Perhaps it's simply the hubris of our race. Throughout the period since the Enlightenment, at least, man has argued that we should be able to lift the unfortunate among us to at least a subsistence level. Earlier this year, in fact, former presidential candidate John Edwards unveiled a plan he vowed to pursue even outside the campaign framework, to end poverty in America within 30 years. Yet we remain haunted by Jesus's warning that, "You shall always have the poor with you."
In An End to Poverty? -- A Historical Debate, Cambridge University political scientist Gareth Stedman Jones examines the arguments of such seminal thinkers as Thomas Paine and Antoine-Nicolas Condorcet that "all citizens should be protected against the hazards of economic insecurity." Jones revisits the 1790s era in which this noble principle "was derailed by conservative as well as leftist thinkers."
Jones also demonstrates how "current discussions about economic issues -- downsizing, globalization, and financial regulation -- were shaped by the ideological conflicts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."
