Memoir on Pauperism: Does Public Charity Produce an Idle and Dependent Class of Society? by Alexis de Tocqueville

Memoir on Pauperism: Does Public Charity Produce an Idle and Dependent Class of Society? Reviews

• 
  Lou

  i rate books on my enjoyment. for this one, i've got an assignment for this so it'd be biased to rate it out of enjoyment soooo...
  
• 
  Roy

  I’ve just learned more about economics, and governmental economic policy, through the few hours in which I read this booklet this morning, than I ever did through years of secondary school classes on economics, bookkeeping, ‘maatschappijleer’, and even history.
  
  I’m not saying that I can already apply that knowledge, too. It still needs to synthesise, preferably synergise, into understanding. And at the very least, that requires time.
  
  But the major advantage of de Tocqueville’s approach over that of much ‘education’ of whatever level nowadays, is that de Tocqueville actually explains, whereas most ‘education’ only instructs. De Tocqueville delves into the ‘Why?’ behind the (economic) system, whereas most education only — and mostly confusedly, at that — explicates one, or multiple, mechanisms within that (economic) system.
  
  If education is successful, the student is left only with a blueprint of a mechanism, or the multitude of mechanisms that make up a system, and the ways in which those influence one another. But this is rarely ever successful, and even if it is successful, this does not guarantee that the student understands how to make any use of that, or influence the mechanism or system oneself. In some way, education even fosters passive acceptance. Which is exactly the antithesis, antidote, to discovery and innovation — the purported aim and driving force of education.
  
  If de Tocqueville’s approach is successful, you have an understanding of the principles that the blueprint is built on. You don’t necessarily have the blueprint itself yet, you are likely to still lack a sufficient overview of the mechanism, let alone the various mechanisms that make up a system. That is, however, not much of a problem, because coming to reach that overview is much easier when you grasp the principles that shape the blueprint.
  
  And, after all, a blueprint is always still. It is the set, rigid, unliving explication of the closed loop, the closed loop which aims to express the structure of the movement that it is about. A blueprint is a rigidificafion, a solidification of a movement that we cannot keep in our mind’s eye, in its motion. It always aims to capture something that cannot be captured. A movement is never bounded, and whenever it is, tension rises. It needs a very strong bond in order to not let that force unleash itself damagingly, even destructively.
  
  Only an intuitive understanding of this unbounded structure of motion, energy, can ever ‘hold’, but not capture, the actual structure of a system, or mechanism — the structure that we always present rigidly, but that rather exists in motion.
  
  Only in that recognition, a recognition which is fostered by going after the ‘Why?’; by remaining open-ended, rather than positing a closed loop; by noticing the movements, rather than the rigidities; of always remaining in wonder, asking questions, and looking for the next thing, rather than believing you have clear-cut, final answers; only therein will you be able to have some semblance of influence over anything.
  
  And even then, it is still not influence, but inspiration. Which you can only find by accepting, actively accepting, that you can only follow along with life, and so be ‘rigid’ only in being a beacon for others to do the same.
• 
  Catherine

  Should be a required reading in high school civics, economics, and sociology. Brief, but ordered well to explain the history of indigence, the moral ties/outcomes, the degradation of the dignity of man through public charity, and the resultant violence and theft/pillaging uprising that inevitably result from the inescapable increase in poverty due to public charity. Humanists won’t like it because the majority of the solution relies upon the decentralization of benevolence to the private sphere, specifically with moral oversight and underpinnings in order to succeed. But let’s be honest—the humanists hate it whenever you bring up all the historical data to show their chosen, anti-theistic means will never achieve their desired, anti-theistic ends. Which begs the question...how hard is it to find a pair of pants that fit when you’re a walking logical fallacy?
• 
  Jasper Van Belle

  'Het is dus niet de armoede die de landarbeider totaal onbezonnen en losbandig maakt (...) Het is het totale gemis aan enige vorm van bezit, het is de absolute afhankelijkheid van het lot.'
• 
  Gyoza

  This book contains 2 essays Tocqueville presented to the Royal Academic Society in Cherbourg in 1835 & 1838. Both are about poverty and the pros and cons of various measures undertaken to alleviate it.
  
  In the first part, Tocqueville outlines the paradox of the wealthier, more prosperous nations (e.g. Great Britain) having much larger percentages of their populations claiming poverty and getting on the dole than poorer nations have (such as France and Spain). He talks about the Poor Laws (basically an early government welfare program), which originated under Elizabeth I after Henry VIII destroyed the monasteries and seized their property, leaving the English poor without recourse, charitable works having once been one of the functions of the Church. By Elizabeth I's time, the problem was so bad that the Poor Laws were passed, which made it the responsibility of each town council to tax their residents to support the poor in that town. Tocqueville outlines the corrupting effects of these laws both on the poor and on those who are taxed to support them. He sat as an observer in a court of a British justice of the peace, where these poverty cases were heard, and his observations are as logical and as prescient as those in Democracy in America.
  
  The second part is about the advantages and disadvantages of the French caisse d'épargne, a sort of special savings bank reserved for the poor. It pays a higher interest rate than normal and it is meant to teach the poor to practice thrift and acquire habits of capital accumulation. Tocqueville gives a very clear explanation how this institution works and his thoughts about it such that even a non-economist like me found it easy to follow.
  
  I highly recommend this slim little book to anyone interested in the problem of poverty and the ways in which various solutions to the problem that look good on the surface can make it worse.
  
  Update 8/22/16: In order to make this book more accessible to English speakers, as well as to practice my language skills, I decided to start translating this book into English and post it online in blog form. You can access it
  here. It is not finished yet, but I plan to post a part of it every day until I get through!
• 
  JoséMaría BlancoWhite

  The great French man takes a look at the paradox offered by modern societies (in this case England, early 19th Century): "The countries appearing to be more impoverished (are the ones with) the fewest indigents", and "among the peoples most admired for their opulence, one part of the population is obliged to rely on the gifts of the other in order to live."
  
  The key? Well-fare, public charity. Today it may not seem a paradox anymore, so ingrained in our righteous leftist minds it is. But Tocqueville saw it as it surreptitiously came forth, along with the Industrial Revolution. His analysis is clear-minded, cool, not coldly detached from the anguish of the miseries of the poor, but -on the contrary- interested enough to inquire into the roots of this modern paradox, which has since provided the daily fuel for the Left's demagoguery, and is the real opium of the self-blinded masses.
  
  Tocqueville is not the Manichean the Left would like to think. His solution to the vicious cycle of welfare-poverty-more-welfare is not to cut through and banish it all. It is to get away with what went wrong in an originally fine idea: To cut loose from there, and return to the healthy idea of improving society, not contributing to its impoverishment.
  
  A real diamond this book is, for its value and for its tiny size. You'll find where exactly the waters we're drinking from now got muddled up.
• 
  Mark

  Tocqueville correctly identifies the culprit of modern poverty – industrialism – but seems resigned to industrialism and social Darwinism as being natural and inevitable. Thus his concerns are never met with a strong solution and his concerns of public charity as a legal right leading to an idle and dependent class of society are never resolved. To his credit, he does draw a distinction between justice and charity and the need for both but he doesn’t look at the justice of charity. He is all for public assistance to those who have merely fallen on bad luck through no fault of their own (industrialism may be the prime mover here) but determining who has bad luck versus who has a character flaw is a fool’s errand to try to discern. As long as we can’t tell the difference between the two, it is a matter of justice to not condemn the innocent for the mistakes of the guilty.
• 
  Maria Therese

  This memoir is very thought-provoking. I think that the thoughts and ideas written in it are very true. Public charity produces and idle and dependent class of society. Individual charity, which is the charity which Christ told his followers to practice, is a charity that substitutes for public charity and does not have the bad side affects public charity can have.
• 
  Dmitry

  Excellent writing on the difference between public and private charity. The point that *obligating* a working man to pay tax which goes to work-able people puts both the giver and the receiver of this money on the same level. That person who sits on a dote doesn't feel ashamed of the disaster where (s)he got, rather is sure of his "right" and obligation of the government to pay him his expenses.
  
  Personally, those are the thoughts and questions I had myself on a modern-day social democracy in Europe. Definitely will reread it again to think more.
• 
  Anne

  Not what I expected from de Toqueville after reading Democracy in America. Though not surprised. In his time the issue was widows and unwed mothers that had to be taken care of particularly if the father/family of either refused to assist in their care. The argument then and now is who's responsible? The person or the government?
• 
  toni

  Very much a supply-side argument.
• 
  Cristhian

  Básicamente, el pueblo pobre será pobre, morirá pobre.
  
  Tan cierto esto hoy como en 1835.