The Faculty
Professor Gareth Stedman Jones
Filed under:
S
Professor of Political Science
Director, Centre for History and Economics
Fellow, King's College
King's College
Cambridge CB2 1ST
Cambridge CB2 1ST
Email:
gsj@kings.cam.ac.uk
Office Phone:
01223 3 31343
Subject groups/Research projects
Teaching
Political, intellectual history 1770-1960Key Publications
- Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, OUP, 1971, 1984, 1988)
- Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, CUP, 1983)
- Charles Fourier: the Theory of the Four Movements, translated by I. Patterson (Cambridge, CUP, 1994) (Ed. and introduction)
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2002) (Ed. and introduction)
- An End to Poverty? (London, Profile Books, July 2004)
In the 1790s, for the first time, reformers proposed to bring poverty to an end. Inspired by scientific progress, the Revolution in France and the promise of the new international economy, Paine and Condorcet argued that all citizens could be protected against the predictable hazards of poverty and insecurity. This was the founding moment of social democracy. But fear and anger greeted this challenge to age-old religious and political attitudes and new forms of Conservatism, of political economy and of Christianity hastened to consign this programme to oblivion. In the early nineteenth century the strength of this reaction was reinforced by unanticipated anxieties about the future of work and livelihood in the newly globalised economy. The result was the enduring triumph of a policy of laisser-faire individualism in state and society. It meant that the formation of the early twentieth century welfare state owed little or nothing to the revolutionary hopes of a hundred years before.