A history of ending poverty

Gareth Stedman Jones
Saturday July 2, 2005

Guardian

The idea of "making poverty history" did not begin with Bob Geldof, Bono or the commitment of rich countries to disburse 0.7% of national income in development aid. It goes back to the time of the French and American revolutions towards the end of 18th century and to a transformation in outlook as momentous as that produced by the revolutions themselves. A small group of visionaries, the followers of Tom Paine in England and Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet in France, ceased to regard poverty as a divine imposition on sinful humanity. It was seen as remediable in principle, since it was man-made in practice.

What this political pamphleteer and aristocratic administrator depicted for the first time was a planned world in which the predictable misfortunes of life no longer plunged people into chronic poverty. This plan was not a utopia. It was a template for a future reality; in the 20th century it came to be known as the welfare state.