Universal Basic Income (UBI) sounds like a modern idea, but its roots go back centuries. Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia, for instance, has everybody receiving a guaranteed income.
“Utopia” of course means “no place,” an idealized vision of human society. But when better to talk about utopian ideas than in dystopian times? And how pie-in-the-sky is it, really, when many countries already have basic income systems for some? Think child support payments for the parents of young children, think old-age pensions. These were once radical ideas, too. UBI would extend such payments as a right to all. The idea is to lift people out of poverty, meet their basic needs, and make the pursuit of happiness attainable.
Economists J. E. King and John Marangos use Belgian political philosopher-political economist Phillippe Van Parijs’s definition of Basic Income—also called Citizen’s Income, unconditional basic income, and UBI—positing it as “an income paid by a government, at a uniform level and at regular intervals, to each adult member of a society. The grant is paid, and its level is fixed, irrespective of whether the person is rich or poor, lives alone or with others, is willing to work or not.”
King and Marangos write that the “case for Basic Income” really boomed during the eighteenth century. The French were all over it, both before the Revolution and during it. The authors focus on two English-language writers who made arguments for basic income in the tumultuous 1790s, when French radicalism fanned radicalism, as well as fierce reaction, across the English Channel.
Thomas Paine (1737–1809) is the more famous of the two. To deal with the problem of poverty, the English-born American Founding Father argued initially in The Rights of Man (1791–1792) for payments to children up to the age fifteen and to those fifty and older. In his Agrarian Justice (1795) he moved on to a broader proposal. This pamphlet was written after Paine narrowly escaped execution during the Terror. On his mind too was the Bishop of Llandaff’s recent theological justification of poverty.
“All preaching that has not this for its object [doing good or making God’s creation happy] is nonsense and hypocrisy,” Paine wrote.
Paine proposed a lump sum payment of £15 (£2,306 in 2025) to everyone reaching the age of twenty-one and a £10 (£1,537 in 2025) annual pension for the blind and lame, as well as for those fifty and older. Paine was “keen to stress the moderate nature of his proposal,” write King and Marangos. It would have been “fully costed” (a modern phrase he used) and financed by death duties. “The plan here proposed will benefit all, without injuring any,” Paine argued.
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Thomas Spence (1750–1814), who was imprisoned for selling Paine’s The Rights of Man in 1792, found Paine’s second basic income plan too conservative. Spence was a radical land reformer, believing land should be communally owned (locally, not by the state). From the “hive of liberty” at No. 8 Little-Turnstile, High Holborn, London, Spence turned out a penny weekly called Pig’s Meat; or lessons for the swinish multitude. The title and subtitle were “in sardonic allusion” to Edmund Burke’s labeling of common folk as the “swinish multitude.”
Spence wrote The Rights of Infants (1797) before he read Agrarian Justice. Upon reading what he called Paine’s “contemptible and insulting proposal,” he added a preface, conclusion, and appendix to his own work to make his argument for a form of basic income in opposition to Paine’s. Spence argued that since “Land is the common Property of Mankind” rents for land should be paid to the community, not aristocrats or other (tellingly named) landlords.
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This should provide a surplus for payments, he wrote, “fairly and equally among all the living souls in the parish, whether male or female; married or single; legitimate or illegitimate; from a day old to the extremest age.”
With revenues “derived immediately from their common property,” and spread to all, Spence believed that “government must of necessity be democratic.” Aristocracy, the rule of elites relevant in his day—when less than five percent of the population could vote for Members of Parliament—was obviously antithetical to democracy.
Arguments for UBI today are obviously more in keeping with our times than with the late eighteenth century, but it’s always good to check in with the roots.
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