The Welfare State and the 'Deviant Poor' in Europe, 1870-1933

B. Althammer, A. Gestrich, J. Gründler, B. Althammer, A. Gestrich, J. Gründler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137333629
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The strife for social improvement that arose in the decades around the turn of the 20th century raised the issue of social conformity in new ways: how were citizens who did not adhere to the rules to be dealt with? This edited collection opens new perspectives on the history of the emerging welfare state by focusing on its margins.

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Introduction: Poverty and Deviance in the Era of the Emerging Welfare State

Beate Althammer

During recent decades, the problem of ‘social exclusion’ has been widely discussed in Europe. Since the early 1990s, when the term first came to prominence in France, it has rapidly gained currency as a key word in a transnational debate on the new challenges faced by highly developed Western societies – a debate that prompted the European Union to proclaim 2010 the ‘European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion’.¹ Although modern welfare states have produced a level of affluence unprecedented in history, symptoms of erosion are apparent. The oft-deplored crisis of the welfare state has many different facets, and many causes have been identified. Yet there is a widely-shared assumption that economic factors such as high rates of unemployment and the financial overburdening of social insurance systems cannot alone be blamed. Rather, social exclusion has a cultural side as well. The established mechanisms of social inclusion seem especially to be failing to have an effect on groups on the margins of society that are not only materially disadvantaged but are also in some way ‘deviant’. The welfare state aims at inclusion, but has difficulty including groups who do not think, behave and live as the ‘normal’ citizen does. So social exclusion is, at least in part, related to a (perceived) lack of adaptation to dominant cultural attitudes.

This assumption has been expressed in various forms, often, of course, stimulated by political objectives. In Britain, the justice secretary Kenneth Clarke’s diagnosis of the August 2011 riots as due to ‘a feral underclass’ lacking ‘an attitude that shares in the values of mainstream society’ may serve as one example;² in Germany, the controversy about immigrants’ relationship to a ‘guiding culture’ (Leitkultur), stoked up by the Christian Democratic politician Friedrich Merz in 2000,³ is another. Although such catchphrases say as much about the worldviews of the speakers as they do about the problems addressed, they highlight the fact that social inclusion is, and always has been, related to norms and attitudes. Societies depend on shared core values, and they constantly wrestle with redefining these values and with achieving the conformity they need. Welfare states, indeed, aim not only at ensuring the material security of their citizens, but also at fostering the appropriate habits and cultural dispositions. Because inclusion is a multidimensional process, welfare states have developed highly differentiated institutions of education, prevention, intervention, assistance, care, therapy and coercion to mould individuals to their requirements. They do this for the sake of the individuals concerned and for the sake of society itself. Sometimes, however, these basically inclusive institutions fail, allowing equally multidimensional processes of social exclusion to evolve. The outcome of such processes that is most feared is the formation of an underclass in which poverty, unemployment, crime and a general defiance of the Leitkultur have become chronic.⁴

Recent debates on the crisis symptoms of the welfare state have also contributed to a revival of interest in its historical origins. The ways in which societies perceive, discuss and deal with problems of social inclusion and exclusion reveal much about their self-image; further, they are, to a considerable degree, shaped by deep-rooted traditions. Traces of ancient and medieval Christian notions of poverty can still be detected in current European discourses, as can the persistent early modern differentiation between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. In the decades around 1900, however, social thinking and social policies entered a decisive new stage. For the first time, the state began to take on direct responsibility for the well-being of all its citizens, particularly the poorer ones, thus initiating a dynamic process of expanding government activity. The elimination of destitution became closely linked to ideas of progress, modern civilization, national strength and competitiveness. With the democratization of political rights, the idea gained ground that social rights existed too. Yet at the same time as large amounts of money and energy began to be invested in welfare programmes, pressures on the poor increased. Inclusion through social welfare depended on their complying with more demanding norms, since social rights implied extended obligations towards the nation. But how was the state to deal with those citizens who would not, or could not, live up to the standards it expected? Did the ultimate goal of inclusion justify measures of force? Were there, perhaps, individuals who definitely could not be included because of their inability to adapt to societal norms? And if there were, what should be done with them? Such questions have always accompanied social policies, but with the rise of the welfare state they became much more fundamental. They referred to groups at the margins of society, yet they were not at all marginal to the discourses and practices of welfare policies. Rather, the ‘deviant poor’ were a troublesome touchstone for the essentially inclusive self-image of modern European societies.

This book discusses the shifting perceptions, representations and treatments of the ‘deviant poor’ in the crucial formative phase of modern welfare policies, between the 1870s and the 1930s, that in many ways set the course for future developments. The chapters are based on papers given at an international conference at the German Historical Institute, London in February 2010, which was organized jointly with the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Strangers and Poor People: Changing Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion from Classical Antiquity to the Present Day’ at the University of Trier, Germany. Much has already been written about the founding period of European welfare regimes, but this book opens up distinctively new perspectives by focusing on the margins of society associated with deviance. The period under consideration was generally an era of social optimism, of rising living standards and a widespread belief that the masses should, and could, be integrated into the nation. With regard to the deviant fringes, however, things seemed less clear, and society’s ambivalent dealings with them form the common theme of the case studies presented in the following chapters. In geographical scope these studies extend from the Netherlands, Germany and Austria to England, Scotland and Ireland; and some of them use an explicitly comparative and transnational approach. Although various national particularities become apparent, the book generally underlines similarities and entanglements. The invention of modern welfare policies was a common European achievement, and the intellectual deliberations about social rights and obligations, norms and deviance, as well as the possibilities of inclusion and their limitations were basically transnational ones.

The remaining pages of this introduction attempt to provide a framework for reading the chapters that follow. The first section offers a brief discussion of the theoretical concepts of ‘deviance’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’. The second surveys the historiography of European welfare policies in the era around 1900 and the role the ‘deviant’ poor have so far played in it. Finally, a third section outlines how the volume is structured.

Concepts of deviance, inclusion and exclusion

‘Deviance’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ were not common expressions in the time period under consideration: they are more recent sociological concepts. Nevertheless, they prove useful for historical analysis. ‘Deviance’ basically designates a difference in relation to a norm. The term was coined in the 1960s as a generic concept for a wide variety of attitudes, behaviours and lifestyles that are socially banned, threatened with punishment, or at the least disapproved of, because they depart from the ‘normal’ in an unacceptable manner. Violations of the criminal law are covered by the concept, but also offences against unwritten codes of conduct in various social settings. From the 1960s onward, sociological deviance theory has evolved into many sub-theories that offer greatly differing, and often conflicting, explanations.⁵ Roughly, these can be divided into two camps. The ‘positivist’ perspective, rooted in early, turn-of-the-century sociology, conceives deviance to be an objectively existing measurable social fact and explores its causes and consequences. The alternative ‘constructionist’ perspective, which thrived especially from the 1960s to the 1980s, understands deviance as a phenomenon not existing per se, but produced by societal definitions attached to perceived differences; and it enquires into the symbolic interactions that result in, and from, such ‘labelling’. While the positivist approach starts its analysis at the point where some type of deviance is detected as a social problem, the constructivist one asks how this deviance came to be regarded as a social problem at all and how sets of knowledge work on the interpretation of actions. Positivists also see norms as societal facts – although they may be disputed and altered over time. Constructivists, by contrast, ask how and why norms become meaningful in specific situational contexts.

Within the positivist camp, two broad lines of thought may be discerned. The first searches for causes of deviance in societal structures and processes. Emile Durkheim, who linked increases in crime and destructive behaviour to states of anomie, the erosion of norms in times of rapid change, was the major forerunner of this school of thought. In Durkheim’s structural–functionalist theory, a high intensity of norm-breaking points to a pathological state of society; but deviance has, nonetheless, a basically stabilizing function because it helps society clarify and reinforce its rules. This insight has also inspired constructivists, since it recognizes that societies may stigmatize outsiders in order to tighten their inner cohesion. The second positivist line of thought searches for the causes of deviance not in the pathologies and necessities of society, but in the pathologies of individuals and their immediate environments, especially the family. In recent decades, micro-sociological, psychological and neurobiological approaches have tended to gain ground in deviance theory, thus putting the focus more on individual offenders than on the wider societal contingencies of norms and norm-breaking.

Sociologists try to prove the validity of their favoured theories and disprove others. This is not generally the aim of historians and is certainly not the aim of this book. Consequently we do not advocate any specific version of deviance theory. Instead we adopt the sociological concept of deviance in a more summary sense, and do so for two purposes. The first is to integrate different types of norm-deviation which historiography usually treats separately. Of the many conceivable types of deviance, the contributions in this book deal with three: (1) transgression of penal laws (delinquency or crime); (2) non-compliance with fundamental socio-moral norms – primarily people’s obligation to work and to support their families; and (3) divergence from mental normality (insanity or ‘mental deficiency’). These types cannot be strictly separated in any in-depth consideration of the ways social issues were discussed in the decades around 1900. In fact, social and penal experts of the time were convinced that delinquency, ‘workshyness’ and mental abnormality were, to a considerable extent, overlapping phenomena. To express their supposed common ground, they coined terms such as ‘anti-sociality’ or ‘a-sociality’. In historical exploration, however, the more neutral expression ‘deviance’ is certainly to be preferred. It bundles various phenomena under one generic term but keeps its distance from the contemporary language whose workings we analyse.

Secondly, sociological deviance theory is useful because it offers interpretative models that can be adopted to categorize the manifold interpretations that circulated in the historical contexts under scrutiny. As outlined, there are three main models. One explains deviance in the light of societal strains and imbalances; another focuses on individual and familial factors; and the third points to the production of norm-breakers through labelling. In rudimentary form, these explanatory models were already being used by commentators in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when they tried to make sense of the social problems they observed. The breakdown of established bonds and normative controls was a widespread concern among Europeans who experienced the upheavals of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Many were also aware of the strains produced by sharp material inequalities and believed that these threatened social cohesion. Structural interpretations of poverty and deviance were the main incentive for turning to new, structurally oriented welfare policies aiming primarily at prevention.

Focusing on the individual and his/her micro-environment was a more traditional approach. Poor child-rearing, the bad influence of ‘depraved’ relatives, and a general lack of moral standards – factors like these had long played a dominant role in explaining poverty and the vices associated with it. Many historians have claimed that the explanatory model based on the individual was largely replaced by the structural one in the course of modernization, and that this shift is what most characterized the birth of modern welfare states. Yet, so far as marginal groups of society were concerned, such a shift is not at all evident. Moreover, individualizing explanations were supported by the rising natural sciences, which seemed to prove that character defects were often rooted in a person’s biological constitution. Individualizing approaches were able to explain why preventive welfare policies did not succeed in eliminating the deviant margins, and therefore they remained attractive.

Constructionist interpretations of deviance were much less common among social experts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they were not completely lacking. Many reformers were well aware of the devastating effects labelling processes could have on the future prospects of individuals. Inappropriate forms of assistance and inappropriate methods of punishment, they knew, could mark people so deeply that both their reputations and their self-esteem were ruined; as a result, they could be pushed even further into deviant ways of life. In particular, the stigmatizing effect of institutions – prisons, workhouses, borstals, asylums – was often deplored: instead of ‘adjusting’ their inmates to social norms, as was their intended goal, they frequently produced only hardened offenders. At the same time, however, such stigmatizing effects seemed essential because they served as a deterrent and thus stabilized the borderline between conformity and deviance. In their different ways, both lines of argument showed an awareness of the functions and mechanisms of social labelling.

For the most part, those who reasoned and wrote about poverty, delinquency and crime in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had no grand theoretical ambitions. They were experts in a more practical sense – poor relief administrators, philanthropists, prison chaplains, police officers and judges. Sociology was still in its infancy around 1900. Jurisprudence was certainly long established, but it was more concerned with systematizing and interpreting law than with understanding why law-breaking occurred. Economics, the academic discipline that had so decisively shaped perceptions of poverty issues in a previous phase, was shifting its focus away from the indigent and marginal. Medicine and psychiatry, by contrast, took an increasing interest in these groups, laying claim to an explanatory competence that went well beyond the diagnosis of specific illnesses. And, at the intersection of medical science and penal theory, the new discipline of criminology emerged. Above all, the public and the voluntary agencies involved practically in dealing with social problems expanded rapidly from the late nineteenth century onward. It was mainly the staff of these agencies who generated the discourse about the roots of deviance, drawing selectively on traditional beliefs, everyday experience and knowledge of various scientific disciplines. Deviance theory can help bring some order into the wide array of opinions that were voiced, and it can help us detect fundamental shifts in attitudes. What makes the concept particularly interesting is that it does not focus either on the centre or the margins of society, but rather on the interdependency between the two. Here deviance theory is closely related to sociological concepts of inclusion and exclusion, which have supplemented and partly replaced the former within scholarly debates in the past two decades.

In the broadest sense, declaring someone deviant is already a form of exclusion: it asserts that an individual does not come within the boundaries of normality. Yet, actual societal reactions to diagnosed deviance can vary greatly. On an imaginary scale of possible reactions, one extreme would be radical forms of elimination from society such as expulsion, permanent incarceration or execution. The opposite end of the scale is less obvious: it could be either unconditional tolerance or positive action intended to reassimilate deviants into mainstream society through education, assistance, therapy or rehabilitative modes of punishment. But measures aimed at re-inclusion do not always attain their goal, and they can even result in further exclusion, as can tolerance that turns into indifference. Moreover, alleged deviance is not the only starting point for processes of exclusion: being deprived of essential resources such as paid employment or decent housing can easily set off an alternative vicious circle that ends with an individual being marked as deviant. The recent sociology of social exclusion, indeed, usually begins with an analysis of material deprivation. While in its early days – the 1960s and 1970s – this branch of research was primarily interested in minority maladjusted groups on the margins of affluent Western societies, it has subsequently shifted its focus to the core of these societies.⁶ What has largely preoccupied sociologists of social exclusion since the early 1990s is the apparent increasing insecurity of integral and ‘normal’ parts of the population, faced by rising rates of unemployment, demographic change and painful welfare state reforms.

Just like theories of deviance, theories of inclusion and exclusion are heterogeneous. The terms ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ have varying meanings in the various models of different schools of the social sciences, not to mention how they are used in political and everyday language, where they have become popular too. A broad range of social disadvantage has been studied under the term ‘exclusion’, not least because exclusion is generally taken as a multidimensional phenomenon: it frequently involves material poverty, but also implies a lack of chances, capabilities and relationships. Exclusion has an objective, measurable side, but also a subjective one of experiences and feelings. It can be the result of deliberate actions or the unintended side effect of anonymous mechanisms. Exclusion can be abrupt and definitive, or it can come upon a person more subtly and flexibly. Individuals can be victims of exclusion, but they can also choose self-exclusion. The concept of social exclusion is, in sum, highly versatile; and in current debates it is sometimes extended in use to be a catch-all term almost interchangeable with ‘social inequality’. The stellar career...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Poverty and Deviance in the Era of the Emerging Welfare State
• Part I From Moral to Social Causes? Shifting Conceptions and Perceptions of Poverty
• Part II On the Borderline: The Vagrant Poor Between Destitution and Delinquency
• Part III Beyond the Borderline: The Mentally Deficient and the Criminal
• Part IV Conclusions
• Notes
• Index