IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/gtechp/978-3-030-01956-3_5.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Poor Laws

In: Thomas Robert Malthus

Author

Listed:
  • David Reisman

    (Nanyang Technological University)

Abstract

The Poor Laws since 1601 had provided parish relief to paupers. Malthus, believing that hand-outs encouraged earlier marriage and larger families, recommended that all welfare save for grants to the irremediably destitute should be abolished. He denied that there was a right to welfare or that welfare formed part of the social contract. While benevolence was a moral absolute, it was expanding the population, putting pressure on limited food and creating the misery it was intended to contain. The hidden curriculum was that the abolition of income-maintenance would teach the values of self-reliance, prudence, assiduity and moral restraint which would confer economic as well as social benefits.

Suggested Citation

  • David Reisman, 2018. "The Poor Laws," Great Thinkers in Economics, in: Thomas Robert Malthus, chapter 0, pages 97-113, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:gtechp:978-3-030-01956-3_5
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-01956-3_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:gtechp:978-3-030-01956-3_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.