Universal Basic Income in Historical Perspective

✍ Scribed by Peter Sloman (editor), Daniel Zamora Vargas (editor), Pedro Ramos Pinto (editor)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 308
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This new edited collection brings together historians and social scientists to engage with the global history of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and offer historically-rich perspectives on contemporary debates about the future of work. In particular, the book goes beyond a genealogy of a seemingly utopian idea to explore how the meaning and reception of basic income proposals has changed over time. The study of UBI provides a prism through which we can understand how different intellectual traditions, political agents, and policy problems have opened up space for new thinking about work and welfare at critical moments.

Contributions range broadly across time and space, from Milton Friedman and the debate over guaranteed income in the post-war United States to the emergence of the European basic income movement in the 1980s and the politics of cash transfers in contemporary South Africa. Taken together, these chapters address comparative questions: why do proposals for a guaranteed minimum income emerge at some times and recede into the background in others? What kinds of problems is basic income designed to solve, and how have policy proposals been shaped by changing attitudes to gender roles and the boundaries of social citizenship? What role have transnational networks played in carrying UBI proposals between the global north and the global south, and how does the politics of basic income vary between these contexts?

In short, the book builds on a growing body of scholarship on UBI and lays the groundwork for a much richer understanding of the history of this radical proposal.

Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
The Problem with Genealogies
How Should We Write the History of UBI?
Competing Narratives, Contested Meanings
Part I: Poverty in the Midst of Plenty: The Rise of Basic Income in Britain and the United States
Chapter 2: Basic Income as Technocratic Liberalism: Framing a Policy Idea in Twentieth-Century Britain
Three Approaches to Basic Income, c. 1797–1945
Juliet Rhys-Williams and the ‘New Social Contract’
Basic Income in Post-War Social Policy
Enter the Radicals
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Basic Income in the United States, 1940–1972: How the ‘fiscal revolution’ Reshaped Social Policy
Milton Friedman’s Negative Income Tax
Equality and the Price System
Guaranteed Incomes Against the New Deal Order
‘Black Poverty’ and the Triumph of the Income Strategy
Conclusion
Chapter 4: American Cybernation: Technological Upheaval and Guaranteed Income Advocacy in the 1960s United States
Introduction
Chapter 5: The Other Side of Abundance: Feminist and Ecological Arguments for Guaranteed Income in the United States, c. 1960–1980
From Welfare Rights to Guaranteed Income
Ecology and Growth
Conclusion
Part II: Basic Income and the Politics of Work in Post-Industrial Europe
Chapter 6: ‘Free of our labors and joined back to nature’: Basic Income and the Politics of Post-Work in France and the Low Countries
‘Work’ Versus ‘Labour’: The End of Producer Sovereignty
Antistatism Against Social Rights
Conclusion: Losing the Battle, Winning the War
Chapter 7: Activating the Unemployed or Liberating the Employed? Universal Basic Income in the French Welfare Reform Debate
Welfare and Social Citizenship in France: From Universalism to Dualism?
A Neoliberal Breakthrough: The ‘Safety Clause for the Player’
A Republican Activation: ‘L’insertion’
France’s Two Worlds of Welfare: Insurance Versus Solidarity
From Obligation to Emancipation: UBI and the ‘End of the Labour Society’
An ‘Emancipatory Form of Activation’? The Paradoxes of UBI
Conclusion
Chapter 8: From ‘Second Cheque Strategy’ to ‘Basic Income’: Why Did André Gorz Change His Mind?
Gorz’s 1983 Reform Programme
Why Does ‘Work’ Provide a ‘Ticket to Citizenship’?
So Why Did Gorz Change His Mind? And When?
Did Gorz Really Change His Mind?
What Is New About ‘Work’ in ‘Cognitive Capitalism’?
Conclusion
Part III: Global Perspectives
Chapter 9: Basic Needs and the Discovery of Global Poverty
Chapter 10: Jobs or Income Guarantees? The Politics of Universal Basic Income and Cash Transfers in Southern Africa
Fertile Ground: A Note on Context
The Promise of Basic Income in Namibia and South Africa
Turning Away from Universality
Basic Income for What—And Whom?
A Political Resurgence?
A Future Politics of Distribution
Chapter 11: From Freedom to Finance: How Development Conditions and Paradigms Frame the Basic Income Debate
Introduction
Basic Income in Capitalist Contexts
A Political Economy Approach to Ideation
Basic Income Narration and Radicalism: Discursive and Real
Basic Income Radicalism in Historical Construction
Basic Income at the Apogee of Emergent Capitalist Crises
The Gilded Age and the Single-Tax of Henry George
Social Libertarianism Against Social Democracy: Hohlenberg
Finance Crises and the Systematization of Income Support
Social Capitalism Before and After the 1930s
Friedman, Myrdal and Government Reform
Basic Income and the Welfare State
Income Guarantees and 1960s Liberalism in America and Britain
‘Revolt from the Centre’: 1970s Thinking on Basic Income in Northern Europe
Construction of a Basic Income Movement Under Neo-Liberal Expansion
Libertarianism of the Left
Libertarianism of the Right
Basic Income in Neo-Liberal Embedding
Conclusion
Chapter 12: Philippe Van Parijs on the History of Basic Income: An Interview
Index