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T.H. Marshall, the Moral Economy, and Social Rights
Moyn, Samuel
Moyn, Samuel
Abstract
At a crucial juncture in his famous lectures on “Citizenship and Social Class,” English sociologist T. H. Marshall explained that the new social rights he associated with the invention of the twentieth-century welfare state were in fact a blast from the past—a
bequest from the moral economy to a later age grappling with political economy run amok. For this reason, Marshall’s celebrated theory of social rights provides one aperture through which to intervene in a dispute brewing between starkly alternative views of the moral economy tradition he invoked.
“The original source of social rights was membership of local communities,” Marshall related. The Elizabethan Poor Law backed up this ramshackle local approach. Just before the triumph of capitalism, the late-eighteenth-century Speenhamland modifications to the Poor Law system provided “a guaranteed minimum wage and family allowances, combined with the right to work or maintenance,” as Marshall recalled from Karl Polanyi’s presentation of 1790s innovations in The Origin of Our Time (as the English version of The Great Transformation was known). Marshall enthused that this provision was “a substantial body of social rights, even by modern standards.” Polanyi had not used the language of social rights, but otherwise Marshall directly incorporated his storied account of the endurance and transformation of the moral economy directly into his own.
That incorporated narrative proceeded through the displacement and return of the moral economy. The Elizabethan Poor Law helped delocalize the very social protection it intended to buttress, and inadvertently paved the ways for ideologies of transactional freedom to conquer old moral cultures of interdependence. To the extent that the moral economy remained live into the nineteenth century, “citizenship was divided against itself,” Marshall explained. To resolve the conflict, premodern social rights were liquidated in the name of the civil ones of modern liberalism. A premodern moral economy that had once fostered duty to others and a sensitivity to basic needs fell to modern political economy, with individual liberties of transaction safeguarded from the annoyance of countervailing norms of solidarity. Some “mercy” remained in the new Poor Law (1834), Marshall acknowledged, but it was of bare significance and no longer defined the entitlements of citizenship.