An End to Poverty?: A Historical Debate

It was in the 1790s at the time of the French Revolution that there first emerged the believable outlines of a world without endemic scarcity, a world in which the predictable misfortunes of life need no longer plunge the afflicted into chronic poverty or extreme want. This idea was not another version of the medieval fantasy of the land of Cockaigne, in which capons flew in through the window ready-cooked. Nor was it the update of a more serious invention, Utopia, most famously that created by Sir Thomas More in 1516. This was the ‘nowhere’, or ‘good place’ according to the pun contained in the Greek word, whose social customs and arrangements offered an ideal perspective from which to criticise the present and to imagine another way of being. What was put forward was neither a vision of a lost golden age nor the dream of an unreachable place; and what was described was neither a world turned upside down nor an apocalyptic community of goods.

Redistribution there would certainly be, but measured, moderate and gradual, an optimistic – but in no sense impossible – extrapolation of the progress of the century and the opportunities of the present. What were described were the new social arrangements which would underpin the peaceful land of the ‘new Adam’. The French Revolution was ushering in a new world, which was spreading outwards from western Europe and the American Republic. Concretely, and in the words of English subject turned ‘citizen of the world’ Tom Paine, it would be a society in which ‘we’ no longer ‘see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows’; one in which orphanhood, single parenthood, unemployment, sickness, old age or the loss of a breadwinner would be relieved by right.¹

The reasons for this optimism were spelt out in general terms by the famous philosophe and visionary mathematician Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, formerly the Marquis de Condorcet, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Condorcet completed the Sketch while in hiding from the Jacobin authorities at the beginning of the ‘Terror’, on 4 October 1793. It was published by the French Republic at its own expense one year after Condorcet’s death in a prison cell in March 1794, in the last months of Robespierre’s rule. ‘Everything tells us’, Condorcet argued, ‘that we are now close upon one of the great revolutions of the human race.’ The intellectual progress of humankind was now about to be accompanied by a material transformation of the human condition. ‘The labours of recent ages’, Condorcet wrote, ‘have done much for the honour of man, something for his liberty, but so far almost nothing for his happiness.’² But the history of modern times – from Descartes to the French Revolution – had prepared the way for a great change in the physical and social prospects of mankind. This transformation had already begun. Condorcet attempted to describe its trajectory in his concluding chapter of the Sketch, ‘The Future Progress of the Human Mind’.

Against those who maintained that the gulf between rich and poor was an inescapable part of ‘civilisation’, Condorcet argued that inequality was largely to be ascribed to ‘the present imperfections of the social art’. ‘The final end of the social art’ would be ‘real equality’ – ‘the abolition of inequality between nations’ and ‘the progress of equality within each nation’. Ultimately, this progress would lead to ‘the true perfection of mankind’. Apart from the ‘natural differences between men’, the only kind of inequality to persist would be ‘that which is in the interests of all and which favours the progress of civilisation, of education and of industry, without entailing either poverty, humiliation or dependence’. That would be in a world in which ‘everyone will have the knowledge necessary to conduct himself in the ordinary affairs of life, according to the light of his own reason’, where ‘everyone will become able, through the development of his faculties, to find the means of providing for his needs’; and where, at last, ‘misery and folly will be the exception, and no longer the habitual lot of a section of society’.³

Beyond France, slavery would be abolished, colonies would become independent and commerce would spread worldwide under the aegis of free trade. Asia and Africa would break free from ‘our trade monopolies, our treachery, our murderous contempt for men of another colour or creed, the insolence of our usurpations’; they would no longer be prey to ‘the shameful superstition’ brought to these peoples by monks. Instead, assistance would be provided by men occupied in ‘teaching them about their interests and their rights’. Soon, large tribes would become civilised and races so long oppressed by ‘sacred despots or dull-witted conquerors’ would gain their freedom. Eventually, even savage tribes and ‘conquering hordes who know no other law but force’ would merge into ‘civilised nations’.⁴

This vision of a new international order would have been shared by many different strands of progressive opinion in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The horrors of the slave trade and the shame of colonialism had become well-known topics of debate in the aftermath of the Seven Years War in the oft-cited writings of Montesquieu, the Quakers, Abbé Raynal and Adam Smith in the 1760s and 1770s.⁵

Far more novel and distinctive were the proposals set out in the Sketch to forward ‘the progress of equality within each nation’. In the agriculture and industry of the ‘enlightened nations’ of Europe, Condorcet pointed out, ‘a great number of individuals’ were almost entirely dependent for the maintenance of themselves and their family ‘either on their own labour or on the interest from capital invested so as to make their labour more productive’. In contrast to those owning land or capital, these groups depended directly ‘on the life and even on the health of the head of the family’. Their livelihood was ‘rather like a life annuity, save that it is more dependent on chance’. ‘Here then’, wrote Condorcet, ‘is a necessary cause of inequality, of dependence and even of misery, which ceaselessly threatens the most numerous and most active class in our society.’⁶

But such inequality could be ‘in great part eradicated’. People in old age could be guaranteed a means of livelihood ‘produced partly by their own savings and partly by the savings of others who make the same outlay, but who die before they need to reap the reward’. A similar principle of compensation could be applied by securing for widows and orphans ‘an income which is the same and costs the same for those families which suffer an early loss and for those who suffer it later’. Through the application of the same principle, it would also be possible to provide all children with the capital necessary for the full use of their labour at the age when they started work and founded a family.⁷

In Condorcet’s conception, the necessary complement to these proposals was a universal scheme of education. The aim was not only to enable the citizen to ‘manage his household, administer his affairs and employ his labour and faculties in freedom’, but also to ‘know his rights and be able to exercise them’; and even beyond that, to ‘be a stranger to none of the high and delicate feelings which honour human nature’. The priority was to avoid all ‘dependence, whether forced or voluntary’. In his 1791 proposals for a national education system in France, Condorcet had underlined the same theme: ‘it is impossible for instruction, even when equal, not to increase the superiority of those whom nature has endowed more favourably. But to maintain equality of rights, it is enough that this superiority entail no real dependence: that each individual be sufficiently instructed to exercise for himself the right guaranteed him under the law, without subjecting himself blindly to the reason of another.’⁸

The danger of dependence, whether economic or spiritual, was not confined to the use of patronage by rich and powerful individuals or by corporations. It extended equally to government. For that reason, public education instituted by government must be limited to instruction. The teaching of the constitution of each nation should ‘only form part of instruction as a matter of fact’. The danger of any other approach was that public education might be identified with the inculcation of ‘a kind of political religion’, and that the citizen might become attached to the constitution ‘by a blind sentiment’. Such measures often went together with a yearning to return to the patriotic ethos of the ancient republic, ignoring the fact that ‘the aim of education can no longer be to consecrate established opinions, but, on the contrary, to subject them to free examination by succeeding generations that will be progressively more enlightened’.⁹

The practical application of such a scheme in England, in the shape of a detailed set of proposals to replace the Poor Rate by a tax-based system of universal insurance, was set forth in the second part of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, published in February 1792. A more redistributory variant of the same idea was argued in his later pamphlet Agrarian Justice, which appeared in England in 1797.

Paine put forward his proposals as part of a larger reformation in the practice of government which would follow the replacement of monarchy by a representative and democratic republic. In England, he claimed, there were ‘two distinct characters of government’. There was first a ‘civil government or the government of laws which operates at home’ and was composed of a set of institutions ‘attended with little charge’ since the country ‘administers and executes them, at its own expense by means of magistrates, juries, sessions, and assize, over and above the taxes which it pays’. On the other hand, there was ‘court or cabinet government which operates abroad, on the rude plan of uncivilised life’, and was attended with ‘boundless extravagance’.¹⁰

In England under monarchical government, Paine claimed, ‘every war terminates with an addition of taxes’; ‘taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but wars were raised to carry on taxes’. Parliamentary government had been ‘the most productive machine of taxation ever invented’. Yet ‘not a thirtieth, scarcely a fortieth part of the taxes which are raised in England are either occasioned by, or applied to the purpose of civil government’. This was why Paine believed that ‘the hordes of miserable poor with which old countries abound’ were ‘the consequence of what in such countries they call government’. ‘In the present state of things,’ Paine wrote, ‘a labouring man with a wife or two or three children does not pay less than between seven and eight pounds a year in taxes.’ The labourer was not aware of this since it was concealed from him in the articles he bought and he therefore complained only of their dearness. But since these hidden taxes amounted to at least ‘a fourth part of his yearly earnings’, he was ‘consequently disabled from providing for a family, especially if himself, or any of them, are afflicted with sickness’.¹¹

This reasoning provided the justification for Paine’s proposals. Relying on Sir John Sinclair’s History of the Revenue, he estimated that since 1714 it had cost £70 million to maintain the Hanoverian monarchy – ‘a family imported from abroad’. If courtly sinecures were abolished and no office holder were to receive a salary in excess of £10,000, Paine estimated that together with the necessary defence costs of a peacetime establishment, £1.5 million per year would be sufficient to maintain ‘the honest purposes of government’. This would leave a surplus of more than £6 million revenue. The use of this surplus to remove or alleviate the most obvious precipitants of chronic want would also make it possible to abolish the major form of additional local taxation, the Poor Rate, ‘a direct tax’ amounting to £2 million per year, ‘which every householder feels and who knows also to the last farthing’.

Paine identified the two most pressing forms of poverty as ‘the expense of bringing up children’ in large families, and the diminution of strength and employability in old age. He therefore proposed that a grant of £4 per annum be made to every child under fourteen, and pensions of £6 per annum to all over fifty, rising to £10 per annum for those of sixty and over. Like Condorcet, however, he also stressed the centrality of education to any scheme of social amelioration. The £4 per annum was to be spent on sending children to school to learn ‘reading, writing and common arithmetic’, their attendance to be certified by ministers in every parish. The reasons for this were as much political as social. ‘A nation under a well-regulated government should permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support.’

Paine also attempted to remedy the poverty trap which his scheme might cause. There were, he noted, ‘a number of families who, though not properly of the class of poor, yet find it difficult to give education to their children; and such children, under such a case, would be in a worse condition than if their parents were actually poor’. Supposing there to be 400,000 such children, he proposed that each of these be allowed 10s. per annum for six years, which would give them six months’ schooling a year and ‘half a crown for paper and spelling books’.¹²

Paine completed his scheme with a number of smaller grants: 20s. to be given ‘immediately on the birth of a child to every woman who should make the demand’; and similarly 20s. to every newly married couple. Grants should be made available to defray the funeral expenses of those ‘who, travelling for work, may die at a distance from their friends’. Shelter and employment should be provided to those young and without skill or connections – ‘the casual poor’ – migrating to London and especially liable to fall into distress. Allowances should be made to soldiers and sailors disbanded as a result of the new state of peace, with increases of pay for those who remained, along with other deserving low-income groups, such as curates and ‘inferior revenue officers’ – a category to which Paine himself had once belonged.¹³

The poor laws, those instruments of civil torture, will be superceded, and the wasteful expense of litigation prevented. The hearts of the humane will not be shocked by ragged and hungry children, and persons of seventy and eighty years of age, begging for bread. The dying poor will not be dragged from place to place to breathe their last, as a reprisal of parish upon parish. Widows will have a maintenance for their children, and not be carted away on the death of their husbands, like culprits and criminals; and children will no longer be considered as increasing the distresses of their parents. The haunts of the wretched will be known, because it will be to their advantage; and the number of petty crimes, the offspring of distress and poverty, will be lessened. The poor, as well as the rich, will then be interested in the support of government, and the cause and apprehension of riots and tumults will cease.¹⁴

The proposals of Condorcet and those of Paine bear some clear and unmistakable similarities, not only in specific points of emphasis, but in a shared optimism about the role of knowledge, reason and freedom in the overcoming of poverty, violence and ignorance. The immediate reason for this affinity is clear enough. It arose from the collaboration between the two men in the increasingly fevered and frightening political battles fought out in revolutionary France, from the move towards a republic following the king’s attempted flight and capture at Varennes on 21 June 1791 to the expulsion from the Convention and arrest of Girondin deputies, with whom both Condorcet and Paine were associated, on 2 June 1793.¹⁵

But the affinity between their positions also had deeper roots. For both men subscribed to a new form of republicanism, forged out of three major political and intellectual developments in the last third of the eighteenth century. The first was a more confident belief in the control over chance and the future through the coming together of the collection of vital statistics and the mathematics of probability. The second was the great impetus given to the growth of positive future-oriented conceptions of commercial society following the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776, and in France the liberal reforms attempted by the Turgot ministry of 1774–6. The third was the radicalisation of the understanding of each of these starting points under the impact of the American and French Revolutions.

The first of these developments concerned what Condorcet described as ‘the calculus of probabilities’. Condorcet based his confidence in the future upon the possibilities opened up by this ‘calculus’ in all forms of knowledge. Back in 1782, at the time of his appointment as permanent secretary to the Academy of Sciences, Condorcet had stressed the importance of this calculus, both as the basis of the connection between scientific and social advance and as the common foundation of the moral and physical sciences, which henceforth ‘must follow the same methods, acquire an equally exact and precise language, attain the same degree of certainty’.¹⁶ Condorcet had come to share David Hume’s belief that all truths, even mathematical truths, were no more than probable. But this was in no sense a concession to scepticism. Like Hume, Condorcet did not doubt the reality of necessity, only the possibility of our knowing it. In the moral sciences, the recognition of all truths as in different degrees probable would allow the introduction of precision into the knowledge of human affairs in place of the ‘prejudices planted by superstition and tyranny’.

More ambitiously, a probabilistic approach would make possible a single mathematically based social science, or what Condorcet came to call ‘social mathematics’. The most contentious part of this new science was its theory of rationality – half descriptive and half prescriptive – which was to be applied to all processes of human decision-making. Like the putative agent depicted by twentieth-century games theorists or proponents of ‘rational choice’, rational man would act to maximise his interest according to the balance of probabilities. Ultimately, if every individual were enabled to think rationally, the conflict between individual and common interest would disappear and all would acknowledge ‘the sweet despotism of reason’. This emphasis upon the reformation of mental processes helps to explain the importance attached to instruction in Condorcet’s educational reforms. The centrality of mental reform to the security and harmonious operation of the new French Republic was reiterated by Condorcet’s followers among the Idéologues, the group led by Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis in the class of moral sciences at the newly founded Institut (intended as a ‘living encyclopedia’) in France under the Directorate between 1795 and 1801. It was also echoed to some extent by Bentham and his circle in Britain.

But such problems did not arise so directly in the area of what might be called social insurance. Here it was more a question of transforming a variety of existing but partial practices into a framework which would be truly comprehensive. In the Sketch, Condorcet included among existing applications of ‘the calculus of probability’, ‘the organisation of life annuities, tontines, private savings, benefit schemes and insurance policies of every kind’.¹⁷ Successful forms of ‘the application of the calculus to the probabilities of life and the investment of money’ now existed. But in the coming epoch, as a means of reducing inequality, they should be applied ‘in a sufficiently comprehensive and exhaustive fashion to render them really useful, not merely to a few individuals, but to society as a whole, by making it possible to prevent those periodic disasters which strike at so many families and which are such a recurrent source of misery and suffering’.¹⁸

Paine’s days as an excise man may have left him with a sharpened knowledge of the operation of the tax system, but he did not possess expert knowledge in either mathematics or statistics. Nevertheless, his proposals were based upon similar assumptions. He justified his pension scheme as a right rather than a charity, with estimates of the tax the recipients would have paid during their working lives. ‘Converting, therefore, his (or her) individual tax in a tontine, the money he shall receive after fifty years is but little more than the legal interest of the nett money he has paid.’¹⁹

Later, in Agrarian Justice, published in 1797, Paine proposed grants of £15 for all 21-year-olds and annual pensions of £10 for those over fifty, to be paid out of a national fund collected from death duties on estates and fortunes above a certain size. Justifying the roughness of his actuarial assumptions, he explained that ‘my state of health prevents my making sufficient inquiries with respect to the doctrine of probabilities, whereon to found calculations with such degrees of certainty, as they are capable of’. Defending his scheme as an alternative to charity, he argued that there was ‘but little any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to be relieved is considered’. It was ‘only by organising civilisation upon such principles as to act like a system of pullies that the whole weight of misery can be removed’.²⁰

Social insurance of the kind proposed by Condorcet involved the application of the mathematics of probability to questions of life expectancy on the basis of mortality statistics. But the coming together of the apparently self-evident set of procedures presupposed in Condorcet’s proposal was less straightforward than it might first appear. Until around 1750, each of the components combined in social insurance had developed in relative isolation. Pioneering work in the mathematics of probability had been done by Pascal, Fermat, Huygens and De Witt in the mid-seventeenth century. But the problems considered were those encountered in lotteries, coin-tossing and games of chance. They were not immediately related to the concerns of ‘political arithmetic’, in which questions of life expectancy and its measurement by means of mortality statistics were eventually encountered.

Bills of mortality had been recorded in London parishes since 1562, not because of any civic interest in life expectancy, but in order to provide an early warning of the onset of plague. The first analyst of these tables to speculate about the relationship between age and death was John Graunt, whose Natural and Political Observations on the Bills of Mortality appeared in 1662. But his main interest was again in immediate policy issues, for example, the number of able-bodied males available for military service and the limited effect of quarantine as a means of containing the spread of plague. His tables assumed that for the average English person, after the age of six there was an equal chance of dying in any of the seven decades that followed. This lack of interest in the empirical details of age at death was highlighted by the fact that, while cause and place of death were recorded, age at death was not included in the bills of mortality until 1728. Even in the case of the pricing of annuities, a procedure in which states had an obvious interest since annuities were sold as a means of servicing debt, a system of estimating life expectancy based upon relevant empirical information was slow to develop. The first proposal to use probability theory in order to price annuities was that made by Jan de Witt to the Estates General of Holland and West Friesland in 1671. He estimated probability of death as a correlate of age, but did not employ statistics and simply assumed that the risk of death remained the same for all ages between three and fifty-three.²¹

The problem was as much political as intellectual. Sharp and mathematically trained observers soon saw how mortality statistics could extend mathematical probability beyond games of chance. In a memorandum of 1700, Leibniz suggested measurements of life expectancy, age distribution and geographical distribution of disease and causes of death.²² By the 1720s, mathematicians like De Moivre had produced life tables as a simplified guide to the pricing of annuities. Yet despite their common interest in the sale of annuities either as business or as a means of servicing debt repayment, neither insurance companies nor governments paid much attention to the advantages of applying the calculus of probabilities to reliable series of statistics until the middle of the eighteenth century.

In the case of the insurance industry, Keith Thomas and other historians have taken its appearance in London towards the end of the seventeenth century as evidence of the emergence of new attitudes towards control of the future and the minimisation of the consequences of unavoidable risk. But this was only half true. The period between the 1690s and the 1740s was chiefly notable for a succession of speculative manias and ‘bubbles’ in which insurance schemes figured almost as prominently as John Law’s plan for the reflation of France and the South Sea Bubble. Insurance policies were placed alongside annuities and lottery tickets, while the law reinforced the association between insurance and gambling by grouping them together in a common notion of risk.

As Lorraine Daston has argued, the obstacles to the development of a modern conception of life insurance were first and foremost social. It was not until there emerged a new attitude towards the welfare of the family within the professions and the middling ranks – clergy, doctors, lawyers, skilled artisans – that there could develop a form of life insurance based upon mathematical probability and reliable series of statistics. This new attitude valued predictability and prudence above luck, and provision for the family above provision for self. In place of the desire for speculative winnings, which had been the motivation behind tontines and lotteries, the new insurance ethos was governed by the fear of downward social mobility occasioned by death or bankruptcy. Its promise was that ‘a man who is rich today will not be poor tomorrow’.²³

The emergence of these new attitudes was signalled by the unprecedented success of The Society for Equitable Insurance on Lives and Survivorships, founded in 1762. The effective founder of this society was the mathematician James Dodson, who calculated premiums on the basis of the London bills of mortality. This marked a radical break with contemporary practice, in which premiums were set more by guesswork than by tables. It also transformed the position of the actuary, who until then had acted as no more than a secretary and book-keeper, and was without mathematical skills. The novelty of the enterprise was underlined by the grounds given by the Privy Council for rejecting the first application to form the society in 1761. It doubted the mathematical process by which ‘the chance of mortality is attempted to be reduced to a certain standard: this is a mere speculation, never yet tried in practice’.²⁴

Government interest in the collection of statistics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in nearly every case driven by military or fiscal needs. This is also partly why social insurance came to be of interest to the French state in the 1780s and after. At the end of the American War of Independence in 1783, the French government became increasingly anxious to extend its tax base. But in the absence of significant tax reform, governments were forced to continue to rely upon lotteries and life annuity contracts to cover the gap between expenditure and tax revenue. The pricing of such expedients demanded precise probabilistic skills and accurate mortality data. In this situation, Condorcet’s theoretical vision of the calculus of probabilities suddenly acquired a pressing practical relevance. Politically engaged mathematicians and scientists, pre-eminently Condorcet and Lavoisier, were able to exert influence on government policy and practice. In the 1780s the Academy of Sciences decided to print the population statistics which had been demanded annually from the intendants from 1772 and further to establish a public bureau of statistics as a department of the National Treasury.

At the same time, the success of the Society for Equitable Insurance in Britain had begun to attract a host of French imitators. This was also of financial interest to the government, which regarded its insurance monopoly as another lucrative source of income. From the mid 1780s, there were numerous schemes of social insurance proposed, some primarily humanitarian, others purely speculative. Once again, Condorcet, together with Lavoisier, Laplace and others, often sat on committees appointed by the Academy of Sciences to assess such schemes. Particularly important were the contributions made by Duvillard de Durand.

Like Condorcet himself, Duvillard had gained his first political experience, as a junior civil servant in the Controller-General’s office, in the 1774–6 reforming ministry of Condorcet’s hero, Turgot. Thereafter he worked in the Treasury and later in the statistical bureau of the Ministry of the Interior. In 1786, he impressed the Academy of Sciences with a report on debt and annuities. In 1788, he acted as the ‘profound mathematician’ in the employ of the French Compagnie Royale d’Assurance, modelled explicitly on the English Equitable Society, in its victorious bid for the insurance monopoly. Together with Condorcet and other members of the ancien règime liberal élite, Duvillard was a member of the Society of 1789 whose official aims were to develop ‘the social art’ and to apply its principles to the establishment of a new constitution. Other members of this exclusive and sometimes self-consciously elitist society included Lafayette, the duc de La Rochefoucauld (-d’Enville), the duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt and Dupont de Nemours and later Sieyès – all, apart from Sieyès, old allies of Condorcet. It was the Comité de Mendicité, appointed by the National Assembly and headed by the duc de La Rochefoucauld, that invited Duvillard to draw up a national plan for life insurance, the Plan d’une association de prévoyance. Of the three mathematicians appointed by the Academy of Sciences to review this plan, two – Condorcet and Vander-monde – were members of the Society of 1789.

But Condorcet did not merely vet or puff the schemes of others, he also put forward proposals of his own. One of his schemes was occasioned by a plan proposed in 1785 by André Jean de Larocque which suggested the establishment of a general savings fund into which working people invested regular amounts in return for annuities which would secure them against premature retirement or old age. Both Lavoisier and Condorcet proposed variants of this scheme. In 1790 Condorcet proposed ‘accumulating funds’ (caisses d’accumulation) which would both serve as a form of government borrowing and release funds for general investment by removing the need to hoard against the possibility of misfortune. The caisses d’accumulation would also create what Condorcet later described in the Sketch as ‘a rich, active, populous nation without the existence of a poor corrupted class’.²⁵

The radicalism of Condorcet and Paine was also distinctive in a second sense. It was a radicalism built upon the emancipatory possibilities of commercial society, as they had been elaborated in the works and proposals for reform of Adam Smith and Turgot. There were clear differences, however, in the philosophical assumptions which inspired these two thinkers. Turgot believed that citizens had rights which ‘exist independently of society’ and ‘form its necessary elements’. He was also a rationalist who believed that the process of decision-making in public assemblies should be designed not merely to produce expressions of political will but to act as a vehicle for the discovery of truth. He was a strong advocate of universal education, not simply as an answer to the ever-shifting character of the demand for skills attending the development of the division of labour, but as a way of inculcating a civic spirit among the citizenry. He also believed in the perfectibility of the human species.²⁶

By contrast, Smith avoided discussion of rights which he associated with Locke and opted for a markedly more minimalist account of the political preconditions of a functioning commercial state. He wrote in 1755: ‘[L]ittle else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice.’²⁷ He followed Hume in rejecting a contractarian account of the origins of government. Political obligation did not derive from a contract, but was the result of either natural deference to established authority or a regard for ‘common or general interest’ or ‘public utility’. Similarly, Smith was not a rationalist. ‘The natural progress of opulence’ had been brought about, not because reason had played an ever-increasing part in human affairs, but because the vanity of feudal lords had led them to barter away their retainers in exchange for ‘baubles and trinkets’. The delusion that wealth and power would bring happiness ‘keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind’.²⁸

Finally, Smith had no faith in the perfectibility of mankind. On the contrary, he became increasingly fearful of the possibility of an attempt at wholesale reform by a doctrinaire ‘man of system’. For, however much he cherished the fact that ‘the lowest and most despised member of civilised society’ enjoyed ‘superior affluence and abundance’ when compared with ‘the most respected and active savage’, it remained the case that ‘laws and government may be considered … as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor and to preserve to themselves the inequality of goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor’.²⁹ Deference and admiration for the rich kept an exchange society in motion, but it was a fragile construction. Therefore, despite his wholehearted praise for the growing moral and political independence of members of commercial society, Smith’s account was never free from an undertow of unease: a nervous dread about what would happen if it became true, as Paine claimed in 1797, that ‘the superstitious awe, the enslaving reverence that formerly surrounded affluence is passing away in all countries leaving the possessor of property to the convulsion of accidents’.³⁰

Neither Turgot nor Condorcet could have felt comfortable with a theory of history which placed so much weight upon unintended consequences. Turgot earlier in his career had appeared to believe that history was a sort of theodicy in which evil was compelled to contribute towards the progress of the good: but as a reformer, he considered that the source of bad customs was bad laws. Without a residue of Christian belief to defend, Condorcet believed straightforwardly that all moral and political errors were the result of philosophical errors.³¹ But these convictions did not pose an obstacle to their common acceptance of the basic premiss of Smith’s ‘science of the legislator’: that the well-being of a state was commensurate with the well-being of the individuals who composed it; that most regulation only benefited privileged groups; and that the surest advice to ‘the legislator’ was to trust to our common ‘desire of bettering our condition’.³² From this shared starting point, Smith and Turgot drew similar practical conclusions. According to Dugald Stewart, writing in 1793–4 about Smith’s encounters with Turgot in Paris in 1765–6, ‘the satisfaction he enjoyed in the conversation of Turgot may easily be imagined. Their opinions on the most essential points of political economy were the same; and they were both animated by the same zeal for the best interests of mankind.’³³

This closeness of outlook was reproduced in the arguments of Condorcet and Paine. Condorcet remained a political disciple of Turgot. Fêted as a mathematician from his twenties, Condorcet, like Laplace, became a protégé of the mathematician and editor of the Encyclopedia D’Alembert. It was through D’Alembert that he was admitted to the Academy of Sciences and introduced to the salon of Mlle Lespinasse, where he met Turgot. He assisted in Turgot’s reforming ministry of 1774–6 and remained in constant correspondence with the ex-Controller General after his fall. When Turgot died, he wrote an admiring study, Vie de Monsieur Turgot, in 1783.

Like Smith and Turgot, Condorcet was an enthusiast for free trade, on the grounds that ‘the natural tendency’ of wealth to equality would be enhanced if ‘free trade and industry were allowed to remove the advantages that accrued wealth derives from any restrictive law or fiscal privilege’.³⁴ On the question of education, however, it was the ideas of Turgot, and before him the Physiocrats, which were to the fore. In the Memoire sur les municipalités (drafted by Dupont de Nemours in 1775 as a digest of Turgot’s ideas and intended as a submission to the young Louis XVI), it was proposed that a national educational council be set up to direct public instruction according to uniform principles. The aim would be to produce a more enlightened citizenry ‘submitting to authority not from fear but through reason’.³⁵ Many of these ideas reappeared in more radical and less authoritarian form in Condorcet’s proposals for public instruction in 1791–2. The aim was that ‘each individual be sufficiently instructed to exercise for himself the rights guaranteed him under the law, without subjecting himself blindly to the reason of another’.³⁶

Condorcet followed Smith in remarking that the more mechanical occupations became, ‘the greater the danger that the people will contract that stupidity which is natural to men limited to a small number of ideas, all of the same kind’. ‘Instruction’ in place of apprenticeship was the only remedy for this evil, ‘which is all the more dangerous in a state to the extent that the laws have established greater equality’.³⁷ But it was also in this context that the programmes of Turgot and Smith diverged. In one of his few explicit criticisms, Condorcet criticised Smith’s proposal that public regulation and financial support should leave instruction itself to a competition between different churches. Condorcet explained this as a rare lapse in the exactitude and precision which governed the rest of Smith’s work.³⁸ Condorcet wished to exclude the church from education, not for specifically anti-Christian reasons, but for the same reason that Turgot had already put to Louis XVI in 1776: ‘Your kingdom, Sire, is of this world. The purpose of education, therefore, was to fit the citizen for his rights and duties as a member of civil society’.³⁹

In the case of Paine, evidence of an acquaintance with Smith and enthusiasm about the future of commercial society is scattered plentifully throughout his writings. Paine in Rights of Man: Part One, contrasted ‘the disorderly cast’ of Burke’s argument compared with Smith’s reasoning ‘from minutiae to magnitude’. He clearly built some of his picture both of the power of the feudal barony as the result of conquest in English history and of ‘the progress which the peaceful arts of agriculture, manufacture and commerce have made beneath such a long accumulating load of discouragement and oppression’ from a reading of Book Three of The Wealth of Nations.⁴⁰ More specifically, Paine’s proposals of progressive taxation in Rights of Man: Part Two, and of death duties in Agrarian Justice as a means of combating entails and primogeniture, if not actually advocated in Smith, were quite in the spirit of Smith’s criticism: ‘[T]hey are founded upon the most absurd of all suppositions, the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth and all that it possesses; but that the property of the present generation should be restrained and regulated according to the fancy of those who died perhaps five hundred years ago.’⁴¹ So much for Burke’s appeal to the principle of prescription!

What is also striking, however, is the meticulous way in which Paine distinguished his own case for ‘agrarian justice’ from the many theories of ‘agrarian law’, from Spence to Babeuf, resting on an appeal to a primitive right to the earth in common. ‘Nothing could be more unjust than Agrarian Law in a country improved by cultivation.’ Paine proposed a tax in the form of a ‘ground rent’ to be paid as recompense for the loss to the community of access to the land in its original unimproved state. But, as he recognised, ‘it is never possible to go from the civilised to the natural state’ since ‘man in a natural state, subsisting by hunting’ would have required ‘ten times the quantity of land to range over to procure himself sustenance, than would support him in a civilised state, where the earth is cultivated’.⁴²

Starting from a future-oriented theory of commercial society, this distinctively modern form of radicalism enjoyed a number of advantages. Not the least important was the way in which it enabled Condorcet and Paine to get beyond the repetitive terms of the eighteenth-century debate about luxury and poverty, virtue and self-interest. In a passage not finally included in the Sketch, Condorcet associated the pursuit of ‘superfluities’ both with the progress of commercial society and with intellectual advance. He wrote of ‘that need for ideas and new feelings which is the prime mover in the progress of the human mind … that taste for the superfluities of luxury which is the spur of industry’ and ‘that spirit of curiosity which eagerly penetrates the veil nature has drawn across her secrets’. In his 1791 essay on ‘Public Instruction’, he stated that from the perspective of ‘the equality of wellbeing’, it was ‘irrelevant to the general happiness that a few men enjoy more elaborate pleasures as a result of their wealth provided that men can satisfy their needs with facility, attaining in their housing, their dress, their food, in all the habits of their daily life, a measure of health and cleanliness, and even of comfort and attractiveness’. He favoured simpler manners, but not as the product of ‘misguided notions of austerity’. As for self-interest, it was only a problem if viewed statically. In the future, the perfection of laws and public institutions, consequent upon the progress of the sciences, would accomplish ‘the reconciliation, the identification of the interests of each with the interests of all’.⁴⁴

Paine was equally confident that reform did not require moral improvement. ‘As to the mere theoretical reformation, I have never preached it up. The most effectual process is that of improving the condition of man by means of his interest.’ He believed this to be possible because ‘all the great laws of society are laws of nature. Those of trade and commerce, whether with respect to the intercourse of individuals or of nations, are laws of mutual and reciprocal interest. They are followed and obeyed, because it is the interest of the parties so to do’; and in an aside similar to Condorcet, he stated, ‘I care not how affluent some may be, providing none are miserable in consequence of it.’ Indeed, in a neat challenge to the conventional understanding of asceticism which informed government and radicals alike, he wrote, ‘I know not why any plant or herb of the field should be a greater luxury in one country than another.’ But ‘an overgrown estate in either is a luxury at all times, and, as such, is the proper object of taxation’.⁴⁵

This removal of moral opprobrium from the language of ‘luxury’ was not characteristic of most forms of radicalism. Until the publication of The Wealth of Nations, it was difficult to disentangle the notion of a polity based upon moderate gradations of wealth from the idea of an austere and virtuous republic. The terms of the debate had been set at the beginning of the eighteenth century in the writings of Fénelon and Mandeville.⁴⁶ The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses by Archbishop Fénelon, the famous critic of the last years of Louis XIV, was published in 1699, translated almost immediately into English and became one of the most popular and reprinted books of the century. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, William Godwin claimed that the just man should rescue Fénelon from the flames in preference to his own brother or father.⁴⁷ In Fénelon’s critique, ‘luxury’ had been associated with the extremes of inequality. The book described how Telemachus, under the guidance of a disguised Minerva, had learnt the art of virtuous kingship. His reform of Salentum (France) depicted a programme for growth without luxury. Foreign trade would be restricted to a single and highly regulated port, sumptuary laws would eliminate the craving for ‘superfluities’, manufacture would be restricted to ‘real’ needs and urban workers in the luxury trades would be resettled on the land.

Mandeville’s response, The Fable of the Bees of 1714, was a defence of the existing commercial economy of Orange and Hanoverian England against Fénelon’s neo-Jacobite appeal. It pointed out that ‘luxury’ or ‘superfluities’ were not confined to the rich, but was only an invidious way of describing the new needs which developed with civilisation itself: a constant development in which what was first thought ‘superfluous’ soon became ‘necessary’. The more contentious part of his message was directed at the hypocrisy of the language in which commercial society was defended. Mandeville maintained that morality and justice were simply devices of the rich to deceive the poor. The Christian values which supposedly underpinned society were a mere façade. Mankind could not be governed by reason and sympathy, only by flattery and deceit. If Christian moderation or self-denial were really to triumph, as pious apologias professed to desire, the result would be a more equal, but much poorer society, since equality and poverty went together. The paradox of a commercial society was that private vices – the incessant quest for luxury and love of display, an entirely self-regarding though hypocritically veiled self-interest – produced public virtue, a dynamic and innovative economy which kept the poor in constant employment.

In at least two respects, the terms of this debate help to explain Smith’s importance in shaping the subsequent radicalism of Condorcet and Paine. Firstly, if a new form of radicalism were to be possible, there had to be something else between the agrarian austerity of Salentum and the selfish free-for-all celebrated by Mandeville. Secondly, no form of radicalism could tolerate the position of the rich if all they were supposed to do was engage in conspicuous consumption and spendthrift hedonism.

On the first point, what had made Mandeville’s depiction of commercial society so unappetising was his denial (following Hobbes) that sociability was natural to man. This meant that justice and morality were no more than the inventions of ‘skilful politicians’. Smith denied that society was simply built upon this form of individualism. Although vanity and delusion in man’s nature could not be denied, human desire for betterment was not solely displayed in naked self-interest. Man did not merely love praise, he was capable of actions which were praiseworthy. Through language, man was endowed with a capacity for mutual sympathy and understanding. This capacity to put oneself in the place of another elaborated into the idea of an ‘impartial spectator’ formed the basis of Smith’s theory of ‘moral sentiment’. The impartial spectator, ‘the man within the breast’, was a shorthand for the way in which the judgement of others became interiorised within the self and acted as a constant check upon the unqualified egoism which might otherwise prevail. The value of this idea as a way of getting beyond the antinomies presented by Fénelon and Mandeville became apparent during the French Revolution. The radical search for some alternative to Christian ethics or ancient republicanism led to the translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1798 by Sophie de Grouchy, Condorcet’s widow.⁴⁸

The second point highlights Smith’s relevance to changing eighteenth-century attitudes towards chance. The logic of Mandeville’s anti-ascetic argument led him to praise all forms of conspicuous consumption provided only that expenditure occurred within the confines of the domestic economy. Somewhat perversely, this now meant that the spendthrift became hero and that the unbridled gambling of the South Sea Bubble era appeared to acquire a solid economic justification. One of the most important advances made by The Wealth of Nations was to demonstrate that, while the employment-generating function of the consumption of the rich still needed to be acknowledged, the longer term progress of an exchange economy was dependent upon something more solid than prodigal expenditure. From his Paris visit of 1763–4, Smith learnt to distinguish between ‘unproductive labour’ – that used up in consumption and display – and ‘useful and productive labour’, which was the product of investment and the true measure of a nation’s wealth. The development of the division of labour depended upon capital accumulation and capital accumulation depended on investment.⁴⁹

Deferral of immediate consumption was therefore not mere miserliness, but evidence of an aspiration to treat the future as something other than the capricious goddess Fortuna of Renaissance statesmen or the dazzling uncertainties of the eighteenth-century gaming table. Just as the associations of insurance began to shift in the 1760s, an analogous change occurred in conceptions of commercial society, highlighted by the crucial position now accorded to investment in Smith’s conception of the economy as a whole. By the 1780s, links between these changes were becoming more common. One example in France, an inspiration of Condorcet’s suggested caisses d’accumulation in 1790, was André Larocque’s 1785 proposal for a caisse générale des épargnes du peuple, which would invest funds formed by regular contributions by working people and return the proceeds in the form of annuities to be paid out in old age or as a consequence of early retirement.

The arrival of new ideas about the control over chance and new future-oriented conceptions of commercial society in the 1760s and 1770s, which provided some of the preconditions for the new radicalism, may help to explain the shape of Condorcet’s and Paine’s interest in insurance. What this does not explain, however, is the comprehensive national scope of these schemes and the radicalism of the redistribution of income which would underpin them.

On the question of social insurance, the uniqueness of Paine’s proposals can be highlighted by comparing them with those of another radical and one-time partial mentor of Paine, the famous Welsh dissenting preacher Richard Price. Price was, among his other accomplishments, a distinguished mathematician and pioneer of social insurance. After Philip Dodson’s death, he had been called in to help the Equitable Society and had selected a new series of mortality tables based on Northampton and calculated the Society’s premiums. He remained the Society’s actuarial expert until he passed over the position to his nephew in 1782. Price and Paine had been closely allied on the American question and Price may have been responsible for Paine’s belief that poverty in civilised countries was increasing. But from the 1770s to the 1790s there was a growing divergence between their views on the future of commercial society. Price’s view of the economy remained close to that of Fénelon, and to the English commonwealth tradition. He was therefore little affected by Smith, who considered Price to be a poor calculator and a ‘most superficial philosopher’.

Price thought not only that poverty was increasing, but that population was declining, that only certain forms of commerce were compatible with virtue, and that luxury was enervating the nation. His advice to the Americans was to avoid foreign trade and luxury. Finally, and most importantly, his view of the poor was moralistic and conventional. Although he backed various parliamentary proposals for social insurance, notably those of Masères in 1773 and Acland in 1786, these schemes were not comprehensive, nor did they replace the Poor Rate system or contain any redistributory component.⁵⁰ His proposals did not look forward to twentieth-century schemes of social insurance, but rather to the mid-Victorian Gladstonian legislation promoting provident savings banks.

There was also an equally clear gap between Smith’s approach to the question of equality and the radical use of his writings to justify the reduction of inequality by directly political means. The whole point of Smith’s famous sentence about ‘the invisible hand’ when it was introduced into his Theory of Moral Sentiments was that, although commercial society perpetuated and reinforced inequality, it also just as consistently mitigated its effects by the ways in which it channelled the expenditure of the rich. For, according to Smith, it led the rich ‘to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants’.⁵¹ For Smith, in other words, the progress of ‘natural liberty’ stood in place of a politics of redistribution.

To cite these contrasts is only another way of making the obvious point that what changed the perspective of radicalism between the 1760s and the 1790s were the American and French Revolutions: particularly the revolt of the American colonies, the declaration of the American Republic and the defeat of the British by the Americans and the French, in all of which Paine played a prominent part. Of special importance was the effect of the American Revolution upon radical opinion in the decade before the French Revolution. For the impact made by this momentous sequence of events upon radical thinking in France was quite different from that in Britain. In fact, the American Revolution opened up a fundamental divergence between the horizons of radicals in the two countries, which was to have a lasting effect. It also helps to explain why British radicalism, despite its Gallic sympathies, found it difficult to fathom the direction of French thinking once the Revolution had begun.

In Britain, the effect of the loss of the American colonies was to reinforce the already widespread assumption, shared by radicals and Whigs alike, that since the accession of George III in 1760 the balance of the constitution had been upset. The constitution had been undermined by the secret ambitions of the executive through its sinister employment of patronage and corruption. Regeneration, narrowly interpreted by the Whigs, meant ‘economical reform’ – the reduction of posts and sinecures at the government’s disposal. Among radicals, it meant more frequent parliaments and a broader or more representative electorate. It could even mean manhood suffrage. ‘No taxation without representation’ had been the slogan of the colonists; and it was not difficult to extend this principle to Britain, where each paid taxes and each possessed in his (or very rarely her) labour a property, so it was claimed, with as much right to be represented as any other form of property.

But although the American crisis inspired novel demands among a minority of radicals, the majority, especially after the end of the war in 1783, were on the defensive. Radicals were demoralised by the Fox–North coalition, widely regarded as a shameful display of political opportunism and they showed little appetite for fundamental change. Thus, despite Whig and radical agitation against George III’s abuse of the constitution, no one proposed that Britain should follow the American example and become a republic. Richard Price in 1787 rejected the accusation of republicanism in this sense as ‘a very groundless suspicion’ and added, ‘What I here say of myself I believe to be true of the whole body of British subjects among Protestant Dissenters.’ He regarded ‘our mixed form of government’ as ‘better adapted than any other to this country, and in theory excellent’.⁵² In a mixed form of government, each element – King, Lords and Commons – fulfilled its legitimate function. The call for the ‘purification’, or ‘restoration’, of this constitution was socially cautious. It was in tune with a political climate in which calls for moral reform were far more widespread than political demands. In Britain, the 1780s was marked by Whig and radical division, by the revival of a new form of Toryism led by Pitt and by the growing strength of evangelicalism in the church.

Among French reformers, by contrast, respect for the English mixed form of government diminished. Admiration for the English constitution and English letters had been widespread during the time of Montesquieu and Voltaire, but the effect of the American Revolution and British defeat was to bring to the fore currents of thought never impressed by the English model of constitutional freedom. The writings of the Physiocrats in the 1760s provided one powerful source of criticism of mixed government. However contentious their proposal of a legal despot standing above the contending interests and imposing laws of ‘natural order’, many agreed with their assumption that only a unified source of power could withstand the entrenched interests of the aristocracy. There was also growing agreement with their belief that the dilution of power entailed in mixed government, with its attendant evils of privilege, corruption and disorder, was pushing Britain into decline.⁵³ The decline in the prestige of mixed government also reinforced an egalitarian and anti-aristocratic strand of criticism in France. The entrenched assumption common to so many forms of early modern republicanism of the need for a virtuous aristocracy gave way to a more radical questioning of the aristocracy’s political and economic raison d’être. Writing in 1786, Condorcet observed that ‘the spectacle of the equality that reigns in the United States and which assures its peace and prosperity, can also be useful to Europe. We no longer believe here, in truth, that nature has divided the human race into three or four orders, like the class of solipeds, and that one of these orders is also condemned to work much and eat little.’⁵⁴

Finally, the success of the Americans led to a renewal and modernisation of republican thought. By the late 1780s, the idea that republics were largely confined to the ancient world and were suitable only in small homogeneous city states – still unchallenged in Britain – was no longer universally accepted in France. In particular, the Société Gallo-Américaine argued that the republicanism of the United States should be adopted in Europe, while from 1787 the inner core of the future Girondins – the group gathered around Brissot and Clavière – blamed the aristocracy for the crisis of the French state and called for the creation of a modern commercial republic freed from the hierarchy of rank.

Paine visited Paris several times in the 1780s and, through Benjamin Franklin and the Société des Amis des Noirs, was acquainted with both Condorcet and Morellet and the group around Brissot. This together with his American experience also explains why Paine’s radicalism was so different from that of his British contemporaries.⁵⁵ As Richard Whatmore has recently demonstrated, the difficulty of situating Paine’s thought largely disappears once it is seen that his principal sources of inspiration were American and French, rather than English.⁵⁶ Paine had criticised mixed government as far back as Common Sense in 1776.

Almost alone among British radicals in the 1780s and 1790s, Paine was openly contemptuous of the supposed virtues of the English mixed constitution. ‘In mixed governments there is no responsibility: the parts cover each other till responsibility is lost; and the corruption that moves the machine, contrives at the same time its own escape.’ English government was without popular origins; it had begun with the conquest and remained a ‘despotism’ which the vaunted liberties of Parliament had done little to mitigate. Subjects were left with nothing more than the right of petitioning, but so far as Parliament itself was concerned, ‘though the parts may embarrass each other, the whole has no bounds’.⁵⁷

Secondly, and again in line with the French, Paine was openly hostile to the aristocracy. In Paine’s opinion, what was required in Britain was not the restoration of a ‘balanced constitution’, but ‘a revolution in the system of government’. ‘Conquest and tyranny, at some earlier period, dispossessed man of his rights, and he is now recovering them.’ The aristocracy arose out of governments founded on conquest. They ‘are not the farmers who work the land, and raise the produce, but are the mere consumers of the rent; and when compared with the active world are the drones, a seraglio of males, who neither collect the honey nor form the hive, but exist only for lazy enjoyment’.⁵⁸

But in at least one crucial respect Paine remained closer to his American experience than to the working assumptions of his French allies. This concerned the meaning of the word republic. For as far back as Common Sense, to Paine this meant a society without a monarchy or hereditary succession. ‘Monarchy and succession have laid (not this or that kingdom only) but the world in blood and ashes.’⁵⁹ In France, at least until 1791, there was little support for a republic in this sense. In the 1780s, Condorcet had thought of himself as a republican in the same sense as his mentor, Turgot. Being a republican meant governing in the interests of the public good, which was quite possible under the aegis of an enlightened monarch. For, as he stated in his observations on the American Revolution in 1786, ‘in terms of public happiness, a republic with tyrannical laws can fall far short of a monarchy’.⁶⁰

In this and in other respects, the American model was not thought by most radicals to be transferable to Europe. First, it was argued, America was not really a large modern state comparable to European monarchies, but a federation of small republics. Secondly, its population – slaves aside – lived in conditions of relative equality and ease without the burden of a hereditary aristocracy and a feudal past. Finally, limitless access to land and agricultural self-sufficiency meant that America was not cursed with the extremes of wealth and poverty found in European commercial societies.

Up until the early years of the Revolution these remained basic but largely academic points of difference between Paine and his French friends. Whatever the ultimate destiny of the French nation, few before the summer of 1791 wished to question the credentials of the new ‘King of the French’. But on 21 June 1791, the unanticipated happened. Louis fled Paris with his family, leaving a note reneging upon everything to which he had formally assented since the fall of the Bastille. Two days later, on 23 June, he was captured at Varennes and brought back to Paris. Now the question of the monarchy became an immediate practical issue. Faced with the double dealing of the king, Paine’s closest associates, Condorcet, Brissot, Clavière and others, came round to his position. They founded a journal, Le Républicain, which argued that national unity necessitated a republic and Louis’s expulsion.

The position adopted by Paine, Condorcet and others was challenged by the Abbé Sieyès in an article published in Le Moniteur on 6 July 1791. For Sieyès, who followed Hobbes on the question of sovereignty, the essential question was: who possesses the final power of decision-making. A monarch was better suited than a senate, weighed down ‘under a multitude of Reports of Committees’, to make ‘the individual decision’. The choice to be made was not therefore between republic and monarchy, but between what he called monarchy and ‘polyarchy’. Was the executive to be appointed by a monarch or a national assembly? Ought the apex of the state be considered as a ‘platform’ or as a ‘point’? ‘Polyarchy’, Sieyès feared, was likely to lead to the formation of a new irresponsible senatorial aristocracy or of an elective mode ‘sometimes accompanied with a civil war’.⁶¹

These questions, rather than the objections of Burke, set the agenda of Rights of Man: Part Two, which Paine composed in the autumn and winter of 1791–2. This was what also accounted for both Paine’s radical reshaping of Smith’s account of commercial society and his dramatic proposals to end poverty through a programme of social insurance and redistributory taxation. One chapter was explicitly addressed to Sieyès, but its title – ‘Of the Old and New Systems of Government’ – really defined the book as a whole. Paine’s aim was to build his case for a republic without a monarch upon the example of America, ‘the only real republic in character and in practice’. But in order to make that case, he had to demonstrate how American conditions could be made applicable to Europe, and in the first instance England.⁶²

Sieyès had assumed that without a single and coherent locus of decision-making, order might break down into chaos. Paine in response argued that a ‘great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government’, and that ‘the mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all parts of the community upon each other, create the great chain of connection which holds it together’. In order to minimise the importance of Sieyès’ objection, Paine made use of a radically simplified reading of Smith. The ‘unnatural and retrograde order’ which Smith blamed for the bellicose interstate politics of mercantilism, Paine simply equated with the rule of the aristocracy and the legacy of conquest. On the other hand, Smith’s ‘natural progress of opulence’, which had wondrously continued ‘beneath the long accumulating load of discouragement and oppression’, only awaited the removal of ‘government on the old system’. ‘Old’ government supported itself ‘by keeping up a system of war’; the ‘New System of Government’ was not the product of conquest, but ‘a delegation of power for the common benefit of society’.⁶³

It was ‘the old system of government’ which was responsible for the ‘hordes of miserable poor with which old countries abound’. The poverty of the poor was mainly the result of the taxation exacted by ‘the old system of government’ for the purpose of waging war. Smith in The Wealth of Nations argued that the advantages of living in modern civilised societies could easily be observed by comparing the situation of ‘an industrious and frugal peasant’ in Europe with that of ‘many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand native savages’. But, according to Paine, under existing conditions this was not true: ‘[A] great portion of mankind, in what are called civilised countries, are in a state of poverty and wretchedness, far below the condition of an Indian.’⁶⁴ Only when the old system of government had disappeared could the full potential of ‘civilisation’ be realised.

Like Condorcet, Paine strongly associated progress with universal education and the transition from superstition to reason. Monarchy could not be part of the new order according to Paine, because the monarchy, the aristocracy and the hereditary principle were associated with ignorance. ‘Kings succeed each other, not as rationals, but as animals. Can we then be surprised at the abject state of the human mind in monarchical countries when the government itself is formed on such an abject levelling system?’ Perhaps, somewhat tongue in cheek, Paine inverted the conventional argument which associated the republic with small states and the ancient world, by arguing that the modern principle of representation, unknown to the ancients, was perfectly suited to a large commercial republic, or to what Sieyès would have called a ‘polyarchic’ form. For only this form could take proper account of the complexities of the modern division of labour ‘which requires a knowledge … which can be had only from the various parts of society’. ‘It is an assemblage of practical knowledge, which no individual can possess’, and therefore as ill-adapted to monarchy as to ancient ‘simple’ democracy. This was principle of American ‘representation ingrafted upon democracy’. ‘What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude.’⁶⁵

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the possibility of a republic like that of the United States depended upon a rough equality and moderate differences of wealth. In Europe, Sieyès’ spectre of civil war and a new aristocracy could be prevented if measures were taken to remove the power of the aristocracy or prevent the emergence of a new aristocracy in its place. Together with aristocracies went the manipulation of a factional and ignorant poor. In England, Paine noted, primogeniture was ‘one of the principal sources of corruption at elections’.⁶⁶ This was why both Condorcet and Paine attached as much importance to universal education and redistributive taxation as they did to the provision of social security. Together, intervention in these three areas would create the material and mental conditions in which a modern republic could flourish in Europe. The more conservative plan proposed by Sieyès would mean not only the retention of the monarchy, but also the continuation of a distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizenship as a way of keeping the poor at bay.

But according to Paine, this was not the way to ensure the security and stability of the republic. Similar restrictions of the franchise after 1795, as Paine argued in Agrarian Justice in 1797, led to Babouvist and royalist plots. The plan he proposed to the Directory in Agrarian Justice was designed to consolidate support for the revolution and preserve the rich from depradation. The argument was similar in Part Two of the Rights of Man: the social measures were designed to ensure that ‘the poor as well as the rich, will then be interested in the support of government, and the cause and apprehension of riots and tumults will cease’.⁶⁷ His thinking in this area had no doubt been helped, not only by the general proposals of Condorcet, but also by the particular deliberations of the Comité de Mendicité under the chairmanship of the duc de La Rochefoucauld, in which relief was treated as an aspect of citizenship. A summary of their proceedings compiled in 1792 by Bernard d’Airy declared that ‘every man has a right to subsistence through work, if he is able-bodied; and to free assistance if he is unable to work’. Assistance was no longer to be regarded as a ‘favour’, but as a ‘duty’ and a ‘national responsibility’.⁶⁸ In France, given the hostility of much of the clergy to the new régime, it had been seen as a matter of political urgency to secure the loyalty of the poor to the new order by removing welfare from the control of the church.

This, then, was the reasoning which lay behind what the British critics perceived as the most threatening and subversive message of the French Revolution. Without a corrupt and powerful aristocracy to bribe the poor and without a priesthood to inhibit their powers to reason, but with an educated citizenry able to both adjust to the changing pattern of the economy and take seriously its civic responsibilities, a new era would begin. As Paine read Smith, the growth of commerce had brought ‘the old system of government to its present crisis: if commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable, it would extirpate the system of war and produce a revolution in the uncivilised state of governments’. ‘The present age will hereafter merit to be called “the Age of Reason”, and the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world.’⁶⁹

The first attempt to plan a world without poverty took shape, not as a response to problems of industry, but as part of an ambition to transplant the conditions of success of the young American republic to European soil. Although it was presented as a plan to overhaul the English tax system and abolish the Poor Rate, it was elaborated as part of a debate in France about what should happen after the king had gone back on his acceptance of the Revolution.⁷⁰ What was intended was not a welfare state, but the assembling of political conditions in which an informed citizenry could govern itself according to reason.

The proposals put forward by Condorcet and Paine built upon two major intellectual and institutional advances of the second half of the eighteenth century, together with a major shift in the radical stance towards the aristocracy. It was a programme which employed ‘the calculus of probabilities’ to make possible a programme which dispensed with the Poor Law and broke down the traditional notion of poverty into a number of predictable problems to be expected in the lifecycle of the average citizen. It made use of Smith’s focus on investment rather than consumption as the crucial feature in the development of commercial societies to suggest how individuals could exert greater control over the course of their lives. It also enabled a sharpening of some of the anti-aristocratic implications of Smith’s argument, in particular an implicit distinction between this system of war and ‘the civil state’, that is, the operation of the parish and the judicial system – all areas which Hegel would characterise as belonging to the sphere of ‘the police’ in civil society rather than to the political state as such.

Finally, the proposals of Condorcet and Paine appeared as the culmination of a growing trend from the 1740s to incorporate the poor within civil society, perhaps as a result of four decades of economic growth and relative prosperity. This meant treating them as entitled to education, high wages and ‘the decencies’ of life. The emphasis was upon the commonality of mankind – the narrow differences which Smith discerned between the prince and the street porter – on the humanity of the poor and their capacity to participate in the culture of their more fortunate contemporaries. To consider them as fellow citizens, as they were commonly being considered in revolutionary countries, was no more than a logical next step in the process. But from the mid-1790s this trend was brought to an abrupt halt as British public opinion was made aware of the true extent of the political, social and religious radicalism of the French Revolution.