LEGISLATIVE PROCESS

Legislative Process

Legislative Process

Introduction

A new definition of poverty as “social exclusion” has begun to take root among European social scientists and UN researchers. This concept implies that along with material deprivation comes exclusion from some or all of the avenues that ensure the development of one's full human potential as well as one's ability to participate in economic, social, and political life—conditions that the economist (Sachs, 2005) calls “substantive freedoms.” The struggle to survive leaves poor people with no time to participate in the life of their communities or to exercise their citizenship rights. Social exclusion, then, connotes both lack of choice and lack of power.

Poverty as both absolute and relative deprivation has been part of the human condition for thousands of years, but it was only during the 20th century that poverty came to be recognized as a social problem for which there could be public remedies (Katz, 2006). Traditional societies met people's needs through a combination of the individual's own labor and the obligation of the kinship group to care for its own. In such societies, the poor were those who remained outside this sphere of care, set adrift through war, famine, or the loss of family. Others were at the bottom of culturally sanctioned strata systems, such as the Indian caste system or various kinds of slavery. In the feudal era, the lord of the manor was obliged to care for his serfs so that, although relative poverty existed, there was little poverty in the absolute sense.

The Emergence of Poverty Legislation

The destruction of the monasteries that had provided care for the poor and the emergence of capitalism in the West began to disrupt this age-old pattern. The enclosure of the commons in England and the mass evictions of peasants displaced large numbers of people from the lands that had sustained them. Some, unable to find work in the emerging industries of the industrial revolution, became beggars and vagabonds or turned to crime.

The individualistic ethos that accompanied capitalism—derived from the Protestant ethic's equation of prosperity with righteousness and “idleness” with sinfulness—ushered in a new attitude toward the poor (Weinberg, 2007). Most—especially able-bodied men who could not find work—were considered responsible for their poverty, leading to a new form of punitive legislation. Under the first such legislation, enacted in England in 1530, beggars old and unable to work received a beggar's license, while poor able-bodied men were whipped and imprisoned.

The Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 established public responsibility for the relief of the poor—an admission that economic and social conditions and not just personal culpability lay behind poverty. But the recognition was only partial. This and subsequent “Poor Laws” still made a distinction between the “deserving poor”—those whose poverty was not of their own making, such as widows, the old, the blind, the infirm, and orphaned children—and everyone else, the “undeserving poor.” These were sent to “poor houses,” little more than prisons with forced hard physical labor (Odekon, 2004). If they refused, they were even more severely punished, sometimes ...