ofthinking this
link was not so much population, in the modem, i.e. post-Malthusian, sense,
but the 'populousness' ofthe nation.
Political oeconomy and political arithmetic, from William Petty to Adam
Smith, relies on an identification ofpopulousness and the wealth of nations.
This in part stems from the householding or stewardship conception of
'oeconomy,23 and the circulatory metaphor of wealth. The augmentation of
population was a result of the 'wise administration' of the state, and the
numbers of people themselves were a sign of the wealth and greatness of the
nation. By increasing the numbers of people, one could increase the
circulation of money and goods in trade, and thus augment the national
treasury. Hence one finds the repeated insistence throughout the literature of
this period that 'the people are the riches and strength of the country', as
Bamon put it in 1690, a position held by Thomas Mun in 1664, by John
Bellers in 1669, and by Henry Fielding in the middle of the eighteenth
century.H Hume's essay on the populousness of ancient, as compared to
modem, nations, might also be cited.
25
So too might Adam Smith's Wealth of
Natwns, in which we find the following: 'Whatever encourages the progress of
population and improvement, encourages that of real wealth and greatness'. 26
The discourse of the Poor, which stands in a position of interchange
between such propositions and the practical problems ofthe governance ofth e
Poor, is led to qualify this statement. One could cite the influential early
advocates of workhouses, such as ChiefJustice Matthew Hale, and Josiah
Child, Chairman ofthe East India Company, Qr those who opposed all fonns
of make-work, even Defoe, to the effect that 'for want of due regulation of
things, the more populous we are, the Poorer we are; so that, that wherein the
Strength and Wealth of a Kingdom consists, renders us the weaker and the
222 Mitchell Dean
poorer'.2' This 'due regulation of things' entails that the numbers of the
population, the greatest of whom are the Poor, are harnessed to the goals of
the strength and wealth of the nation. The practical way to do this is to 'set
the Poor to work', and, thus, to transform the idle Poor into the industrious
Poor. This can be done in two major ways: the provision of employment with
or without confinement. The former is exemplified by the poor law's pro
visions for the raising offunds to establish a parish stock (of flax, hemp, etc.)
for the Poor to work on, perhaps even in their homes. The latter is done
primarily by the workhouse, which would establish a patriarchal form of
governance which resembled, and thereby increased, the number of the
nation's industrious households, and replicated the patriarchalist order of
the state itself.
23
The workhouse would place its inhabitants in a 'regular course of life'
within relations of patriarchal discipline, instruct the young, provide for the
sick, and prevent idleness, beggary, and disorderliness.
29
It did resemble the
manufactory, and has a place in the genealogy of nineteenth-century manu
factures, but its function and conception was entirely different. It housed
forced _ not 'formally free' -labour, and most definitely was not an insti
tution for expropriating surplus value. The highest ambition of the pro
ponents of the workhouse was not the production of profits, but the
rendering of the greatest numbers of the Poor self-subsistent, and thus no
longer a drain on national resources.
30
Despite the fact that the workhouse
will fail in this, its most elementary function, and in its other goals, its root
edness in the 'governmental rationality' of national mercantilism will ensure
that it was not easily abandoned.
31
Needless to say, this rationality is not one
ofWeberian 'rational capitalism'.
But there is another problem contained in the paradox which was con
fronted by the discourse of the Poor, that of the conversion of the indus
trious into the idle, by what Defoe called the 'taint of slothfulness' or Locke
'the relaxation of discipline and corruption of morals', or, if we were to
32
identify a less lofty target, by the mechanism of the alehouse. Here the
problem is the idleness that is ingrained in the habits and customs of the
Poor. The strategies to combat this are legion: anti-recreational campaigns,
that include tactics such as withholding fairground .licences, the 'vagrant
ization' of performers, and the withdrawal of access to commons and wastes
in the name of public security and decency; the campaigns against li
centiousness and slothfulness; the committees for the reform of manners;
and the regularization of the working week and routinization of the working
day.33 But the most favoured strategy is a simple one, and rests on the prin
ciple of the utility oflow wages (or high prices}.34 The doctrine oflow wages
as a spur to industry did not receive universal assent - Adam Smith is one
notable exception in favouring a 'liberal reward for labour', but his work is
exceptional in many ways - but it inspired many political techniques. These
included the use of public granaries to withhold plentiful grain and excises
on foodstuffs, and many measures to increase population and the supply of
A genealogy ofthe gQVe17lmenl ofpoverty 223
labour, such as allowances for large families, the relaxation ofimmigration and
naturalization laws, and even religious toleration.
JS
To summarize, the terrain upon which matters of the administration and
relief of the Poor were discussed and debated in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries possessed an unusual degree of systematicity which
allows us to talk of a singular discursive formation, the discourse of the Poor.
The coherence of this discourse of the Poor, moreover, can be approached
through the statement, 'who make up the numbers ofthe nation's Poor?' The
possible responses to this statement indicate the threefold system of
classification of the Poor. This classification can only be understood in terms
of a distinctive form of governance. It is the characterization of the latter to
which we now turn.
The police ofthe Poor
How should we characterize this mode ofgovernment, in which this discJurse
of the Poor was inscribed, and which grants that discourse its intelligibility?
The solution to this is starting perhaps, not the least because it invokes a term
with a vast literature on continental Europe and well-known to the Scots but
only rarely found among the English until the end of the eighteenth century,
that ofpolice. The exclamation ofone French visitor to London in 1720 should
suffice to make this plain: 'Good Lord! How can one expect Order among
these People, who have not such a Word as Police in their Language.'36 To
speak ofa police ofthe Poor in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England
may seem a reckless move, one that risks transgressing the careful use of
historical sources characteristic of genealogy.
The use of the term 'police' to describe the governance of the Poor does
need to be argued fOf, but first we must be clear about what we are arguing
against. What is rejected is an account that views the treatment of the Poor as
fundamentally a matter of moral concern. It is, above all else, a matter of
governance, i.e. the way in which the life-conduct of specified categories of
actor are directed. The term 'police' is used here to circumscribe a very broad
form ofthat governance. The following will demonstrate tha t there are ethical
considerations within this governance, and definite relations with the
trajectories of religious ethics, but there is no 'moral economy' ofthe Poor, no
'foundationalist' morality that regulates the relation between the rich and the
Poor.
37
E. P. Thompson's popular schema cannot be applied in this context
it illuminates elements within the government ofthe Poor but does not grasp it
as an intelligible ensemble of relations.
It would be also mistaken to invoke a Weberian interpretation. This would
argue that the governance ofthe Poor of 'national mercantilism' after the Civil
War (as opposed to the 'royal of the Stuarts) represents the
application of the social and ethical consciousness of Protestantism and its
new valorization of labour to the Poor.38 This would be evidenced by the
224 Mitchell Dean
condemnation of begging, indiscriminate almsgiving, and even the Poor
themselves, by the Puritans. The thesis is, first, anachronistic in that it
assumes that the governance ofthe Poor can be understood as a feature ofan
early or proto-capitalist state. Second, it ignores .the fact thai the problem of
idleness and aim of 'setting the Poor to work' was a European-wide
phenomena, as were workhouses, and not simply the preserve of Protestant
countries. Finally, it disregards the centuries-long trajectory of the sup
pression ofmendicancy and the attempts to regulate the various classes ofthe
Poor. The furthest we can go with Weber in this regard is to say that the
trajectory was perhaps intensified by Puritanism.
If one looks for an immanent characterization of this long trajectory,
particularly in continental Europe, one does not find it in religion, morality, or
ethics, but in the complex genealogy ofpolice. Ofcourse, it must be said that
the archaic sense of the term is quite different from its more familiar
namesake, where today it is identified with a body of officers, a police force,
whose rationale is the prevention and detection of crime, or 'keeping the
peace'. In fact, this archaic police is not an institution or a technique, but a
condition to be achieved - good police being akin to the good order of a
community - and the regulations by which this condition is attained.
From the end ofthe Middle Ages, this police encompassed a wide range of
concerns. It started with 'sumptuary' problems of the blurring of distinctions
between estates, the wearing of extravagant clothing, the appropriate
behaviour at church or during festivals, the performance of trades and
occupations, and the behaviour of servants and journeymen towards their
masters.
39
Later were added concerns over monopolies, unseemly vendors,
weights and measures, usury, extravagance in all areas, fires, public buildings,
and streets. Police had, at least in continental Europe, a municipal focus, but
despite that, it knew few limits, especially those of a private sphere, and
extended to matters, morals, and the minutiae of everyday life. Adam Smith
may have defined police as a matter of 'the inferior parts of government', ie.
concerned with local oeconomy, but Catherine the Great's Instructions in 1768
included a police ofpublic decency and morality.40
The agencies ofpolice are diverse: in the later medieval period, the multiple
sources of police regulation included 'municipalities, guilds, charities,
principalities, ecclesiastical and seigneurial authorities as much as from royal
command' YThe emergence ofthe sovereign state saw not simply a take-over
of police prerogatives exercised by the estates, but the concentration of some
police functions and a sublimation ofothers onto an emergent private sphere
around issues of social morality. The result of this is that police had slowly
become identified with the distinctive political sphere, the sovereign state, and
the estates became depoliticized. This is how police became linked to the
pervasive Enlightenment calls for an effective, clear, and simple body of
sovereign-made This too is how it is possible to understand the
definition of police given by Von Justi at the end ofthis long evolution as 'the
enlargement ofthe internal power and strength of the state'. 43
A genealogy o/thegovernment ofpoverlJ' 225
Thus the term takes on many different connotations in the context of the
devolution of authority from local to regional and central state structures,
particularly in German regions, from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth
century, where finally it is constituted as a science of police (Polizeil/Jissen
schaji), a science concerned with the objectives of the state and the form of
state activity. In the context of this long devolution, one could distinguish
between two general phases or aspects of police, a 'conservative' and a
'biopolitical' one.+! The former concerns the re-forming of feudal relations
and codes, and aims at the conservation of a society of orders and estates
(Standegesellschaji).45 The notion of 'biopolitics', on the other hand, was
advanced by Foucault to address the development of a concern with the
conduct and conditions oflife of both the human individual and the species
which has pervaded European political thought and practice since the
seventeenth century.46 An early, if now primitive, form, of this biopolitics was
the mercantilist problematic of governance as that of the utilization and
fostering of the population to augment national wealth, power, and sec1rity.
This problematic was perhaps most clearly evidenced in the emergence of
census-taking and the extraordinary secrecy and sensitivity surrounWng
census data in this period.
47
Many instances of a police of the Poor can be found in the vast continental
literature ofpolice. A few examples only need be cited: a regulation ofbeggars
(Bettleordung) among the medieval police regulations of Nuremburg; the
parliament ofNormandy's police ofthe Poor (police des pauvres) of 1521, which
led to Rouen's office of the Poor (bureau des pauvres) of 1534; two
sixteenth-century French pamphlets on the police of the Poor and of
almSgiving, La police des pauvres de Paris of 1544 and La police de I'amonse de
Lyon of 1530; the sections relating to begging and almsgiving in .the police
ordinance of 1628 for the free imperial city ofStrasbourg; the detailed police
ofthe Poor in Catherine's Instructions ofl768; and the separate chapter on the
Poor in Duchesne's 1757 Code de la Police.
48
In England, however, there was a police ofthe Poor for all this period, but
there was no, or very little, use of the term 'police'. The absence ofa notion of
police may be due to the comparatively early development of its central state
and the effective securing of police functions by local agents, above aU, the
justices of the peace.
49
This meant that what in German and French regions
were called police regulations were in England issued from the fourteenth
century as laws and statutes, and that they were issued in the knowledge that
there existed local agents for their enforcement. From the Statute of
Labourers of 1350 to the long list of Vagrancy Acts, the central state issued
statutes of a conservative police nature, and invariably the justices would be
their agents. The latter had powers to 'keep the peace' - to arrest, commit to
gaol, demand good behaviour sureties, and to exercise powers of summary
conviction (after 1388), and try crimes in quarter sessions. They were
given the power to compel labourers to work at statutory rates under the
Statute ofLabourers of1350, and to intervene in master-servant relations in
226 Mitchell Dean
textile manufactures under laws of 1467. In 1601 the Poor Law and its
immediate agents, the o.verseers of the Poor, were placed under the justices'
charge, and the settlement laws after 1662 empowered them to issue warrants
for the removal of paupers.50 With such an early co-ordination of central and
local agencies and powers, there was, one might say, little need for a reflection
on the means ofsecuring police. Those means were well established.
Despite this absence, the Tudor poor and vagrancy laws can best be
understood as the first central state application of a concerted strategy for the
police of the Poor, and they are descended from and resemble the municipal
police regulations in their aims, as well as methods. To set the Poor to work, to
relieve the sick, to educate the young, to suppress beggary and vagabondage
these objectives of the English centralized system are the hallmarks of the
local system of police applied to the Poor throughout Europe in early modem
times. But what is gained by the use of this term, police, is not simply the
placement of the English poor laws in the context of comparative state
formation. What is more important is that the term provides a means for
understanding the characteristic themes, preoccupations and techniques of
the governance of the Poor in the period. To illustrate this we might focus on
the practice of confinement, and Foucault's thesis that 'the house of
confinement constitutes the densest symbol ofthat "police" which conceived
itselfas the civil equivalent of religion for the edification ofthe perfect city'. 51
The emphasis on confinement continues the conservative dimension of
police, not because it returns the body politic to its original shape but because
it seeks to arrest disturbances to that body. Having immobilized the agents or
symptoms of this disorder, it does not return them to their 'proper places' (of
work, obedience, and residence) but attempts to duplicate an ideal political
familial order within the walls of the workhouse. Confinement can be placed
in a long series of tactics in which the political ideal is held to be a happily
settled and properly ordered kingdom or city, and in which the movements of
persons without proper station or place ofresidence represent multiple sites of
disorder, upheaval, and crime.
Yet the workhouse is more than merely another instrument in the long
. battle that had taken place against vagrancy. Its widespread use has profound
links with the biopolitical aims of mercantilist practices and technologies of
governance, and the representation of the nation within the distributional
framework of political oeconomy. The workhouse may well aim to herd the
vagrant micro-populations (the 'rogues, sturdy beggars, and vagabonds') off
the streets and highways, but it also attempts to enhance the process of
circulation by augmenting the numbers of trading households of the nation.
The suppression ofvagrancy combined three distinct actions: the arrest ofthe
mobile population, typified by the putting ofvagrants in stocks; the recording
of them within hierarchical relations by brandings and other inscriptions on
the body; and the reinsertion of the idle within the political order by
transporting them to their 'proper' place, usually of birth or residence. The
workhouse, by contrast, manages to combine these in a single action. It is able
A genealol5J1 oJ the guvernmenl oJ puuwy ..~ ,
to demobilize the idle, recode their status, and reinsert them, within a new
economy of governance which also aims to contribute to the wealth of the
nation by placing the (formerly) idle within a replica of the patriarchal
household. The mercantilist workhouse does not operate according to a
nostalgic vision of the proper status and residence ofthe Poor in a hierarchical
political order but by the educative and disciplinary functions of a certain
'course of life', formed under patriarchal authority and organized around
labour, which is necessary to the fulfilment ofnewly formulated national goals.
The ethical valuation of labour underlying this institutional form may have
been utopian, but it was clearly rooted in everyday mercantilist concerns wi th
increaSing the numbers of the trading households in the nation, and
converting the idle into the industrious Poor.
Several concluding points should be made with respect to this police ofthe
Poor.52 First, this mercantilist police was neither the reformatory police ofthe
period of the decline of feudal relations or of the order of estates, nor the
preventive police force of the liberal mode of government, although it shares
with both the problem of securing the good order of the state. WherF the
earliest police concerned the conservation and re-formation of relatiops of
servitude, obedience, and custom, its successor began to formulate\new
biopolitical objectives of establishing and maintaining national power and
prosperity through the wise administration ofthe population.
Second, while certainly the densest instrument ofthis mercantilist police, it
should be remembered that the workhouse formed only one node within a
network of techniques and strategies (described in the previous section)
projected onto the labouring population to promote work-discipline by
increasing the motivation for a continuous and regular course oflabour. The
workhouse should be regarded, then, as more the emblem of this police than
, its essential or representative element.
Third, this form of police had many features which can be described as
non-capitalist, including the forms of labour it exhorted and compelled the
Poor to do, and its notions of profitability. This should not preclude us from
regarding these great strategies offormation ofthe population as among those
resources which would be drawn upon - and turned to different ends - as
conditions of capitalist social and property relations and the liberal revolution
in government which sought to secure them.
Fourth, this police ofthe Poor does make a fundamental contribution to the
trajectory ofwhat would later be called social policy by constituting the Poor as
an object of observation, comparison, and information collection. Through
such a process it begins to assess the modes of life of labourers and poor
families in terms of the benefits or burdens they represent to the cause of
national welfare. To do this is already to take tentative steps in the direction of
the delineation of a domain of personal conduct and familial and self
responsibility as crucial in the consideration of poor policy, and toward a
redefinition ofthe relationship between state and patriarchy.
It must be said in conclusion, however, this same framework which sought
228 Mitchell Dean
to usefully employ the Poor to link them to national goals meant that the Poor
could never be abandoned to the vagaries of the labour-market.
53
The
post-Tudor poor police could distinguish between different categories of
Poor and different behaviours, customs, and habits of the Poor that were
beneficial or detrimental to national goals. It could not rescind, however,
either the desire to render the Poor useful to the nation or the implication that
it was the duty of the rich, articulated through the national and local arms of
the state, to see to it that the Poor were made to work and live within
patriarchalist relations.
It would be a mistake, nevertheless, to view, in this ensemble of discourse,
law, and administrative practice, the recognition of a right to subsistence or a
right to work, or the evidence of a primitive form of state socialism or a moral
economy of rich and poor. Such an impression is given only retrospectively
from the vantage-point of the liberal mode of government which would
displace this police ofthe Poor. We shall now attempt to state the conditions of
the liberal transformation of the police, and so to specify the nature of the
transition concerned.
The liberal break
At the end ofthe eighteenth century this discourse and governance ofthe Poor
was in disarray, and within less than half a century a fully formed new mode of
government would have displaced it completely. Why? This is a difficult, ifnot
impOSSible, question, one that is relatively fruitless, or at least, one that would
lead to the repetition of the answers as found in classical social theory (e.g. the
rationalization of poor relief according to the requirements of capital
accumulation). In anycase, the genealogical emphasis is on how, rather than
why. If 'why' refers to a general causal explanation which effaces careful and
meticulous analysis, 'how' poses the challenge of establishing a coherence out
of that detail. The principal strategy, here, is not to work retrospectively from
current practices, discourses and beliefs in order to turn the unfamiliar into
the familiar precursors of present social arrangements. Rather, to attain an
understanding which respects unfamiliarity and particularity, genealogy
works prospectively. In the present case, the classical liberal mode of
government of poverty is not rendered intelligible from the viewpoint of
current social policies and practices (the welfare state and its decline) but from
the viewpoint ofwhat it displaces. Our approach thus begins by following each
of the diverse threads of this police of the Poor as that great tapestry of
governance unravels.
To begin, some background. The considerable fear of Jacobinism and
insurrection among the peasantry on the part of their masters should without
doubt be mentioned. So too should the agrarian scarcities of the eighteenth
century, that had taken their toll on the capacity of poor relief to provide
subsistence. Indeed, the final decade was one of particularly harsh and
repeated rural distress, near famine, and intermittent but regular revolt. But
these factors alone would not account for the transformation of the
governance of the Poor. There had been a history of agrarian revolt
throughout the eighteenth century, but it is only in the final decades that the
whole ensemble of poor police was called into question. In order to make
intelligible the transformation, it is necessary to look very closely at the charges
levelled at the old system. Here, one discovers that this system of poor relief
was subject to a threefold problematization in the second half of the
eighteenth century: the pervasive disenchantment with the workhouse and the
goal of setting the Poor to work; the emergence of contributory alternatives;
and the example ofphilanthropy.
The workhouse comes to be criticized by Jonas Hanway and others as a
costly scourge, breeding physical and moral disease and degeneration, and a
source of epidemics, rather than an institution of profitable employment and
the suppression of beggary and vagrancy. 54 It is effectively abandoned as an
instrument for the able-bodied Poor in Gilbert's Act of 1782 which enabled
the union of parishes for the purposes of encouraging outdoor relief to the
able-bodied and reforming workhouses to provide humane treatment fof the
aged, sick, and children.
55
t
Co-terminous with this, insurance and annuity schemes, together with'the
friendly societies of the labourers themselves, begin to provide alternatives to
the poor law and establish the principle of present self-provision for the
f future. 56 If the disenchantment with the workhouse confounded the solu tion
j
for those able to work, the principle ofthese 'contributory alternatives' put the
1
legitimacy of relief to the sick and aged on the agenda for the first time.
But most important is the third element of this problematization, one
occasioned by the example of philanthropy in the eighteenth century which,
through subscriptions, had established charity schools, hospitals, almshouses,
and benevolent societies. 57 This philanthropy was able to represent itself in
terms of an alternative system of moral relations to that of the poor law. Its
advocates argued that philanthropy, due to its voluntary nature, inculcated
relations of kindness, respect, benevolence, and gratitude, between the
various ranks of society, while the poor law, as a result ofits compulsion, only
destroyed the benevolence of the rich and the gratitude and respect of the
poor. As Eden argued in 1797 the ultimate consequence oflegal provision was
to remove the 'emulative spirit of exertion', and encourage debauchery by
allowing mothers to throw their unwanted children upon the parish.
58
Indeed,
Thomas Alcock had already made the point in 1752 that 'the very law which
provides for the Poor, makes Poor'.s9
Is this, then, the elusive moral economy, one might ask, which underlay the
rights and obligations ofthe rich and the Poor? It is true that from the second
half of the eighteenth century arguments about the poor law begin to be
constructed in terms of a foundationalist morality, i.e. a system of thought
which presupposes specific moral relations between the parties to society as
the primary criteria for the evaluation of legal, political, and administrative
230 Mitchell Dean
practices. However, a foundationalist morality, and its corollary of a right of
subsistence, are first invoked to contest, not to uphold, the legitimacy of the
poor law, to pronounce favourably on the merits of voluntary charity over
those of poor relief, and to deny the existence of such a right. Only when the
poor law is under sustained attack toward the end of the eighteenth century, is
a right of subsistence derived from moral philosophy asserted. Only with the
arguments of R. Woodward, Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, in 1768, William
Paley in 1786, Ruggles in 1793 and Sherer in 1797, do we find a justification
ofthe poor law in a moral philosophy which held that the right to relief was a
corollary to the right to property.60
In the writings of the divines. in the second half of the eighteenth century,
and in those of Coleridge and Southey in the early nineteenth century, there
are the constituents of a moral economy of poor relief. However, this moral
economy did not form the grounds on which poor relief was legitimated and
evaluated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As we have seen, the
problem ofpoor relief and administration did presuppose patriarchalist moral
relations between rich and Poor and moral judgements were involved in the
categorizatiol1 of the Poor. However, such moral relations and judgements
were not foundational but subordinate to the problem of the wise adminis
tration of the Poor in the interest of national goals, that is, to the requisites of
mercantilist police.
It is only with the breakdown of this police toward the latter part of the
eighteenth century that poor relief becomes the object of moral legitimation
and contestation. It is only after these three fundamental breaches in the old
system had been made that critics and defenders ofthe poor laws began to cast
their arguments in terms of the moral foundations of relief. It is only in the
debate over the comparative effects of forms of relief, of 'voluntary charity'
and 'compulsory legal provision', that anything resembling a 'moral economy'
first arose. We might wish to say that the question of morality and poor relief
becomes independent offrameworks ofgovernance for the first time in several
hundred years and is thus potentially foundational. But we should also say that
such a moral economy of poor relief is never established, and that a new
dependency of moral issues will soon be established.
This point is emphasized here not because ofan antiquarian wish to contest
the fine details of historical interpretation. It is not made simply because the
notion of a 'moral economy' does not establish a sufficiently coherent
framework for understanding the post-Tudor system of poor relief and
treatment. The significance of this point is that to interpret the administration
of the Poor in terms of a 'moral economy', even as a 'traditional platonic
ideal',61 draws attention away from the secular trajectory ofgovernance and its
worldly goals, in which morality plays an importam but not founding role, as
the framework for understanding practices and discourses on poverty.
Moreover, to cling to a notion of moral economy would be to conceal the
particular configuration of economy and morality that is constituted by the
liberal transformation of this police, and that has provided the twin axes of
A genealogy ofthe govenzment ofpoverty 231
discussion of poverty over the last two centuries. It is difficult to overestimate
how important is this little dispute over historical interpretation in our grasp of
present-day realities.
But which of the threads of this classical form of governance should be
followed as they unravel? The methodological option was not to follow what
today, retrospectively, is considered important, but to follow the descent of
those dimensions which were constitutive of the older form of governance:
population oeconomy, the Poor, and police. The first three will now be
addressed separately. The transformation of police will be addressed in a
concluding section which focuses on some of the principal lines of practice,
administration, and knowledge, which make up the new, liberal mode of
government of poverty, and its centre-piece, the reformed poor law.
a) Population
It is no accident that the first discursive transformation wrought by ~ e
collapse of the Tudor system of police concerned the notion of populatiOl,).
Population was the means by which political oeconomy had assembled its
object and the discourse of the Poor conceived its practical imperatives.
Malthus's famous first Essay on the Principle ofPopulation of 1798 contained a
fundamental break with earlier conceptions of population, one not hinted at
even by Joseph Townsend in his choleric Dissertation on the Poor Laws of the
previous decade.
62
Pre-Malthusian conceptions of popUlation, those of
Montesquieu, Hume, Wallace, Smith, and Townsend, conceived of the
relations between population and subsistence in the form of an unstable, but
self-adjusting, equilibrium.
63
The most pessimistic of these writers, such as
Townsend, added that hunger and misery were indeed necessary to this
equilibrium. But Malthus radicalized this whole schema by inaugurating the
possibility ofa fundamental disequilibrium at the heart ofthe natural order, an
insurmountable situation of scarcity. In his arithmetic and geometric ratios of
subsistence and popUlation, Malthus had discovered a principle that would
not only disconcert all the dreams of Condorcet, Godwin and the philos
ophers ofperfectibility, but also galvanize the movement ofthe abolition ofthe
poor law, and establish an axiom for the new economic discourse. In doing so
he found a rationale for marriage among the propertyless in the limitation of
state responsibility. Such an understanding of the importance of the
Malthusian intervention into the question of the governance of the poor
cannot be thought within the limitations of the vague and capricious notion of
'influence' .
The policy options for Malthus were a choice from among the various
checks on population, which were resolved, by the second edition of his
famous essay in 1803, into vice and misery, on the one hand, al1d moral
restraint - the deliberate delay of marriage on the part of the adult male after
the calculation of its potential burdens - on the other.
64
The poor laws were
232' Mitchell Dean
bound to expand the misery they sought to eradicate by increasing population
without increasing its means of subsi,stence. If it had been established by the
critics of the poor laws that they disturb the moral (elations of rich and poor,
and create greater numbers of poor, it could now be argued .that this moral
disturbance "''as an abomination of the laws ofnature itself. For Malthus, the
morality of the poor was central but not foundational. Such morality had
become the obedience or transgression of a 'bio-economic' necessity.
Historians have typically questioned the influence of Malthus upon the
poor law and its refonn. The weight of received opinion was on the side of
massive and overwhelming influence.
65
But modern opinion is more mixed,
some ofit tending to deny the influence. For it, Malthus was not influential on
the poor law because it was not abolished, but refonned, and refonn was not in
response to a perceived population problem.
66
The latter part of this view is
simply mistaken, for Malthus did not diagnose an imminent popUlation crisis
in Britain in any ofthe editions ofthe Essay or his writings. The first part is, of
course, quite correct, but it ignores several things that reveal the limitations of
this 'too magical' notion of influence.
67
First, Malthusianism - to divorce the
intervention from the author - did structure the tenns of the philanthropic,
religious, and public debate about poor relief in the decades after its
publication.
68
It occasioned a massive shift in articulate opinion and its
prescriptions were encapsulated in the abolitionism of the 1817 Report ofthe
Select Committee, which, although not acted upon, placed the radical
reorganization ofthe poor laws on the parliamentary agenda for the first time.
By the end of two decades of Malthusian abolitionism, measures had been
introduced to curtail expenditure and restore the independence of the
labouring poor, including restrictions on the justices and small ratepayers in
favour of the largest property owners (the 'Select Vestry Act' of 1819).
Second, the central objectives ofthe post -1834 Poor Law were Malthusian
even if its means were rather less dramatic that total abolition. These
objectives were defined in relation to the establishment of a domain of
'natural' economic responsibility around the category of the male bread
winner. This was the express aim of the 1834 Poor Law Report and the effect of
the refonned law, as Karel Williams has shown. 69 The objective ofMalthusian
abolitionism was to remove the barriers to the operation ofa man's economic
responsibility for his children and their mother as a natural condition, and
thus to establish an absolute limitation of the responsibility of the state. The
refonned post -1834 poor law operated effectively to exclude able-bodied men
from relief, and to offer relief to those construed as their dependants, i.e. their
wives, whether they lived with them or not, the mothers oftheir children, and
their children, only within the deterrent, 'less-eligible' institution of the
workhouse.
Karel Williams's ground-breaking analysis of the official statistics on relief
before and after the 1834 reforms shows that 'in the last thirty years of the old
poor law before 1834, able-bodied men were consistently included among the
classes obtaining relief.
70
In direct and dramatic contrast he finds that after
A genealogy ofthe guvernment ofpaverty 233
1834 a 'line of exclusion' was drawn against relief to able-bodied men and
those construed as their natural economic dependants.
71
Malthusianism was a
fonn of discourse which could establish the 'ethical ideal' of a new fonn of
governance ofthe Poor without establishing the means to do it. In this sense, it
may be understood as a governmental rationality in search of a political
technology. It must be remarked that when the latter was found, it would be a
particularly effective one.72
b) Political economy
Malthus's principle ofpopulation is less important for its supposed influence
in the history of ideas, than as a marker of an important transfonnation of not
only a revolution in poor policy but also the possibility of an economic
discourse. Of course these two events are related. But to grasp the link
between the two, it is necessary to distinguish between different forms pf
discourse and their policy prescriptions in the course of this discursite
transformation from which 'the economic' emerged. ,
For political oeconomy, the Poor are among those things which are subject
to the wise administration of the state by the sovereign or statesman. The
discourse of the Poor is a so:vo;r concerned with linking the general propo
sitions ofpolitical oeconomy with the practical problems of the governance of
the Poor. It addresses the Poor as an object to be classified, about which
infonnation can be had, and ultimately, as a terrain to be governed. Poverty
can only perform a limited discursive function in these discourses: it is
possible to talk about the poverty of a nation, Or a city, or even of the Poor
themselves. But it is not possible to make poverty into a concept, or to theorize
about it, or to undertake strategies for its overcoming Or even amelioration. If
wealth is the outcome ofwise administration, poverty is a sign ofthe failure of
policies. It is, however, neither an object of knowledge nor terrain of govern
ance and policy. It is 'the Poor' which fills both these positions, and the Poor is
a static and eternal entity, a pennanent rank within a fixed hierarchy, a
perpetual object of governance by the sovereign or statesman.
Smith's Wealth ofNations introduces a disturbing inflection within political
oeconomy. It autonomizes the sphere of exchange, wrenching it from the
political and legislative framework ofsovereignty. 73 But it does not constitute
an economic discourse, an analysis of the mechanisms of production and
distribution, nOr does it exemplifY the new, 'demoralised political economy',
as Thompson argues. 74 Indeed, it would be more appropriate to apply the term
'moral economy' to Smith than to either his forebears or descendants.
Exchange"becomes a moral sphere, one that co-ordinates the self-interested
activities ofsympathetic individuals. The wealth of nations thus comes to be
thought in terms of the happiness of these individuals, the degree of liberty,
equity and justice they are accorded. In this moral economy, the labouring
Poor make up the greatest numbers, and they face other individuals as equals,
234 Mitchell Dean
as rational owners of labour facing owners of land and capital. As a result,
Smith's major prescriptions toward the labouring Poor are found in his
chapter on wages: the encouragement ofa progressive, rather than stationary,
state of society, one. that provides a 'liberal reward' for labour; the
establishment of a minimum wages rate 'consistent with common humanity';
and 'the improvement of the circumstances of the lower ranks' according to
the principle ofequity.75 The Poor enter into and are transformed by Smith's
moral economy of exchange, not by virtue of a right to subsistence, but as
bearers oflabour and juridicial subjects of the wage-contract.
But it is not Smith's moral economy which establishes the ethical ideal for
the new mode of government. Classical political economy, instanced by
Mathus and Ricardo, is left to do that. Smith annexed the sphere of exchange
from the political framework of political oeconomy, only to tum it into a
morally founded order. Classical political economy connects this sphere of
exchange to different mechanisms, those ofproduction and distribution. It is
often said that what distinguishes this classical political economy is the
bifurcation of labour, at once a commodity like others, but also that which
regulates the value ofall commodities.
76
In the latter sense, labour may ground
the mechanisms analysed by classical political economy. But the constitution
of this new discursive fonn depends on a prior entity not of its own creation,
one that grounds, if one likes, labour itself. In Malthus, it is the fundamental
disequilibrium between population and subsistence which drives labour in a
constant and unremitting, but ultimately, vain attempt to bridge that gap. In
Ricardo, labour is intensified and capital improvements made because the
increase in popUlation means that inferior lands of progressively decreasing
fertility are brought into cultivation. Indeed, the differential fertility of lands
provides the centre-piece ofthe Ricardian theory of distribution, its theory of
rent.77 In both cases, then, it is a natural scarcity, an ontological lack, which
drives the econorruc mechanisms, a scarcity not found in Adamite moral
economy or the old political oeconomy. Where rent had derived from the free
bounty of nature, it now signified nature's paucity.
The name for this lack, this scarcity, this fundamental insufficiency, insofar
as it enters the sphere of humanity, is poverty. The maxim ofillimitable wants
and limited resources places poverty at the heart ofeconomic discourse and its
rationality. Classical political economy - and perhaps all economic discourse
depends on a concept of poverty that it did not produce but without which it
could not exist. Poverty is both that fundamental necessity under which all
humans are placed and the manifestation of that necessity among various and
varying individuals and groups "Within the human population.
c) Poverty
The 'constitution ofpoverty' begins to assume a dual sense: the constitutional
position of the poor in the state, of the 'contract' between the propertyless and
A genealogy oJthe guvernment ojpoverty 235
the nation; and ofthe formation ofpoverty as both an object ofknowledge, and
field of governance. The emergence of a definite concept of poverty,
necessary to both economic discourse and a liberal programme of govern
ment, is dependent upon the transformation of the constitutional position of
the Poor from within the mercantilist order. The appropriation ofthis concept
by economic discourse was, none the less, a selective one. To grasp the
emergence of a definite conception of poverty, it is necessary to make
intelligible its sudden and massive constitution or, even, invention, in the
1790s.
The decade is perhaps a paradoxical one. On the one hand, it displays
legislative paralysis in the face ofthe collapse ofthe older systems ofpolice and
the agrarian Crisis, perhaps as result ofTory reaction againstJacobinism and
the 'profound discredit' into which the Whig opposition had fallen. 78 On the
other, programmes, schemes, histories, and local initiatives of all types
proliferate: the famous practice of the granting of allowances in aid ofwages
(somewhat dubiously identified "With the 'SpeenbamJand' system), the
founding of philanthropic societies (the Society for Bettering and
the Comforts of the Poor), Count Rumford's dietaries (which popularized
soup as appropriate fare for the poor), Arthur Young's policies of allotments
and cow money, Whitbread's failed minimum-wage legislation, Pitt's iIl
drafted and labyrinthine Poor Bill, and, ofcouLse, Bentham's elaborate system
of Pauper Management.
79
lt is among all this activity, its minor successes and
its massive failure, that the invention of poverty can be glimpsed, and a new
compact between the propertyless individual and the state is doubdess forged.
This is an invention without an inventor. Quite simply, the concept of
poverty is a particular condition of individuals and groups (and hence, in
principle, separable from them) that results from the general condition of
humankind, subject as it is to the bio-economic forces of population,
subsistence, and capital. Suddenly, this concept is everywhere, and from all
sides. Classical political economy would develop the latter dimension by
naturalizing this concept ofpoverty and making it necessary to the functiOning
of the economy, but others would dissociate the concept of poverty from its
bearers, and "With strange and dispersed effects.
To cite only the most famous. Edmund Burke in 1795 thunders over the
'political canting language' of the 'labouring poor' because it is 'trifling with
the condition of mankind'; the next year he argues 'it is the COmmon doom of
man ... that he must eat by the sweat of his body, ofthe sweat ofhis mind'.8o
Burke may well be the 'first to interpret political economy as a purely
conservative orthodoxy', as Halevy suggested,8} and to thus argue against
relief to the labouring population, but he is able to do this only after first
dissociating the notion of the poor from that of the labouring popUlation.
Another, more interesting, example is F. M. Eden. 'The only diSciple of
Adam Smith during the eighteenth century that produced any work of
importance' was Marx's verdict.
82
His major work was a meticulous
three-volume history of the labouring population,83 that tries to show, in fact
236 Mitchell Dean
the very opposite to Burke. Eden dissociates the term poor from that of the
labouring population in order to argue that the terms are historically
coincident. The poor are not possible under 'a state of servitude' since they
would always have recourse to their masters for th.eir maintenance; it is only
with the 'introduction of manufactures and the consequent emancipation of
those who were dismissed by their masters' that there appeared a 'new class of
men henceforth described by the Legislature under the denomination of the
Poor'.84 This account was of course already anachronistic for 'the Poor'
formed a domain ofstate administration, and was not equivalent to a new class
ofhistorical subjects. Perhaps it is Eden who inaugurates the social history of
poverty as we know it today, prefiguring the anal)'sis of poverty found in
Marx's genealogy of capitalism in which the 'historical process of divorcing
the producer from the means of production' was 'written in the annals of
mankind in letters ofblood and fire'. 85 Eden gave the term 'the poor' historical
content for the first time not because he had discovered the key to the
legislation and governance of the Poor in former times but because that
governance had already fallen into disarray. What he discovered was not the
intelligibility of the fixed juridical taxonomJ of the Poor but the vista opened
with the collapse ofthat edifice, that ofthe history ofpoverty.
If Burke could dissociate the labourers from the poor and Eden could give
the latter term a particular historical content, it is because the poor, and the
labouring population, were no longer the objects oftaxonomic knowledge and
correct governance. Poverty had become a site of theoretical and historical
argumentation and conceptual elaboration. Malthus himself would immedi
ately lament the lack of what we might think of as a comparative historical
demography ofthe 'manners and customs ofthe lower part ofmankind' .86 Not
only was there thus a 'reversal in the axis of individualization', revealed by
Foucault, but what might be called a reversal of the axis of 'historicization', if
by the latter is meant that the privileged 'subjects' of history are no longer
those whose deeds and greatness are to be commemorated, but those at the
bottom of the social hierarchy, their everyday lives, habits, conditions of
existence and so on.
87
The elaboration of the concept ofpoverty is most sharply instanced not by
the Tory reaction but by the Radicals, principally Patrick Colquhoun, a
magistrate who established both a Chamber of Commerce in Glasgow, and
put the science ofpolice on a new footing, and Bentham himself, especially in
his essays on the poor Jaws with their definitions of poverty and indigence.
Between them, they would establish the axioms and principles of the
techniques ofthe liberal governance ofpoverty, that Edwin Chadwick, Nassau
Senior, James Kay Oater, Kay-Shuttleworth), and other Radicals and
Whig-liberals would adopt, develop, and seek to implement in the first half of
the nineteenth century.
The magistrate from Glasgow is justly famous for linking what might be
called 'a poverty theory of labour' to a 'labour theory of value', and thus
making clear the interdependence ofthe presuppositions ofthe new economic
A geneafogJ' oJ InegIJVt:rmm:", ".I f'V'M 'J
discourse and the administrative conditions for the operation of a national
labour market.
8s
His argument went beyond that of the utility of low wages
characteristic of the eighteenth century in that it established poverty as a
natural condition that is general to the great body of humankind, and
necessary to the production ofwealth and the development of civilization:
Without a large proportion ofpoverty, there could be no riches, since riches
are the offspring of labour, while labour can only result from a state of
poverty. Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual
has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of
subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise ofindustry in the
various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary com
ponent of society without which nations and communities could not exist in
a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since
without poverty there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no
benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth, in as much as without a
large proportion of poverty surplus labour could never be rendered
productive in procuring either the conveniences or luxuries oflife.
89
(
Ifsuch an understanding ofpoverty created the possibility of a conceptiOn
ofpoverty freed from the fixed taxonomic space ofthe Poor, it also opened up
a new taxonomic form of knowledge, one of far greater detail and with a new
object, pauperism. Bentham clearly distinguished between poverty as the state
of having to labour to procure subsistence and pauperism or indigence as 'the
state of him, who, being destitute of property ... is at the same time, either
unable to labour, or unable, evenfor labour, to procure the supply ofwhich he
happens to be in want'. 90 The same distinction would be used in the epochal
1834 PoorLaw Reportto define indigence as the legitimate area ofrelief, and in
the writings of its principal architect, Edwin Chadwick.
91
Such a distinction allows a fundamental kinship between the new economic
logic and administrative rationality. The former presupposes a necessity
binding poverty to labour; the latter targets an entity, pauperism, that is both
cause and effect of the transgression of the laws of that necessity. If nature,
necessity, obedience, poverty, labour, subsistence, and civilization form a
series which embodies the logic of economic liberalism, then anti-nature,
contingency, transgression, pauperism, dependency, idleness, inertia, and
abyss, form the domain of pauper administration. This, indeed, is the exact
language of Bentham's system ofpauper management and it is used in a quite
rigorous way in his unpublished Essays on the PoorLaw of 1796. Ifthe objective
expression of the adherence of moral subjects to bio-economic necessity was
manifest in the act of the exchange of their only property, labour, for
subsistence, then pauperism was a constant (willing or unwilling) trans
gression of the laws under which humankin4 is eternally placed. But it is
crucial to note that it is not labour itself to which pauperism is opposed, but the
self-provision of subsistence afforded by labour. Labour does not possess an
intrinsic moral worth for B e n t h a ~ but is a form of economic activity that
238 Mitchell Dean
pennits self-sufficiency and therefore independence. Pauperism is not the
opposite oflabour, but to the life-conduct ofthe illdependentW,ourer.
Both Bentham and Colquhoun produced Tables of Pauperism of all the
different cases calling for relief, their causes and their modes of relief, that
which Bentham called a 'general Map of Pauper-Land, "'1th all the Rotuls to
it,.92 While poverty is unclassifiable as the general and unalterable state of
humankind, necessary to labour, civilization, and history, the Table of
Pauperism deals with that which is outside the life-conduct of productive
labour, that which falls outside history and threatens its dynamism, that 'which
inertia alone, that force which acts without relaxation, makes the lot of every
mortal gravitate' ,93 The Table seeks to bring an exhaustive order to that region
of the body politic which is shrouded in obscurity and opacity, the abyss of
indigence.
94
Against the chaos ofpauperism, the Table classifies by means ofa
determination of efficient causes, locates each class in respect of labour
capacity, and thereby deduces the mode of relief or prevention necessary.9S
Bentham's 'administrative imagination' reached unparalleled heights with
this new object ofknowledge and field ofgovernance. For him, there was to be
an adequation between knowledge and administrative response both for each
individual case, and between the Table of Pauperism as a whole and the
practice of pauper rnanagement.
96
His panoptic 'industry houses' were not
simply pragmatically designed administrative enclosures. They were to be the
practical equivalent of the knowledge ofpauperism, the manifestation ofsuch
knowledge in concrete fonn. If the Table was to bring to light the manifold
and hidden forms of pauperism, the pauper Panopticons would form a series
of chains across the kingdom, a 'net-work' which would forever remove
91
administrative particularity, dispersion, and disconnection. Within them,
paupers were to be located and grouped according to their work-capacity in
the same manner as they were laid across the Table. Their sequestration
would mirror its closed space. They would be subject to strict modes of
'separation' and 'aggregation' in the same way that each pauper was treated as
a separate case with characteristics that detennine its relations with other
cases. And finally, just as the totality ofcases were spread out across the Table
before the rational subject of knowledge of pauperism, so too, in the house,
paupers were to be subject to the 'censorial' eye oftheir governors, or at least
to its omnipresent possibility, under the principle of central inspection.
Bentham's scheme instances the way in which the governance ofpauperism
could be both an administrative programme, designed to create the conditions
of wage-labour, and hence act as a deterrent to potential paupers, and a
utopia, insofar as the space of pauperism, once demarcated, becomes a field of
the realization of all sorts of projects and dreams.
98
The 'industry houses' are
multi-functional institutions, employing techniques of disciplinary nonnaliz
ation, but also combining elements of the quarantine station, prison, school,
hospital, nursing home, manufactory, and research institute. They are like
menageries for the semi-humanized, hyper-natural, paupers, who are
perhaps closest here to domesticated animals, 'that part of national live stock
/l gCIJ.t.""t.t/Of Vj u.,.. " .... __ .
which has no feathers to it and walks with two legs'.99 They are extraordinary
laboratories, turning the dross of pauperism into the sterling of human
achievement. Bentham's dream not only projected the ambitions of the
classical workhouse onto a utopian scale, employing all the disabled, but also
instituted a finely calibrated 'semiotechnique' of penalties and rewards for
both inmates and governors, encouraged banking, established educational
programmes, and provided health care.
loo
As an instance of its extreme
illiberality, the pauper institutions would also act as sites ofexperimentation in
fields such as medicine, both therapeutic and die tic, mechanics, chemistry,
domestic economy, technical economy, husbandry, meteorology, book
keeping, logic, and in the optimization of sexual relations in regard to
health.
lol
Bentham wrote: 'Fiat lux were the words of the Almighty: Fiat
expmmentum, were the words ofthe highest genius he ever made. 0 chemists:
much have your crucibles shown us ofdead matter; but our industry house is a
crucible for men.'IOZ
Bentham's scheme belongs to a series of programmes of political
management which brought available techniques and institutions into contac.t
with the dystopia, contingency, contagion, and chaos of pauperism. Because
pauperism represented all that was alien, opaque, and obscure in the i d e ~
kingdom, a systematic mode of combating it would have to discover and
represent an ideal of total illumination and clarity. Bentham's utopia is hence
one of complete transparency, visibility, and inspectability. Yet, what is most
significant about Bentham's scheme is that in the course of describing such a
utopia it was able to evince a particular fonn ofadministrative rationality which
was flexible enough to adapt to more concrete situations, while rigorous
enough to establish protocols for the reorganization of the administration of
poor relief.
Despite the elaborate utopian dreams Bentham held for his system of
pauper management, he sought to make it consistent with the principles of a
liberal political economy. We have to go no further than the very principles
enunciated by Smith to understand how Bentham could arrive at his
exceedingly illiberal, authoritarian, and repressive administrative regime,
which would amount to an alternative, fully regulated economy within a wider
state operating under principles of economic liberalism. Bentham, unlike
Smith, recognized one set of circumstances in which it is possible for the
propertyless rationally to choose not to exchange their labour. This excep
tional set ofcircumstances was summed up by him in this statement:
Ifthe condition ofpersons maintained without property Iry the labour ofothers
were rendered more eligible than that of persons maintained by their own
labour then, in proportion as the existence of this state of things were
ascertained, individuals destitute of property would be continually with
drawing themselves from the class of persons maintained by their own
labour, to the class of persons maintained by the labour of others: and the
sort of idleness, which at present is more or less confined to persons of
240 Mitchell Dean
independent fortune, would thus ell.1:end itself sooner or later to every
individual ... till at last there would be nobody left to labour at aU for
anybody.103
The Adamite regard for the labourer as rational subject of exchange
becomes, when poor relief is taken into account, a problem of the relative
eligibility of conditions of labourer and pauper. It is this problem that was to
guide the conditions under which relief could be granted. If relief was to
appear more comfortable, desirable, or suitable than the situation of the
ordinary labourer, then the poor, as rational subjects, wiII choose relief over
labour. If one assumes labour as necessary to the creation of subsistence,
wealth, and civilization, it follows that relief should only be offered under
conditions which preserve the rational preference for labour. This can be
done, argued Bentham, by granting relief to the poor person in such a way that
'public provision should appear less eligible to him than the provision
resulting from his own labour' .104
This principle became the first principle of the reformed administration
after 1834.
105
The new administration represented a return to the workhouse
as a technique ofrelief. This was not because it sought to fulfil the aspirations
which Bentham had inherited and blown up into utopian proportions, but
because it found in this principle ofless eligibility, and the distinction between
poverty and indigence on which it depended, a way of defining the field of its
administration, the objectives of that administration, and a deterrent tech
nique which could achieve them.
In the history of poverty, the names Bentham and Malthus act as inverted
mirror images. On the one side, an administrative utopia, replete with an
advanced practical knowledge and a multiplicity of techniques that in
principle know no limits to implementation. On the other, a governmental
rationality, grounded in theoretical knowledge, with ethical ideals, but which
seeks to abolish the sphere ofstate assistance and administration of the poor.
A totalized governance and an anti-governance, a biopolitical dream and a
bioeconomic necessity, face one another as the dual utopian solutions to
pauperism. Malthusianism and Benthamism could be the two names we give
to the anti-administrative and hyper-administrative dimensions of this new
liberal mode of government of poverty. Yet in the practical sphere of
governance it is Benthamism, precisely because it has the highest quotient of
administrative imagination, that can reconcile the two poles, and make
illiberality consistent with a liberal mode of government.
Bentham's pauper management and Malthus's abolitionism were, of
course, neither completely realized as governmental programmes in that both
were not implemented in any strict sense. The reformed poor law, and the
1834 Report, would draw on many other resources, including the remedies
tried by various poor-law unions in the early decades ofthe nineteenth century
and the eighteenth-century uses of the workhouse. Indeed one could cite a
continuity between the reformed law and the use ofthe workhouse in the early
A genealogy OJ inC.!:IIUC:"" ...". -J r __
eighteenth century as a deterrent institution, which had achieved legislative
endorsement in 1723 (Knatchbull's 'Workhouse Test' Act). But it must be
said that it is the unique assemblage of Benthamism and Malthusianism that
characterizes the poor-law reform and the liberal mode of government of
which it is a pivotal element. And in this both are victors. Benthamism is a
victor in that it announces the triumph of the centralized, professional forms
ofstate administration ofrelief and welfare over localism, parochialism (in an
exact sense), particularity, dispersion, and even abolition. Malthusianism _
and the new economic form of governance, more generally - is the victor in
that it sets both the ethical ideal ofthat mode ofgovernment and the limits to
it, that provided by the category of the 'independent labourer', the self
responsible male breadwinner together with his natural dependants.
Conclusion
It should not be overlooked that this reformed law itself acts in concert with a
wider network of measures, both within the state and outside it, includirtg
those of public health, police, and public education, and the practice bf
philanthropy. In the hands of Colquhoun and Chadwick, for example, the
science and practice of police will take on its modem role of the 'prevention
and detection ofcrimes', as the former put it. 106 'Preventive police', to cite the
title ofChadwick's article in the London Review of 1829, sought to co-ordinate
a series of techniques in a systematic, effective, and economical strategy for
the prevention of crime. These techniques included the use of a vigilant body
ofofficers, its governance by a central board, intelligence agencies, a ministry,
the use ofspies and informers, and the systematization ofrewards. 107
Police might now be thought to be an 'adjacent' set of practices of
government, with its own rationality and technologies, in that the governmeiit
ofthe poor is not among its defining concerns. However, it is striking that one
key, overlapping, rationale remains for this police that is the same as that ofthe
reformed poor law, the fear ofthe moral descent ofpoverty into pauperism. loa
Ifpauper management sought an institutional partition that sealed offpoverty
from pauperism, the new police would attempt to seal off poverty from the
temptations of crime that undermined the life-style of the wage-labourer by
prOviding an alternative, and perhaps more eligible, means of subsistence. In
Bentham's definition ofindigence cited above, the pauper and the criminal are
moraDy equivalent in that they both live off the labour of others. Indeed
Colquhoun produced his table as the 'Table of the Indigent and Criminal
Classes of Great Britain'.I09 The programmes of the new forms of adminis
tration, whether in police, or poor relief, or, for that matter, public health,
would negatively define and seek to promote a form oflife through a signi(ying
chain which linked pauperism, indigence, mendacity, vice, crime, and disease.
The transformation of modes of governance is signalled by the re
arrangement of the relations betWeen economy, polity, and household, and
242 Mitchell Dean
the corresponding conceptual history of terms such as political economy and
police. Indeed, the latter terms appear to change in contrary fashion. On the
one hand, 'oeconomy', as the art and techniques of patriarchalist governance
practised first in a household and then in the state, was displaced by 'the
economy', a quasi-autonomous reality to which political intervention must
submit. On the other, 'police' ceased to be a positive condition of well
administered states, a political reality to be achieved within the state, and
became merely a technique of governmental security. In these moves,
governance is no longer conceived on a familial model, although the family
and household becomes a conduit and site of application of political
programmes.
Police is now but one political technology within the new liberal mode of
government. It is not difficult to find others. One could cite the role ofpublic
health and the delineation of its domain in the work of Chadwick and
sanitarian doctors such as Kay, Arnott, and Southwood Smith. 110 Public
health measures would seek to regulate urban conditions within a preventive
framework much like that of police or poor law reform, one which targets
those conditions, circumstances and behaviours of the labouring poor which
render them indigent.
lI1
Even the miasmatic theory of the aetiology of
epidemics clearly linked contagion to those pauperizing conditions and
behaviours. Epidemics were propagated by a compound, miasma, given off by
decaying animal or vegetable matter and conveyed by a smeU. The conditions
favourable to miasma were the atmospheric impurities created by the
dampness and lack of ventilation of buildings, the effiuvia and refuse which
accumulated in the street and houses, the open sewers, the lack of proper
drainage, the lack ofcleanliness, poor domestic economy, and filthy habits and
ignorance of the poor.
l1l
The professional biographies of doctors, civil servants, and reformers, are
often ones of the linkage between various modalities of knowledge and
techniques of government. Certainly Chadwick is the most weU known. But
James Kay, who would be instrumental in the founding of the Manchester
Statistical Society, combined a career which stands at the intersection of the
'statistical idea' with the 'educational idea' with the 'sanitary idea,.113 At the.
same time, the sphere ofphilanthropy itself was being rewritten in accordance
with the new requisites of government. Philanthropy would be reorganized as
'sacrament of moralising intervention' that would convert the issue of relief
into one of personal economic morality.1H With Thomas Chalmers, for
example, philanthropy would find a complementary moralizing and relieving
role among the labouring population, and begin to delineate the field of
activity that would be undertaken by the Charity Organisation Society among
J1S
London's casual poor in the 1870s.
In concert with this immense activity, the liberal mode of government also
generated much in the field of the organisation of information. One could
mention the vital statistics pioneered by William Farr in the Registrar
General's Department, the Statistical Movement, and the statistical societies
A genealogy o/tlle grroemment o/poverty 243
from the 1830s. The establishment of these societies did not reflect a re
jection of political economy but an increasing concern about the conflicting
policy conclusions drawn from it.
116
The problem that preoccupied the
London Statistical Society from the start was the integration of the stat
istics of poverty with the operation of the economy. The new mode of
government also gave rise to forms of knowledge: the discipline of 'social
economy' in France with Buret, Villerme, and Fregier, or with the English
literature on the 'conditions of the labouring classes'.117 These knowledges
would fulfil the role Buret envisaged for I'economie sociale in relation to pol
itical economy. They would 'provide a test, a critique, and means of veri
fying it' . 118
There are transformations and subtle shifts of emphasis in this domain of
knowledge, and in the techniques it recommends. In England the 1834
poor-law reform is pivotal, as Polanyi saw, because it marks the transition
beyond a phase in which the problem of governance is preoccupied with
creating the conditions for the operation of a national labour market, fre;d
from the obstacles of ancient systems of relief and local practices shoring qp
the supply of agriculturallabour.
1l9
The focus on pauperism before the 183-4
reforms concerns the production of the conditions of the generalization of
wage-labour, at least among the adult male propertyless class. After this has
been achieved, with ruthless effectivity, as Williams ShOWS,l20 the partition of
pauperism and poverty comes to be understood in much more relative terms.
The conditions of pauperism inhere in the lives of the labouring population,
their working and living conditions, their habits and domestic economy, their
propensities and temptations. Interventions and reforms - such as those of
public health, policing, and educational.measures - define an increasingly
complex form oflife for the wage-labourer and his family, addressing not o,nly
the question of economic responsibility and dependency through the agency
of the male breadwinner, but also the specific content of the position of
housewife and mother. If the first phase of liberal governance drew upon the
workhouse, and the older semiotechnique of less-eligibility, to enforce
wage-labour, the second would increasingly find the need for an ensemble of
measures that actively sought to encourage the ethic ofpersonal and familial
responsibility and to target women as its agents.
It is only toward the end of the nineteenth century, with Booth and
Rowntree, that the forms of knowledge of poverty characteristic of the
emergent liberal mode of government (i.e. the Table of Pauperism, classical
political economy, and Bentharnite administration) would finally be displaced,
and relegated to the pre-history of a new conception of poverty as relative
deprivation. Or so we would often like to imagine. But it is not clear that this is
so. Ifit would now be asserted that poverty is relative, not absolute, and social
rather than natural, if later some will talk of a culture ofpoverty, it is because
there already exists the possibility of a fissure between poverty as the
fundamental relation of humans and nature and that which describes the
life-conditions of specific groups and individuals. Indeed, in a more general
244 Mitchell Dean
sense, the displacement of ' the Poor' by the the liberal conception of poverty
was surely necessary before a concept of relative deprivation would be
thinkable. Further, to talk of relative deprivation is to say that that scarcity
which is the ontological condition of economic activity is never present to
human existence itself. Such scarcity is experienced only through the
mediation of the social relations between groups and individuals, of classes
and minorities. The social sciences and economics will henceforth merely
presuppose this ontological lack and confine themselves to the discussion of
poverty in relation to social and historical norms, to life-cycles and life-styles,
to the form and conduct of life. In a sense, their object would be like that
foreshadowed by Buret, whose concern was not poverty itself, but distress (la
misire) which he defined as 'poverty felt morally' .121 Perhaps we can say that
bioeconomic necessity remains both constitutive of the means by which
poverty is conceived and governed to our very present yet undetectable by our
present-day social and moral sciences.
It is necessary to return briefly to the notion of morality that has befuddled
historians, imagining it to be a relic ofa former, perhaps even happier, regime,
a resource, to be revisited as we strive to undermine the hegemony of the
economic at the end of the twentieth century. As far as morality and poverty
are concerned, a new schema is necessary. It may be stated thus: the
opposition between moral and economic conceptions of poverty is a result of
the transformation in modes of government it seeks to explain. The liberal
transformation ofpolice displaces oeconomic governance within patriarchalist
households, and the state as household, with a legally specified 'private'
sphere of the family constituted by patriarchal relations of responsibility and
economic dependency that is located at the intersection of the twin axes of
morality and economy. But this image of two equal intersecting axes is not
sufficient. For the ethical sphere is subordinate, even as it complements, the
economic rationalization ofpoverty and is displaced onto the entirely different
domain of personal morality that had been previously only suggested by the
sphere ofpoor policy.
The government of poverty has promoted and shaped key aspects of the
forms of life that have characterized liberal-capitalist societies. It has had
moral consequences, but it does not answer to, nor has it answered to, the
dictates of a foundational morality. This is doubtless why moral principles
such as social justice are never sufficient means to oppose the regime of
our political rationality. It is perhaps why that rationality appears to found
its own personal morality, one that it never ceases to extol, and one that
seems to be inscribed in the contours of our life-conduct. The principal
political question today may be not to make our structures of welfare more
accountable to certain moral precepts and principles, or even to continue to
establish that poverty is an effect of social arid economic structures and not
a matter of personal failure. Rather, it may be the need to rethink the
political rationality that makes such discussions necessary and their
oppositions predictable and stale. It may be that we need to problematize
A genealogy ofthe government OJ poverly <'"T.J
that rationality that constitutes poverty as a necessary part of our forms of
life.
School ofBehavioural Sciences
Macquarie University, S),dney, Australia
Notes
This paper was first presented at the London meeting of the History of the Present
Research Network on 22 January 1992. I would like to thank the participants of that
seminar for their discussion of the paper, particularly Nikolas Rose, Peter Miner, and
Barry Hindess, whose later elaborations proved especially helpful.
1 The terms 'regimes of practice' and 'regimes of truth' are used by Foucault re
spectively in 'Q!Iestions of method', / (5 C, viii (1981), pp. 3-14, and 'Truth and
power', Power/Knowledge, ed. C. Gordon (Brighton, 1980). While Foucault's work has
incited my own explorations, the use of these and other concepts does not, however,
imply a complete fidelity to their source. By juxtaposing the two terms lsough!. tQsq,g
gest. that !.k_e.Y.!!9.'E-.!linof i,nterdependencebetWeen the mcfde
oforgiinization ofan mStitiJiional practice (e,g. of punishment, of curing, of treating tbe
poor elc:}and-the-<>rglinization of statements in disciplines or sanctioned bodies of
knowledge (e.g. criminology, medicine, social policy, etc.). The present paper draws
upon, elaborates, clarifies, and qualifies the research fully stated in my recent book, The
Constitution ofPUM1y; toward 0. ge.neo.logy of JiberoJ gUlJeT7lance (London, 1991), The
introduction of that book discusses what I mean by the term genealogy. For Foucault's
most sustained reflection on genealogy and historical method, see his essay,
'Nietzsche, genealogy, history" in Language. Counter-memory, Practit:e, ed. D. B. Bou
chard (Oxford, 1977). The locus classicus of Foucault's use of the complementary
methodology, archaeology, is The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (London, 1972).
2 The term 'assemblage' is found in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, 'Rhizome', / (5 C
viii (1981), pp. 49-71. It is a translation of o.gDIcemmt, as pointed out by the trimslator of
this piece, Paul Patton, in his 'Notes for a glossary', / (5 C viii (1981), p. 40. In the
present context an assemblage is an ensemble of heterogeneous discursive and non
discursive practices, and regimes of truth and conduct, which possesses an overall co
herence without answering to any determinative principle or underlying logic. Fou
cault himself used the more obscure and perhaps untranslatable term, dispositi/.
3 In the preface of F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.]. Holingdale
(Harmondsworth, 1973),pp. 13-14. [
4 I am thinking here ofthe ill-considered diatribe against Foucault as genealogist of
transcendental power in]. Habermas, The PhilosophicoJ Discourse ofModemity (Cam
bridge, 1987), that seems to have wholly missed the point that genealogy is not simply
an inversion of the enlightenment philosophies of history. See my forthcoming Fou
to.ult's Histories andHistoriaJ Sociology (Roudedge).
5 Cf.]. Minson, GmeoJogies ofMorals; Nietzsche, Fouto.Ult. Donzelot o.nd the Eumtncity
ofEthies Q..ondon, 1985), p. 108.
6 On 'history of the present', see M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of
the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (London, 1977), pp. 30-1. Again see my forthcoming
book, Foucault's Histories etc.
7 Foucault, 'Questions of method', pp. 6-1 L
8 M. Cousins and A. Hussain,MicheJFoucault(London, 1984), pp. 3-4.
9 K. Polanyi, The G'reat Transfontllllion (Boston, 1944), pp. 83-4.
i
246 Mitchell Dean
10 M. Foucault, 'Governmentalitf. J (!f C. vi (1979). pp. 5-21. C. Gordon. 'The
soul of the citizen: MaxWeber and Michel Foucault on rationality and government', in
S. 'Whimster and S. Lash (eds), Max Weber, Rationality anJModernily (London, 1987).
11 R. Williams, Keywords (London, 1976), pp. 148-50.
12 On 'Whig-liberalism' and nineteenth-century government, see P. Corrigan,
'State formation and moral regulation in nineteenth-century Britain: sociological
investigations', (University of Durham Ph.D. thesis, 1977), pp.147-60 and pMsim.
The classic intellectual history of Radicalism remains E. Halevy, The Growth of
Philosophic RaJicalism, trans. M. Morris (London, 1928).
13 See M. Weber's seminal programmatic statements of his sociology of religion, the
Introduction to 'The Economic Ethic of World Religions', and the 'Intermediate
Reflections', published under somewhat obscure tides in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills
(eds), From Mu Weber (London, 1948), pp.267-30I and pp.323-59 respectively.
This concern is evident throughout his jusdy famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
ofCapilalism, trans. T. Parsons (London. 1985). For a livelyand provocative discussion
ofthe latter text which emphasizes the importance ofthe problematic of the formation
ofthe Lebrosfohrung, see W. Hennis, 'Max Weber's "central Economy and
Society, xii (I 983), pp. 135-80. For a comparison ofWebe rand Foucault on rationality,
government, and life-conduct, see Gordon, 'The soul ofthe citizen'.
14 See G. Gutting, Michel FoulUlt's Archaeowgy of Sdentific Reason (Cambridge,
1988). pp. 19-20, on the use of'recurrrential history' (I'historie ricurrente) in the work
of Gaston Bachelard and Georges CanguiJhem. Here the history of science
deliberately starts from the certainties of the present and discovers the. 'progressive
formation of the truth'. Foucault's archaeological history distinguishes itself from the
history of science in rejecting the possibility of such a move for the relatively
unformalized forms ofknowledge ofles sciences humaines, Archaeology, pp. 189ff. Such a
move is not simply an anti-Whiggism. It is an attempt to distinguish the forms of
history, and methodology, appropriate to particular types of discourse. See, also, K.
Tribe, Land, Labour, and Eumomic Discourst (London, 1978), pp. 18-23.
IS J. R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism: English ItkM on Poor Relief 1795-1834
(Melbourne, 1969), pp. 21-2.
16 Halevy, Philosophic RaJicalism, p. 205 fi:; R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism (Harmondsworth, 1938); Polanyi, Great Transformation, pMsim; E. P.
Thompson, 'The moral economy ofthe English crowd in the eighteenth century', PMf
and Present, 2 (1971), pp. 76-136; G. Himmelfarb, The Irka ofPflIJtrt)': Engfq.nd in the
Early IndustrialAge (New York, 1984).
17 Foucaulr,Archaeowg)', pp. 37-8.
18 On the notion of a 'governing statement' as one lies at the root of the tree of
derivation ofa discourse, see Foucault,Archaeology, p. 147.1 have capitalized the 'p' of
the 'Poor' to identify both the discursive form and the object ofdiscourse as distinctive
and coherent entities, even where they appear as subsets or intersecting other such
entities, e.g. with the discipline ofpolitical oeconomy, as we shall see below.
19 D. Defoe, GivillgAlms No Charity and Employing the Poor a Grievance to the Nation
(London, 170+), p. 27, original emphasis.
20 G. Procacci, 'Social economy and the government of poverty', Irkology and
Consciousness, iv (1978), p.60. The piece defines a sl1VOir as a form of discourse
mediating between scientific and theoretical knowledge, governmental programmes,
and direct social intervention. A more formal account ofthe concept in the context ofa
discussion ofthe conditions and relations ofscience and ideology is given by Foucault,
Archaeology, pp. 181 if.
21 Cited in F. M. Eden, The State ofthe Poor: a History of the Labouring Classes in
England, abridged and ed. by A. G. L. Rogers (London, 1928),p. 36, p. 64. One might
h .. temuted to add a fourth category after the provisions ofthe Elizabethan legislation,
. ,.." ..lI. The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century
A genealogy ofthe g(JVernment ofpoverty 247
(London, 1926), pp. 24-6. However, insofar as children were regarded as being either
yet unable to work or ready for employment or fur training and apprenticeship in a
trade. they could be resolved into the categories of the impotent or industrious Poor.
22 Dean, Constitution ofPuverry, pp. 30-4; Weber, General Economic History, p. 350. 1
here follow Tribe. Land, Labour anti Economic Disrotme, pp. 80-109, in his general
description of this discursive formation and the tide he gives it. It is possible, howC'\'er,
to supplement his account, by dra'wing on the fullowing: T. Bruland and K. Smith,
'Economic discourse and the capitalist order', Erono11l)' anti Society, X, pp.467-80;
Foucault, 'Governmentality', pp.5-2I; M. A. George, 'The concept of industrial
revolution: textile history and the "histories" ofdiscipline', (Griffith University M.PhiI.
thesis, 1985), pp. 205-10; C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-revolutionary England
(London, 1964), ch. 12. On patriarchalism in the seventeenth century, political
thoughtand social life, see G. J. Schocher, Patriarthalism antiPolitical Thought (Oxford,
1975), especially, ch. 4, and, of course, C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Oxford,
1988).
23 For example, Sir J. Steuart,An Jtujuiry into the Principles ofPolitical aeronomy. 2
vols, ed. A. S. Skinner (Edinburgh, 1966), i, pp. 15-16.
24 E. S. Furniss, The Position ofthe Laborer in Q System ofNationalism: a Study in the
Labor Theories ofthe State ofthe Late English Merconti/isls (New York, 1957), pp. 16-W,
,
25 D. Hume, 'On the populousness ofancient nations', in Philosophical Works. 3 vol's,
ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, (Berlin, 1964, reprint of 1882 edn), iii.
26 A. Smith,An ltujuiry into the Nature and Causes ofthe Wealth ofNations, 2 vols, ed.
R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford, 1976), ii, p. 566.
27 Sir M. Hale, A Disrourse Touching Pruvision for the Poor (London, 1683); Sir J.
Child, A Ne1lJ Discourse on Trw (London, 1669); Defoe, GivingAlms no Charity. The
quote is from Hale's unnumbered preface.
28 I have sought to base my understanding of the rationale of the seventeenth
century workhouse, briefly summarized in this and the follOwing paragraph, on a close
examination of the arguments of Hale and Child. This has been supplemented by
. William Petty's arguments for outdoor make-work schemes in his Treatise on Tues and
Contributions, in The EcofWmit Wn'tings ofSir William Petty, 3 vols (New York, 1963), i
pp.29-31, and Sidney and Beatrice's Webb's account of the early workhouse
movement in England, in English Poor Law History, Part One: the Old Poor Law
(Hamden, 1963), pp.I06-21. An account which emphasized the patriarchalist
conception of the relations of obedience and command within the workhouse, and its
position as but one in a series of other simiJar projects, such as the earlier houses of
correction and industry, and the later labour colony, is to be found in George, 'The
concept ofindustrial revolution', pp. 242-50.
29 On this 'Course of Life', Hale,Discourse, pp. 1, 11.
30 On notions of 'profitability' and a 'profitable life', see Hale, Discourse, pp. 12-15.
The meaning of these terms for Hale combines a notion of a self-sustaining course of
life with a lowering of taxation, and the possibility of the establishment of
import-replacing domestic manufactures which would increase the balance of trade.
Child's list of the benefits of workhouses leaves out the criterion of profitability
altogether! See his Dis((JUrse on Trw, pp. 72-4.
31 From the time of his course of 1977-8, Foucault proposed the notion of
'governmentalitf or governmental rationality as the general heading of his own studies
into the formation of modem forms of power in EUrope since the sixteenth century,
and the imbrication of forms of knowledge withiri the exercise of the power. See M.
Foucault, Reuml tks Cours 1970-1982 (paris, 1989). Since Foucault's proposal there
has developed a significant literature on the investigation of govemmentality and
modes of government and the production ofconcepts adequate to them. The following
represent important examples: Gordon, 'The sou) of the citizen'; P. Miller and N.
248 Mitchell Dean
Rose, 'Governing economic life', Economy and Society, xix (1990), pp. 1-31; N. Rose
and P. Miller, 'Political power beYQnd the state: problematics of government', British
Journal of Sociology, forthcoming; and the various contributions to G. Burchell, C.
Gordon, and P. Miller (ed.) The Foucault Ejfoa:Studies in GlJI)l'1'7Imentai Rationality
(Hemel Hempstead, 1991). For the present purposes a 'governmental rationality' is a
way ofknowing or rendering the real in order to act within or upon it with the aim ofthe
direction ofconduct ofspecified social agents. The means ofthat action or intervention
are referred to as political 'technologies' or political techniques. Although government
is a fundamentally programmatic domain, this does not preclude the setting of''lIrious
'ethical ideals' which animate its aims and objectives.
32 Defoe, Giving Alms no Charity, p. 27; John Locke's 1697 Report to the Board of
Trade, as cited by Webb, English Poor Law History Part One, p. 109.
33 R. W. Malcomsen, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700-1850 (Cambridge,
1973); George 'The concept of industrial revolution'; E. P. Thompson, 'Time, .
work-discipline and industrial capitalism',Past andPment, xxxviii (1967), pp. 56-97.
34 Furniss, The Position of the Laborer, ch. 6; R. North, A Discourse of the Poor
(London, 1753); A. Young,A SixMonths Tour through the North ofEngland, 4 vols, 2nd
edn (London, 1771), and A Six Weeks Tour through the Southern Counties (London,
1768). '
35 Smith, Wealth ofNations, i, p. 99; Furniss, The Position ofthe Laborer, pp. 134-6,
14().....4.
36 Cited in L. Radzinowicz, A History ofEnglish Criminal law and its Administration
from 1750, 3 vols (London, 1956), iii, p. 1.
37 I follow the use of Minson, Genealogies ofMorals, p. 149, for whom foundational-
ism 'views ethical considerations as always grounding and therefore overriding other
considerations' .
38 Weber, Protestant Ethic, pp.I77-8, General Eronomic History, pp. 347-50. Aside
from the following objections to this thesis we have on the considerable authority of
Dorothy Marshall, English poor in the Eighteenth Century, p. 20, that the 'religious
motive ... was not strong enough, and lacked driving force to make it a real and
effective incitement to the relief of the Poor'.
39 F-L.Knemeyer, 'Polizei', EronomyandSodelJ,ix (1980),pp. 172-96; L.J. Hume,
Bentham and Bureaucraz;y (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 33-4. See also the list of the items
covered by the big police ordinance of Strasbourg of 1628 in G. Oestreich, Neostoicism
and the Early Modern State (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 157-9.
40 A. Smith, Leaures on Justice, Police, Revenue andArms, ed. E. Cannan (New York,
1956), p. 154; Hume, Bentham and Bureaueraz;y, pp. 34-5.
41 Minson, Genealogies ofMorals, pp. 104-5.
42 There are two excellent case-studies of continental absolutism and the
emergence of the sovereign state, Oestreich, Neostoicism, especiaJIy Part 2, which
situates police in this context, and H. E. Strakosch, StateAbsolutism and the Rule ofLaw
(Sydney, 1967), which touches on the changing late eighteenth-century concept of
police and police practices in the context of Anstrian legal codification, pp. 131-7,
183-5. Also on police and legal codification, is Hume, Bentham and Bureaucraz;y,
pp.34-40.
43 Knemeyer, 'Polizei', p. 181.
44 Minson, Genealogies ofMorals, pp. 102-6.
45 P. Pasquino, 'Theatricum politicum: the genealogy of capital- police and the
state of prosperity', Ideology and Consciousness, iv (1979), p. 47.
46 M. Foucault, The History of SexualilJ. voL I: an introduction, trans. R. Hurley
(London, 1979), p. 135 ff.
47 D. V. Glass,NumberingthePeople: the Eighteenth-century Population Controversy and
the Development ofCensus and Vital Statistit:t in Britain (Famborough, 1973), pp. 13-17.
48 The sources for these examples are: Pasquino, 'Theatricum politicum',
A genealolf)! ofthe guvermnent ofjH:rVerty 249
pp: 41-54; Webb, English Poor Law History Part One, pp. 30-5; Oestreich, Neostoicism,
p. 158; and Hume, Bentham and Bureaucracy, pp. 34-5.
49 P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural
Revolution Oxford, 1985),passim. This view seems to be supported by E. M. Leonard,
The Earb' History ofEnglish Poor Reliif(Cambridge, 1900), pp. 267-94, in its discussion
of the distinctiveness of the English system of poor regulation and relief and its
movement beyond its Su.1eenth-century municipal form.
50 Conigan and Sayer, Great Arch, pp.38-40. Also, Leonard, Early History,
pp.165-83.
51 M. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: a History ofInsanit)' in the Age ofReason,
trans. R. Howard (London, 1965), p. 63.
52 These points are discussed at length in my Constitution ofPuveTtJ', pp. 60-7.
53 J. O. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideolo1!J' in Seventeenth-Century England
(princeton, 1978), pp. 150-3.
54 Webb, English Poor Law History Part One, 134-44; MarshaU, English Poor in the
Eighteenth Century, pp. 125-60.
55 Webb, English Poor La:w Histo7J' Part One, p. 110; Marshall, English Poor in the
Eighteenth Century, pp. 159-60.
56 Poynter, Society and Pauperism, pp.35-9; Eden, State of the Poor, pp. ~ 7 - 8 ,
pp.75-7. i
57 D. Owen, English Philanthropy 166lJ-1960 (Harvard, 1964), pp. 11-96. Leorlard,
Early History ofEnglish Poor Relief, p. 204, notes, by way ofcontrast, that there was 'little
distinction' made between charity and the poor rates in the seventeenth century.
58 Eden, State ofthePoor, pp. 92-4.
59 Poynter, Society and Pauperism, p. 41.
60 Poynter, SodelJ and Pauperism p. 34; Eden, State ofthe Poor, pp. 86-7; W. Paley,
The Principles ofMoral and Political Philosoph)!, 2 vols, 10th edn (London, 1794), i,
pp.241-7.
61 Thompson, 'Moral Economy', p. 79 ff.
62 T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Ajfocts the Future
Improvement ofSociet)' (London, 1798);J. Townsend, A Dissertotion on thePoor Laws by a
Well-wisher ofMankind (Berkeley, 1971). There were six editions of Malthus's essay
published in its author's lifetime. I shall quote from the first edition, and also from the
first posthumous edition, An Essay on the Principle ofPopulation etc., 7th edn (London,
1872).
63 See K. Smith, The Malthusian Controvmy (London, 1951); J. Schumpeter, A
History ofEronomicAnalysis (New York, 1954), pp. 255-77.
64 Malthus, Essay on Principle ofPopulation (1872 edn), p. 8, defines moral restraint
'to mean the restraint from marriage from prudential motives, with a conduct strictly
moral during this period of restraint'. This might sound gender-neutral, yet his
examples of the practice almost always concern men of various ranks, e.g. the
discussion of the preventive check in first Essay (1798 edn), pp.63-7, and the
discussion of the obligations of marriage in the final edition, Essay (1872 edn),
pp.403-4.
65 E.g. W. Otter, 'Memoir', in T. R. Malthus, Principles ofPolitical Economy, 2nd edn
(London, 1836), p. xix;]. Bonar, Malthus and his Work, (London, 1885), pp. 304-5; S.
Webb and B. Webb, English Poor Law History, Part T'IPO: the Last Hundred Years, 2 vols
(Hamdel.l, 1963), i, pp. 21-5; Smith, Malthusian Controvmy, pp. 296-7.
66 E.g. the work of W. D. Grampp, 'Qassical economics and its moral critics',
History ofPolitical Economy v (1973), pp. 359-74, and 'Malthus and his contempor
aries', History ofPolitiCII.I Eronomy, vi (1974), pp. 278-304.
67 Foucault, Archaeology, p. 21.'
68 R. G. Cowherd, PoliticalEronomists anti the English Poor Laws: an Historical Study of
the Influence of Classical Eronamit:t on Social Welfore Policy (Athens, Ohio, 1977).
I
250 Mitchell Dean
J. J. Spengler, 'Introduction', in Population Problems in the Viaorian Age, 2 vols
(Famborough, 1973), i. Poynter, Sockty and Pauperism, passim.
69 S. G. Checkland, and E. O. Checkland, The Poor LrnP Report of 1834
(Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 156. K. Williams, From. Pauperism to Pwerty (London,
1981).
70 Williams, Pauperism to Pwerty, p. 51.
71 ibid., pp. 69-75.
72 See note 31 on the language of the analysis ofgovernment.
73 Tribe, Land, LolJour and Economic Discoune, pp. 1O().....45j K.. Tribe, Genealogies of
Capitalism (London, 1981), pp. 121-52.
74 Thompson, 'Moral Economy', pp. 88-91.
75 Smith, Wealth ofNations, i, pp. 82-104.
76 M. Foucault, The Order ofThings: an Archaeology ofthe Human Sciences, trans. A.
M. Sheridan (London, 1970), p. 253.
77 D. Ricardo, 'Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Prohts of
Stock', The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, 10 vols, ed. P. Sraffa and
M. Dobb (Cambridge, 1951), iv, pp. 9-41.
78 E. Halevy, A History ofthe English People in the Nineteenth CentuIJI, 6 vols (London,
1961), i, pp. 18, 172.
79 Poynter, Society and Pauperism, pp. 45-106; Webb, English poor Law History Part
One, pp. 168-89; J. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Village LolJourer 1760-1830
(London, 1913), pp. 123-65; Owen, English Philanthropy, pp. 104-9.
80 E. Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 16 vols (London,
1826), vii, p. 377; viii, p. 368.
81 Halevy, Philosophic Radicalism, p. 230.
82 K.. Marx, Capital; a CriticalAnalysis ofCapita/ist Produaion, i, trans. S. Moore and
E. Aveling (Moscow, 1974), p. 680.
83 F. M. Eden, The State ofthe Poor: or Q HistOfJI ofthe Labouring Classes in England,
from the Conquest to the Present Time, 3 vols (London, 1797).
84 ibid., i, pp. 56-7.
85 Marx, Capital, i, pp. 686 and 693.
86 Malthus, Essay on Population (1798), pp. 32-3.
87 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 192-3. Here, Foucault poses the problem of
what he calls 'a reversal ofthe political axis ofiridividualisation' between sovereign and
disciplinary forms ofpower. Whereas the former undertakes an 'ascending individual
ization' ofthose located at the point ofthe exercise of power, the latter presupposes a
'descending individualization'. 'Memorable man', the product of 'historico-ritual'
techniques of sovereignty, gives way to 'calculable man', the product of'scientifico
disciplinary' mechanisms. I would suggest that a reversal of the axis of'historicization'
is a similar and rdated phenomenon. If social history has replaced such a
history, it may be more to do with the pervasiveness of a new
biopolitics, and its disciplinary forms of power, than with the advance of historical
knowledge and perspective. It may be noted that genealogy trenchantly refuses such a
reversal: it suspends a social history in favour ofa history ofthe forms ofknowledge and
modes ofgovernance which are the conditions ofsocial history.
88 P. Colquhoun,A Trtatiseon Indigence (London, 1806), p. 7.
89 ibid.
90 Cited by L. C. Boralevi,Bentham and the Oppressed (Berlin, 1984), p. 98.
91 Checkland, Poor Law Report, p. 334; E. Chadwick; AnArtide on the Principles and
Progress ofthe Poor Law Amendment Act, reprinted from Edinburgh Review (London,
;f
1837), p. 18.
92 J. Bentham, Works, 11 vols, ed. J. Bowring (Edinburgh, 1843), viii, p.361;
Colquhoun, Trtatise on Indigence, pp. 38-43.
93 Bentham, cited in Boralevi, Bentham and the Oppressed, p. 99.
A geneaJog)' ofthe gfJVernment ofpqverfJ' 251
94 C. Bahmueller, The National Charity Comptmy:Jermry Bentham's Silent Rt11{}lution
(Berkeley, 1981), pp. 5-6.
95 Bentham, Works, viii, 'Table ofCases Calling for Relief.
96 ibid., p. 365.
97 Bahmueller, National Charity Company, p. 5.
98 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 159.
99 Bentham, Works, viii, pp.366-7. Foucault makes a brief but illuminating
comparison between Le Vaux's royal menagerie at Versailles and the Panopticon in
Discipline and Punish, p. 205.
100 Foucault uses the term 'sesruotechnique' to describe a theory and practice of
punishment (and, ultimately, of all forms of governance) in which penalties and
rewards act as signs to which the assumed hedonistic individual win respond by seeking
to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. See Discipline and Punish, pp. 93-103.
101 Bentham, Works, viii, p. 425.
102 ibid., p.437.
103 Cited in Poynter, Society and Pauperism, pp. 125-6.
104 ibid., p. 126. #
105 Checkland, Poor Law Report, p. 335. l
lOOP. Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police ofthe Metropolis, 6th edn (London, 1805'),
preface, no page number. "
107 Radzinowicz, History ofEnglish Criminal LrnP, iii, pp. 448-74.
108 Colquhoun, Treatise on Police, p. 365.
109 Colquhoun, Treatise on Indigence, pp. 38-43.
110 M. Flinn, 'Introduction', in E. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Conditions ofthe
Labouring Population ofGreat Bn'tain of1842 (Edinburgh, 1965).
111 Chadwick, Report on Sanitary Conditions, pp. 254-7; J. P. Kay, The Moral and
Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufaaure in
Manchester (London, 1832), pp. 28-43.
112 S. E. Finer, The Lifo and Times ofSir Edwin Chadwick (London, 1952), p. 218;
M. Pdling, Cholera, Fever and English Medicine 1825-1865 (Oxford, 1978); Flinn,
'Introduction'.
113 COrrigan, 'State formation and moral regulation', Ph.D. thesis, pp. 197-237.
114 Procacci,' Social economy and the government of poverty', p. 68; J. Donzelot,
The PoliCing ofFamilies, trans. R. Hurley (New York, ] 979), p. 55.
115 See, for example, T. Chalmers, Problems ofPuverty (London, 1912), and On
Political Economy. in Conne:xion with the Moral Stale and Moral Prospeas ofSociety (New
York, 1968). On Chalmer's scheme for the Tron parish, A. F. Young and E. T.
Ashton, British Social Work in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1956), pp. 70-1. On the
CSO in London in the 18705, G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A study in the
Relationship belJ1Jeen Classes in Viaorlan Societ)" 2nd edn (Hannondsworth, 1984),
pp.271-S0.
116 P. Abrams, The Orgins of British Sociology 1834-1915 (Chicago, 1968),
pp.13-23.
117 L. Chevalier, Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris in the First Halfof
the Nineteenth Century, trans. F. Jellinek (New York, 1973); P. Gaskell, The
Manufaauring Population ofEngland, its Moral Social and Physical Conditions (London,
1833); Kay, NJoral and Physical Condition ofthe Working Classes; Chadwick, Report on the
Sanitary Omditions; F. Engels, The Condition ofthe Working Class in England, (Moscow,
1973). .
I] 8 Buret, cited by Chevalier, lAbouring Classes and Dangerous Classes, p. 144. Also,
Procacci, 'Social economy'.
119 Poianyi, Great Transformation, pp. 77-S9.
120 Williams, Pauperism to Puverty, pp. 69-75.
121 Chevalier, Labouring Classes andDangerous Classes, p. 142.