The idea of an unconditional basic income has three historical roots. The idea of a minimum income first appeared at the beginning of the 16th century. The idea of an unconditional one-off grant first appeared at the end of the 18th century. And the two were combined for the first time to form the idea of an unconditional basic income near the middle of the 19th century.
1. Minimum income: the humanists More (1516) and Vives (1526)
Raphael's cure for theft - The idea of a minimum income guaranteed by the government to all the members of a particular community is far older than the more specific and radical idea of an unconditional basic income. With the advent of the Renaissance, the task of looking after the welfare of poor people ceased to be regarded as the exclusive preserve of the Church and of charitable individuals. Some of the so-called humanists started playing with the idea of a minimum income in the form of public assistance. In Thomas More's (1478-1535) Utopia, published in Louvain in 1516, the Portuguese traveller Raphael Nonsenso, walking on the central square of the City of Antwerp, narrates a conversation he says he had with John Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Such a scheme, he argued, would be a more astute way of fighting theft than sentencing thieves to death, which had the unpleasant side effect of increasing the murder rate.
"I once happened to be dining with the Cardinal when a certain English lawyer was there. I forgot how the subject came up, but he was speaking with great enthusiasm about the stern measures that were then being taken against thieves. 'We're hanging them all over the place', he said. 'I've seen as many as twenty on a single gallows. And that's what I find so odd. Considering how few of them get away with it, how come we are still plagued with so many robbers?' 'What's odd about it?', I asked - for I never hesitated to speak freely in front of the Cardinal. 'This method of dealing with thieves is both unjust and undesirable. As a punishment, it's too severe, and as a deterrent, it's quite ineffective. Petty larceny isn't bad enough to deserve the death penalty. And no penalty on earth will stop people from stealing, if it's their only way of getting food. In this respect, you English, like most other nations, remind me of these incompetent schoolmasters, who prefer caning their pupils to teaching them. Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody's under the frightful necessity of becoming, first a thief, and then a corpse."
A pragmatic theological plea for public assistance - It is, however, Thomas More's close friend and fellow humanist, Johannes Ludovicus Vives (1492-1540), who should be regarded as the true father of the idea of a guaranteed minimum income, as he was the first to work out a detailed scheme and develop a comprehensive argument for it, based both on theological and pragmatic considerations. Juan Luis Vives was born in Valencia in a family of converted Jews. He left Spain in 1509 to escape the Inquisition, studied at the Sorbonne but soon got fed up by the conservative scholastic philosophy that was prevailing in Paris at the time and moved on to Bruges in 1512, and in 1517 to Louvain, one of the main centres of the humanist movement, where he was appointed professor in 1520. He taught more briefly at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but spent most of his adult life in the city of Bruges, where his statue can still be seen on the bank of one of the main canals. In a memoir addressed to the Mayor of Bruges in 1526 under the title De Subventione Pauperum (On the Assistance to the Poor), he proposed that the municipal government should be given the responsibility of securing a subsistence minimum to all its residents, not on grounds of justice but for the sake of a more effective exercise of morally required charity. The assistance scheme would be closely targeted to the poor. Indeed it is because of their ability to target them more efficiently that public officials should be put in charge of poor relief. To be entitled to the latter, a poor person's poverty must not be undeserved, but he must deserve the help he gets by proving his willingness to work.
"Even those who have dissipated their fortunes in dissolute living - through gaming, harlots, excessive luxury, gluttony and gambling - should be given food, for no one should die of hunger. However, smaller rations and more irksome tasks should be assigned to them so that they may be an example to others. [...] They must not die of hunger, but they must feel itspangs." Whatever the source of poverty, the poor are expected to work. "Even to the old and the stupid, it should be possible to give a job they can learn in a few days, such as digging holes, getting water or carrying something on their shoulders." The point of requiring such toil from the beneficiaries of the scheme is in part to make them contribute to the funding of the latter. But it is also to make sure that "being busy and engrossed in their work, they will abstain from those wicked thoughts and actions in which they would engage if they were idle". Indeed, this concern should consistently extend to those born rich: Emperor Justinian was right, according to Vives, "in imposing a law that forbade everyone to spend his life in idleness". If the poor cannot be parasites, why could the rich?
At two junctures, Vives anticipates some insights that will drive later thinkers in the direction of a basic income. "All these things God created, He put them in our large home, the world, without surrounding them with walls and gates, so that they would be common to all His children." Hence, unless he helps those in need, whoever has appropriated some of the gifts of nature" is only a thief condemned by natural law, because he occupies and keeps what nature has not created exclusively for himself". Further, Vives insists that relief should come "before need induces some mad or wicked action, before the face of the needy blushes from shame... The benefaction that precedes the hard and thankless necessity of asking is more pleasant and more worthy of thanks". But he explicitly discards the more radical conclusion that it would be even better if "the gift were made before the need arose", which is exactly what an adequate basic income would achieve.
From Vives to the Poor Laws - Vives's plea explicitly inspired a scheme put into place a few years later by the Flemish municipality of Ypres. It also contributed to inspiring incipient thinking and action about forms of poor relief, from the School of Salamanca of Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto (from 1536 onwards) to England's Poor Laws (from 1576 onwards). Less well remembered than his friends and protectors Erasmus and More, Vives's pioneering thinking on the welfare state has been recently rediscovered.
He is also still remembered in his Alma Mater, the University of Louvain: A stone from his house has been incorporated in the wall of the "Universitaire Halle", which houses the rectorate in the old town of Leuven. And the meeting room of the Chaire Hoover in the new town of Louvain-la-Neuve, where the Collectif Charles Fourier met in 1984-86 to discuss basic income and organise the founding meeting of the Basic Income European Network, has been named "Salle Vives".
Vives' s tract is the first systematic expression of a long tradition of social thinking and institutional reform focused on the public exercise of compassion through government-organised means-tested schemes directed at the poor. Despite the difficulties and doubts aroused by the operation of the poor laws, the thinkers of the nouveau régime made public assistance an essential function of the government. Thus, Montesquieu (L'Esprit des Lois (1748), section XXIII/29, Paris: Flammarion, Vol.2, p. 134): "The State owes all its citizens a secure subsistence, food, suitable clothes and a way of life that does not damage their health". This line of thought eventually led to the setting up of comprehensive, nationally-funded guaranteed minimum income schemes in a growing number of countries, most recently, France's RMI (1988) and Portugal's RMG (1997).
2. Basic endowment: the republicans Condorcet (1594) and Paine (1596)
Condorcet on social insurance - However, towards the end of the 18th century, a different idea emerged that was to play an even greater role in the alleviation of poverty throughout Europe. The first known person to have sketched the idea is the first-rate mathematician and political activist, Antoine Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794). After having played a prominent role in the French revolution, both as a journalist and as a member of the Convention, Condorcet was imprisoned and sentenced to death. While in prison, he wrote his most systematic work, the Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (published posthumously by his widow in 1795), whose last chapter contains a brief sketch of what a social insurance might look like and how it could reduce inequality, insecurity and poverty.
"There is therefore a necessary cause of inequality, of dependency and even of misery, which constantly threatens the most numerous and most active class of our societies. We shall show that we can to a large extent removing it, by opposing luck to itself, by securing to those who reach old age a relief that is the product of what he saved, but increased by the savings of those individuals who made the same sacrifice but died before the time came for them to need to collect its fruit; by using a similar compensation to provide women and children, at the moment they lose their husbands or fathers, with resources at the same level and acquired at the same price, whether the family concerned was afflicted by a premature death or could keep its head for longer; and finally by giving to those children who become old enough to work by themselves and found a new family the advantage of a capital required by the development of their activity and increased as the result of some dying too early to be able to enjoy it. It is to the application of calculus to the probabilities of life and to the investment of money that one owes the idea of this method. The latter has already been successfully used, but never on the scale and with the variety of forms that would make it really useful, not merely to a handful of individuals, but to the entire mass of society. It would free the latter from the periodic bankruptcy of a large number of families, that inexhaustible source of corruption and misery."
This distinct idea, which will end up inspiring, one century later, the birth and development of Europe's massive social insurance systems, starting with Otto von Bismarck's old age pension and health insurance schemes for the labour force of unified Germany (from 1883 onwards). Though not targeted to the poor and involving massive transfers to the non-poor, these systems soon started having a huge impact on poverty as their development quickly dwarfed public assistance schemes and relegated them to a subsidiary role. In one way, social insurance brought us closer to basic income than public assistance, as the social benefits it distributed were not prompted by compassion, but by an entitlement, based in this case on the premiums paid into the insurance system. But in another way, it took us away to basic income, precisely because entitlement to the benefits is now based on having paid (or having had one's employer paying) enough contributions in the past, typically in the form of some percentage of one's wage. For this reason, unlike the most comprehensive versions of public assistance, even the most comprehensive forms of social insurance cannot provide a guaranteed minimum income.
Condorcet and Paine on basic endowment - However, it is the very same Marquis de Condorcet who was the first to briefly mention, in the context of his discussion of social insurance, the idea of a benefit restricted neither to the poor (deserving of our compassion) nor to the insured (entitled to compensation if the risk materialises), namely the idea of "giving to those children who become old enough to work by themselves and found a new family the advantage of a capital required by the development of their activity." Condorcet himself is not known to have said or written anything else on the subject, but his close friend and fellow member of the Convention Thomas Paine (1737-1809) developed the idea in far greater detail, two years after Condorcet's death, in a memoir addressed to the Directoire, the five-member executive that ruled France during most of the period separating the beheading of Robespierre and the rise of Napoleon.
"It is a position not to be controverted, he writes, that the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race." As the land gets cultivated, "it is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is in individual property. Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund proposed in this plan is to issue." Out of this fund, "there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property. And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age". Payments, Paine insists, should be made "to every person, rich or poor", "because it is in lieu of the natural inheritance, which, as a right, belongs to every man, over and above the property he may have created, or inherited from those who did"
From Paine to the Stakeholder Society - This idea of an equal basic endowment given to all as they reach adulthood, has reappeared now and then, for example in the writings of the French political philosopher François Huet. In his attempt to combine liberalism and socialism, he proposed that young people should all be given an endowment financed out of the taxation of the whole of that part of land and other property which the bequeather has himself received (see esp. Le Règne social du christianisme, Paris: Firmin Didot & Bruxelles: Decq,1853, pp. 262, 271-3).
The same endowment idea, combined as it was by Paine with a basic pension, has been more recently revived and developed in great detail by two Yale Law School Professors, Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott (The Stakeholder Society, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). The justification for this $80.000 unconditional grant, however, is no longer common ownership of the earth, but more comprehensive conception of justice as equality of opportunities.
3. Basic income: the utopian socialists Charlier (1848) and Mill (1849)
Charles Fourier's right to subsistence - What equal ownership of the earth justifies, in Paine's view, is an unconditional endowment for all, not a guaranteed income. A number of 19th century reformers, such as William Cobbett (1827), Samuel Read (1829) and Poulet Scrope (1833) in England (see Horne, Thomas A. "Welfare rights as property rights", in Responsibility, Rights and Welfare. The theory of the welfare state, Boulder & London: Westview Press, 1988, 107-132, for a useful survey), have rather interpreted it so as to give guaranteed income schemes a firmer basis than public charity. Most famous among them is the eccentric and prolific French writer Charles Fourier (1836: 490-2), one of the radical visionaries Marx contemptuously labelled "utopian socialists". In La Fausse Industrie (1836), Fourier argues that the violation of each person's fundamental natural right to hunt, fish, pick fruit and let her/his cattle graze on the commons implies that "civilization" owes subsistence to everyone unable to meet her/his needs, in the form of a sixth class hotel room and three modest meals a day.
"Le premier droit, celui de récolte naturelle, usage des dons de la nature, liberté de chasse, cueillette, pâture, constitue le droit de se nourrir, de manger quand on a faim. Ce droit est dénéié en civilisation par les philosophes et concédé par Jésus-Christ en ces mots: (...). Jésus, par ces paroles, consacre le droit de prendre quand on a faim, son nécessaire où on le trouve, et ce droit impose au corps social le devoir d'assurer au peuple un minimum d'entretien: puisque la civilisation le dépouille du premier droit naturel, celui de chasse, pêche, cueillette, pâture, elle lui doit une indemnité. (...) Si l'ordre civilisé enlève à l'homme les quatre branches de subsistance naturelle, chasse, pêche, cueillette, pâture, composant le premier droit, la classe qui a enlevé les terres doit à la classe frustrée un minimum de subsistance abondante, en vertu du neuvième droit (subsistance abondante). Mais voici de nombreux obstacles à la concession de ce droit: D'abord, il faudrait chercher et découvrir le mécanisme sociétaire d'industrie combinée qui, donnant quadruple produit, fournirait de quoi satisfaire en minimum. D'autre part, comme la multitude assurée d'un minimum abondant ne voudrait que peu ou point travailler, il faudrait découvrir et organiser un régime d'industrie attrayante qui garantirait la persitance du peuple au travail, malgré son bien-être."
Fourier, however, is as clear about the non-universality of the delivery of this income in kind (only a minority would be accommodate in those sixth class hotels) as he is about the absence of a work test: it is an unconditional entitlement for the poor by way of compensation for the loss of direct access to natural resources. His disciple and leader of the Fourierist school, Victor Considérant (Exposition abrégée du système Phalanstérien de Fourier, Paris, 1845) makes a step in the direction of a genuine basic income when emphasizing that, when work will have been made attractive thanks to the Phalansterian system, "one will be able to forward a minimum income to the poor members of the community with the certainty that they will have earned more than the expenditure by the end of the year". But despite the nature of the underlying justification, poor relief is still not being turned into a universal income.
"La distribution des travaux par groupes et séries ayant la propriete de les rendre attrayants, toutes les classes de la société recherchent avec ardeur des places dans toutes les branches infiniment variées de fonctions sociales. Il n'y a donc plus de paresseux: on pourra faire aux sociétaires pauvres l'avance d'un minimum, avec la certitude qu'ils auront gagné plus que leur dépense à la fin de l'année. Ainsi, l'établissement du régime sociétaire extirpera la misère et la mendicité, fléaux des sociétés basees sur la concurrence anarchique et le morcellement. Il serait impossible aujourd'hui de faire au peuple l'avance du minimum: il tomberait aussitôt dans la fainéantise, attendu que le travail est répugnant. Voilà pourquoi la Taxe des pauvres, en Angleterre, n'a fait qu'élargir la plaie hideuse du paupérisme. - L'avance du minimum, c'est la base de la liberté et la garantie de l'émancipation du prolétaire. Pas de liberté sans minimum; pas de minimum sans attraction industrielle. Toute la politique d'émancipation des masses est là."
Joseph Charlier's territorial dividend - In 1848, however, while Karl Marx was finishing off the Communist Manifesto in another neighbourhood of Brussels, the Fourierist author Joseph Charlier (1816-1896) published in Brussels his Solution du problème social ou constitution humanitaire (Bruxelles, "Chez tous les libraires du Royaume", 1848, 106p.), which can be regarded as containing the first formulation of a genuine basic income. Undoubtedly inspired by the Fourierist tradition, he saw the equal right to the ownership of land as the foundation of an unconditional right to some income. But he rejected both the right to means-tested assistance advocated by Charles Fourier himself and the right to paid work advocated by his most prominent disciple Victor Considerant. The former, he reckoned, only dealt with the effects, and the latter involved too much mingling by the state. Under the labels "minimum" or "revenu garanti" (and later "dividende territorial"), he proposed giving every citizen with an unconditional right to a quarterly (later, monthly) payment of an amount fixed annually by a representative national council, on the basis of the rental value of all real estate. In a later book, in which he further develops his proposal, he relabels it "dividende teritorial" (La Question sociale résolue, précédée du testament philosophique d'un penseur, Bruxelles, Weissenbruch, 1894, 252p.). Such a scheme, he argues, would end "the domination of capital over labour". Would it not encourage idleness? "Hard luck for the lazy: they will be put on short allowance. Society's duty does not reach beyond securing each a fair share of the enjoyment of what nature puts at his disposal, without usurping anyone's rights." Anything above the minimum will have to be earned.
Mill's most skillfully combined form of socialism - Charlier's obstinate plea was hardly heard, and he was himself quickly forgotten. This is not quite what happened to another admirer of Fourierism: John Stuart Mill. The relevant passage is the sympathetic discussion of Fourierism which he added to the second edition of his Principles of Political Economy, published the year after Charlier's first book. This discussion unambiguously ascribes to the Fourierists the proposal of a non-means-tested basic income:
"The most skilfully combined, and with the greatest foresight of objections, of all the forms of Socialism, is that commonly known as Fourierism. This System does not contemplate the abolition of private property, nor even of inheritance; on the contrary, it avowedly takes into consideration, as elements in the distribution of the produce, capital as well as labour. [...] In the distribution, a certain minimum is first assigned for the subsistence of every member of the community, whether capable or not of labour. The remainder of the produce is shared in certain proportions, to be determined beforehand, among the three elements, Labour, Capital, and Talent."
The idea is clearly there, and under the pen of one of the most influential political thinkers of the century. But it will take another six decades before something like a real discussion arose for the first time.
