1. Introduction Universal Basic Income in Historical Perspective (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan) Peter Sloman, Daniel Zamora Vargas, and Pedro Ramos Pinto The idea of a universal basic income is one of the most powerful and resonant policy proposals in contemporary public debate. Google Trends data shows that global internet searches for the term rose more than twenty-fold between 2015 and 2019, and then doubled again in March and April 2020 in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. A series of UBI pilots – most notably in India (2011-12), Kenya (since 2016), Finland (2017-18), and Stockton, California (2019-21) – have helped to raise the profile of the idea and build a sense of momentum around it. Even Pope Francis has suggested that ‘it is time to explore concepts like the universal basic income’, which would ‘acknowledge and dignify’ all forms of work and ‘concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights’.1 The economic shock caused by the Covid pandemic has reinforced a global wave of interest in UBI which emerged during the 2010s and shows no sign of receding.2 In the global south, UBI proposals have gained traction as part of a wider effort to break away from the paternalism of traditional development strategies and ‘just give money to the poor’ – creating what the anthropologist James Ferguson has called a ‘new politics of distribution’.3 In Western Europe and North America, basic income shows signs of becoming a totemic demand for some left-wing activists, partly through the influence of bestselling books setting out a vision of a ‘post-work world’ and partly as a reaction against the coerciveness and complexity of existing welfare policies.4 Mainstream economists and social policy specialists have also begun to grapple seriously with the question of what UBI might look like in practice. Yet the intellectual roots of the idea remain under-explored, and the relationship between UBI and traditional forms of leftist politics continues to provoke vigorous debate. For some, UBI offers a way of reasserting a progressive vision of the welfare state as an embodiment of universal rights and a symbol of inclusive social citizenship.5 For others, the popularity of basic income schemes shows how traditional socialist arguments for collective provision and trade union power have been supplanted by a thin approach to redistribution 1 Pope Francis, Let us Dream: The Path to a Better Future (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2020), p. 131; Pope Francis, 2020 Easter message, delivered at the Vatican, 12 April 2020, and available online at https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/full-text- pope-francis-easter-sunday-urbi-et-orbi-blessing-43012. 2 Peter Sloman, ‘Universal Basic Income in British Politics, 1918-2018: From a “Vagabond’s Wage” to a Global Debate’, Journal of Social Policy, 47, no. 3 (2018): 625-642. 3 Joseph Hanlon, Armando Barrientos, and David Hulme, Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South (Sterling, Va: Kumarian Press, 2010); James Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 4 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London: Verso 2015); Rutgar Bregman, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (New York, NY: Crown, 2018). 5 Louise Haagh, The Case for Universal Basic Income (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/full-text-pope-francis-easter-sunday-urbi-et-orbi-blessing-43012 https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/full-text-pope-francis-easter-sunday-urbi-et-orbi-blessing-43012 through cash transfers, which reflects neoliberal influences and reinforces the logic of the market.6 In an attempt to rectify the ahistorical nature of much of the discourse around UBI, we convened a one-day workshop at the University of Cambridge in January 2019 on ‘the intellectual history of basic income’. The call for papers attracted submissions from a number of historians and social scientists who were working on the topic, with a particularly strong focus on the origins and reception of UBI proposals in Europe and North America. Alongside these historical contributions, we also invited four leading members of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) – Louise Haagh, Philippe Van Parijs, Eduardo Suplicy, and Malcolm Torry – to reflect on how the UBI debate has developed over the years. This book draws together seven of the papers presented at the conference, together with three other chapters which we have commissioned from established scholars, and an edited transcript of an interview which Daniel Zamora Vargas has conducted with Philippe Van Parijs. Pedro Ramos Pinto began the conference by asking a provocative question: what might be the use of a history of UBI? When bringing an idea into the public arena, inserting it in a genealogy – whether it be the tradition of Tom Paine or of Milton Friedman – is a way of seeking legitimation. It anchors the unusual in the familiar and helps us the argument gain the ear and trust of an audience. But it is also a distortion, since ideas are always a product of their world, and so change with it. Modern historians are instinctively suspicious of teleological narratives which see the past as a series of rehearsals on the way to the present. In different ways, all of the contributions to this book seek to lift the historical analysis of basic income out of the realm of genealogy by situating UBI proposals in their time and place and studying them through the lens of established scholarly literatures. The problem with genealogies The prevailing narrative of the history of basic income mainly reflects the efforts of UBI supporters to establish a historical lineage for their proposals. Most UBI campaigners have been drawn to the idea for political or philosophical reasons; for instance, Philippe Van Parijs developed his proposal for an ‘allocation universelle’ in 1982-3 as a way of trying to answer the problem of persistent unemployment outside the classical Keynesian framework. Van Parijs’ frame of reference was distinctly contemporary, reflecting economic debates over inflation and deindustrialization (including the critique of Keynesian macroeconomics by figures such as Milton Friedman) and sociological concerns about the future of work highlighted by André Gorz. It was only as the European, and later global, UBI network matured – particularly after the creation of Basic Income European Network (BIEN) in 1986 – that scholars began to investigate the history of the idea, connecting figures as disparate in time and place as Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell, Mabel and Dennis Milner, and Milton Friedman. In some cases, the fruits of this research have been based on rigorous archival work: for instance, Walter Van Trier’s book Every One A King (1995) provides a richly textured analysis of basic income proposals in inter-war Britain and their relationship with other strands of radical economic thought, such as Major C.H. Douglas’ Social Credit movement.7 More often, however, the effort to tell the history of UBI as a ‘500-year-old idea’has meant 6 Daniel Zamora, ‘The Case Against a Basic Income’, Jacobin, Dec. 2017, available online at https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/12/universal-basic-income-inequality-work. 7 Walter Van Trier, Every One A King: An Investigation into the Meaning and Significance of the Debate on Basic Incomes with Special Reference to Three Episodes from the British Inter-War Experience (Leuven: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1995). https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/12/universal-basic-income-inequality-work reading contemporary definitions back into the past to construct a genealogy.8 In popular works such as Rutger Bregman’s bestseller Utopia for Realists, the history of basic income has been written in the service of the present. Bregman, for instance, claims that ‘Thomas More dreamed about [UBI] in his book Utopia in 1516’.9 Guy Standing, one of the most important proponents of the idea, has pushed the genealogy further back in his paperback introduction to UBI, suggesting that the Athenian reformer Ephilates – who introduced payments to citizens for carrying out jury service – was ‘the true originator of the basic income’.10 Though his ‘enlightened system of deliberative democracy, facilitated by the basic income’, did not survive the oligarchic coup of 411 BC, basic income returned during the Middle Ages with ‘the epochal Charter of the Forest in 1217’, which ‘asserted the rights of the common man to subsistence’.11 Standing’s genealogy then runs through Thomas More, Thomas Paine, Edward Bellamy, Bertrand Russell, and Erich Fromm to the 1960s US guaranteed income debate and the formation of BIEN, before culminating with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs such as Sam Altman. In a similar vein, John Cunliffe and Guido Erreygers argue that basic income has ‘an intellectually rich albeit neglected past under various titles’, which can be traced through ‘apparently isolated and episodic occurrences in quite different contexts over some two hundred years’. From time to time, without any ‘easily identifiable transmissions of intellectual or political influence’, the ‘deceptively simple ideas of a universal capital grant or lifetime income’ have been ‘(re)invented or (re)discovered’.12 Attempts to construct a genealogy of UBI in this way are classic examples of what Quentin Skinner has called the ‘mythology of doctrines’. As Skinner pointed out in his famous 1969 essay on ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, attempting ‘to trace the morphology of some given doctrine “through all the provinces of history in which it appears”’ runs the risk of reifying an ‘ideal type’ of the idea and launching into an ‘endless debate… about whether a given idea may be said to have “really emerged” at a given time, and whether it is “really there” in the work of some given writer’.13 As the historian duly sets out in quest of the idea he has characterized, he is very readily led to speak as if the fully developed form of the doctrine was always in some sense immanent in history, even if various thinkers failed to ‘hit upon’ it, even if it ‘dropped from sight’ at various times, even if an entire era failed… to ‘rise to a consciousness’ of it.14 This reification is doubly problematic in the case of UBI, because both the term itself and its prevailing definition – as a universal and unconditional payment to every individual – have only been widely used since the 1980s. Most proposals for universal payments have appeared under other labels and in very different political contexts. For instance, Thomas Spence’s 8 This phrase has been used very widely: see, for instance, Gideon Haigh, ‘Basic Income for All: A 500-Year-Old Idea Whose Time Has Come?’, The Guardian, November 10, 2016. 9 Bregman, Utopia for Realists, p. 33. 10 Guy Standing, Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 10 11 Ibid., p. 10. 12 John Cunliffe and Guido Erreygers, eds., The Origins of Universal Grants (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2004), xiii. 13 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8, no. 1 (1969): 3-53, at 10, 11. 14 Ibid., 10. 1803 proposal to give each person ‘an equal share of the rents of the parish where they have settlement’ was deeply rooted in a radical critique of the Enclosure Acts, in his practical experience of the Elizabethan settlement laws, and in a historical narrative which complained of the dispossession of ‘free-born Englishmen’. Assimilating Spence’s ideas to a canon of UBI proposals based on a contemporary definition is likely to distort their original meaning. Since the very meaning of basic income is unstable, its history cannot be written as a single story, let alone a triumphant narrative of ‘an idea whose time has come’. As Walter Van Trier has argued, ‘The meaning of any particular basic incomes proposal depends crucially and in a very strong sense on its substantive features’ and on the particular ‘frames of reference’ within which it is set.15 When we talk about basic income, we are really talking about a family of ideas, linked by a common set of characteristics. The changing content and impact of these proposals can only be properly understood by setting them in their social, political, and intellectual contexts. How should we write the history of UBI? What, then, might a better history of basic income look like? We would identify four broad objectives. Firstly, histories of UBI should be sensitive to the language and context of different schemes and to the ways in which their reference points have changed over time. This historical concern to recognize the ‘otherness’ of the past leads many of the contributors to this volume to emphasize the distinctiveness of ‘modern’ UBI proposals. Attitudes to redistribution, for instance, have been powerfully reshaped by what Martin Ravallion has called the ‘Second Poverty Enlightenment’ – the explosion of research and interest in poverty relief after the Second World War, which has intersected with global discourses around human rights and ‘basic needs’, as Samuel Moyn shows in his chapter.16 The notion that the state should set a ‘poverty line’ below which citizens cannot fall has become a political commonplace over the last century, at the same time as the technology of redistribution has been transformed by the growth of centralized bureaucracies, population registers, and automated payments systems. Alongside this temporal shift, conceptions of what a basic income should look like have also varied widely between national contexts, according to the structure of welfare states, the problems they create, and the social expectations they set. For example, proponents of a guaranteed income in the 1960s United States were primarily attracted to the idea of an unconditional safety net which would replace the complex patchwork of state and federal welfare programmes, and tended to blur the distinction between a universal system of cash payments and selective programmes such as Milton Friedman’s Negative Income Tax (NIT). By contrast, the UK has had a long tradition of centralized means-tested support which grew out of the old ‘Poor Law’ and persisted into the post-war period, as José Harris has shown.17 British campaigners have thus tended to see UBI as a way of extending the principle of ‘flat- rate universalism’ which William Beveridge articulated in his report on Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942), and removing the stigma and complexity which they associate with the means-tested benefit system. Likewise, as E. Fouksman shows in chapter 10, campaigners 15 Van Trier, Every One A King, pp. 417, 427. 16 Martin Ravallion, The Economics of Poverty: History, Measurement, and Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 17 José Harris, ‘From Poor Law to Welfare State? A European Perspective’, in The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688-1914, eds. Donald Winch and Patrick K. O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 409-37. in South Africa and Namibia have presented basic income as a response to the economic and social legacies of apartheid, including high levels of black unemployment and the continuing divide between contributory (social insurance) and means-tested (social assistance) benefits. Secondly, a history of UBI must recognize that ideas are never free-floating; rather, they are nurtured and disseminated by individuals and institutions, which carry them into public debate. Many basic income proposals have been championed by individual ‘policy entrepreneurs’, who (in John Kingdon’s words) ‘invest their resources – time, energy, reputation, and sometimes money’ – in the pursuit of policy change, and ‘attempt to “soften up” both policy communities… and larger publics, getting them used to new ideas and building acceptance for their proposals’.18 Dennis Milner, Juliet Rhys-Williams, and Hermione Parker in the UK are classic examples, as Peter Sloman shows in chapter 2. Over time, basic income campaigning has increasingly become institutionalized, both on a national scale (for instance, through the Citizen’s Basic Income Trust in the UK and the BIG Coalition in Namibia) and through BIEN. Other organizations have taken up UBI alongside other goals or demands, as in the case of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) in the United States, which Alyssa Battistoni discusses in chapter 5, and the Dutch Council Against the Work Ethic, which Anton Jäger analyses in chapter 6. Close study of individuals and formal institutions forces us to grapple with wider intellectual and political influences on social policy debate, which have given UBI proposals their form and meaning. Both the NWRO and the Dutch Council Against the Work Ethic, for instance, can only be understood as a product of larger social movements: the US civil rights movement (particularly in its late 1960s guise, radicalized by frustration with the limits of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty) and the transnational New Left which emerged out of the 1968 student protests and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Such movements, in turn, are shaped by deeper patterns in capitalist political economy and political culture, as Louise Haagh argues in chapter 11. Among academics and policy-makers, discussions of UBI have similarly been structured by intellectual agendas and disciplinary assumptions. As Daniel Zamora Vargas shows in chapter 3, many post-war US economists were drawn to guaranteed income proposals as a liberal solution to poverty which respected the superior allocative efficiency of the price system – reflecting the preference for fiscal transfers over collective provision which Alice O’Connor has traced in her study of Poverty Knowledge.19 By contrast, political philosophers such as Philippe Van Parijs have mainly been attracted to the principle of unconditional income support as a way of achieving ‘real freedom for all’. The explosion of interest in UBI within the Anglo-American academy during 1980s and 1990s arguably owed less to real-world developments in social policy than to the post-Rawlsian revival of debates on distributive justice, and Van Parijs’ attempt to justify ‘why surfers should be fed’ in his dialogue with Rawls.20 André Gorz’s efforts to rethink socialism for a post-industrial age had a similarly galvanizing effect on sociologists and left-wing intellectuals in continental Europe.21 As Walter Van Trier points out in chapter 8, Gorz framed his analysis in relation to a Marxist analysis of political change in a way that Van Parijs did not – a reflection of the slightly different intellectual contexts in which they were operating. 18 John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies (second edition, New York, NY: Longman, 1995), pp. 122, 128. 19 Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century US History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 20 Juliana Uhuru Bidadanure, ‘The Political Theory of Universal Basic Income’, Annual Review of Political Science, 22 (2019): 481-501. 21 Adrian Little, The Political Thought of André Gorz (London: Routledge, 1996). Thirdly, we need to understand the reception of basic income in public debate, both in order to explain the repeated waves of interest in the idea over the last century and to see why UBI proposals have so rarely been implemented. There is already a growing literature on the politics of UBI by scholars such as Jurgen de Wispelaere, which has highlighted problems that proponents frequently face: deep concerns about the cost of universal payments, shallow and inconsistent support from political actors, and the difficulty of constructing a durable coalition around particular proposals.22 Clearly governing institutions matter: for instance, Finland’s high-profile 2017-18 basic income experiment was launched as a result of coalition negotiations after an election held under proportional representation.23 The structure of existing welfare states – and the existing distribution of income – also has major implications for the likely pattern of winners and losers from a UBI system.24 As Brian Steensland has pointed out in his study of the US guaranteed income debate, The Failed Welfare Revolution (2008), however, the politics of social reform cannot be understood wholly in rationalist terms. Steensland argues that ‘guaranteed income plans failed’ in the 1960s and early 1970s ‘because they challenged the cultural logic of American welfare policy, which is based on sorting the poor into different programs according to assessments of their “deservingness”’.25 Similar cultural factors figure prominently in several of the chapters included here. Anton Jäger and Marc-Antoine Sabaté both highlight the commitment of the twentieth-century European left to a producerist vision of society oriented towards ‘inclusion’ through paid work, which has continued to shape policy in France and the Netherlands until very recently, in spite of the rise of the ‘second left’ and the impact of deindustrialization. Likewise, E. Fouksman draws on her own anthropological research to show that many poorer Namibians and South Africans retain a strong normative attachment to paid work and are wary of direct income transfers. Fouksman’s analysis echoes Luke Martinelli and Nick Pearce’s warning to British basic income advocates that ‘many of those who might stand to benefit from BI in material terms might oppose it on normative grounds of fairness or reciprocity, particularly if it were extended to “undeserving” groups’ such as migrants.26 Recent experience suggests that this distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor remains a powerful weapon for conservative politicians, and a major obstacle to UBI in many contexts. Finally, a global history of basic income must uncover the networks that have brought UBI supporters together and placed the idea at the heart of a wide-ranging transnational movement. Early basic income proposals tended to be episodic and disconnected, partly 22 See especially Jurgen de Wispelaere and José Antonio Noguera, ‘On the Political Feasibility of Universal Basic Income: An Analytic Framework’, in Basic Income Guarantee and Politics: International Experiences and Perspectives on the Viability of Income Guarantee, ed. Richard K. Caputo (New York/Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 17-38, and Jurgen de Wispelaere, ‘The Struggle for Strategy: On the Politics of the Basic Income Proposal’, Politics, 36, no. 2 (2016): 131-41. 23 Antti Halmetoja, Jurgen de Wispelaere and Johanna Perkiö, ‘A Policy Comet in Moominland? Basic Income in the Finnish Welfare State’, Social Policy & Society, 18, no. 2 (2019): 319-30, at 321. 24 This is, of course, the founding insight of both standard political economy models of redistribution (such as the Meltzer-Richard model) and the literature on the difficulties of welfare state reform associated with scholars such as Paul Pierson. 25 Brian Steensland, The Failed Welfare Revolution: America’s Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), x. 26 Luke Martinelli and Nick Pearce, ‘Basic Income in the UK: Assessing Prospects for Reform in an Age of Austerity’, Social Policy & Society, 18, no. 2 (2019): 265-75, at 270. because the terminology around the idea was so fluid and its advocates struggled to gain acceptance in mainstream social policy circles. As Walter Van Trier has pointed out, many proponents of UBI have thought they were coming up with a completely new idea, and then stumbled across earlier cases; Philippe Van Parijs (who was probably one of the last to ‘discover’ UBI in this way) explains the origins of his interest in the idea in his interview with Daniel Zamora Vargas.27 From the 1960s onwards, however, debates over the US War on Poverty, deindustrialization, and ‘third-world’ development spilled across national borders, and the conference which Van Parijs organised at Louvain-la-Neuve in September 1986 brought together UBI enthusiasts from across Europe to form BIEN.28 Although BIEN is formally a research organization – which ‘fosters evidence-based research and plural debate about Basic Income’ and ‘remains neutral among competing arguments for and against’ UBI – many of its members are actively involved in campaigning. More recently, groups such as UBI Europe have adopted a more overtly activist posture. The fact that basic income lies at the heart of a global movement today does not mean that the idea has an ‘immanent’ and ‘internal’ logic that has always had the potential to ‘universalize’ itself. As Samuel Moyn has noted, concepts do not spread one by one, but are always ‘bound up with larger political and cultural processes’ and ‘selected out of larger actual and possible sets of alternative concepts’.29 The emergence of the modern UBI movement reflects both the agency of basic income advocates and the trend towards the globalization of policy discourse. Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, for instance, have drawn attention to the rise of ‘fast policy’: a condition of deepening transnational interconnectedness, in which local policy experiments exist in relation to near and far relatives, to traveling models and technocratic designs, and to a host of financial, technical, social, and symbolic networks that invariably loop through centres of power and persuasion.30 Basic income provides a striking case of how a policy idea can migrate between contexts and mutate in the process. Indeed, the circulation and ‘hybridization’ of UBI ideas across space is critical to understanding UBI’s global ‘success’ in the last few years. UBI is often presented as the future of social policy in the global south, and perhaps in the global north as well. Where once the International Labour Organization’s 1944 Philadelphia declaration promised to universalise the western industrial welfare model, the global south now shows the north how to create a welfare society that is not based on productivism. The embrace of UBI by the development community is linked to the rise of ‘conditional cash transfers’ (CCTs) such as Brazil’s Bolsa Família programme – a family allowance conditional on the educational participation of children – or South Africa’s range of family support grants, which are now in widespread use across the global south. As Fouksman argues in this volume, it is important to distinguish CCTs from UBI, and the mechanisms and legitimating rationales for the former can in fact militate against a truly unconditional and universal system. Nonetheless, it could 27 Van Trier, Every One A King, p. 20. 28 Anne G. Miller, ed., Basic Income. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Basic Income, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium, 4-6 September 1986 (Antwerp, 1986). 29 Samuel Moyn, ‘On the Nonglobalization of Ideas’, in Global Intellectual History, eds. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 201. 30 Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), xxxi. be argued that one of the major impetuses for the current attention devoted to UBI has been its grafting on to the seemingly positive experience of cash transfer schemes. As such – and regardless of the position one takes on the desirability of UBI – James Ferguson’s call to historicise development and social policy discourses in order to understand how cash transfer programmes have arisen as a solution to the problems of global poverty and inequality, seems to us to be crucial. Direct allocations by the state were not invented by the randomised control trials that have made CCTs the latest go-to anti-poverty policy; rather, they have a long history in colonial and post-colonial contexts.31 The rise of cash transfers must also be set against the backdrop of an even longer history of in-kind provision, typified by systems of collective feeding in both ancient and recent empires. In India, for instance, British administrators organised ‘gratuitous relief’ for the purposes of emergency relief following the late-nineteenth-century famine codes, and later developed a public distribution system for food during the Second World War, which the Indian government expanded after independence and which remains a major form of social transfer in the world’s largest democracy.32 Likewise, it is important to explore how ideas about direct unconditional transfers developed by contemporary basic income advocates intersect with other ideas with long genealogies, including the Islamic practice of zakat, a tax on wealth – which is sometimes voluntary, sometimes not, and in some instances state-administered. To the extent that the debate about basic income is also a debate about what is a basic or sufficient command of resources, then, it is intrinsically linked to a larger history of the politics of defining, measuring, and fighting over vital and social minima in the context of colonial and post-colonial development. These minima have taken a wide variety of forms – including wages, calories, bushels of grain – and have been integral to the conceptualisation of standards of living and debates over rights.33 As Frederick Cooper reminds us, the debate about social minima has a long history within colonial empires, from anti-slavery to ILO- sanctioned projects of colonial reformism in the middle of the twentieth century.34 The terms and shape of basic income debates can only be properly understood in the light of these legacies, as Grace Davie has shown with regards to the Basic Income Grant (BIG) campaigns in South Africa.35 In short, the history of UBI needs to be set within the broader history of global social policy, and of development agendas and ambitions. This history is complex, and on a global 31 James Midgley, ‘Colonialism and Welfare: A Post-Colonial Commentary’, Journal of Progressive Human Services, 9 (1998): 31-50; Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 32 Jean Drèze, ‘Famine Prevention in India’, in The Political Economy of Hunger, Vol. 2: Famine Prevention, eds. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Jos Mooij, ‘Food Policy and Politics: The Political Economy of the Public Distribution System in India’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 25 (1998): 77-101. 33 Nick Cullather, ‘The Foreign Policy of the Calorie’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007): 337-64; Vincent Bonnecase, ‘When Numbers Represented Poverty: The Changing Meaning of the Food Ration in French Colonial Africa’, Journal of African History, 59 (2018): 463-81; Poornima Paidipaty, ‘Testing Measures: Decolonization and Economic Power in 1960s India’, History of Political Economy, 52 (2020): 473-97. 34 Frederick Cooper, ‘Afterword: Social Rights and Human Rights in the Time of Decolonization’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 3 (2012): 473-92, at 481. 35 Grace Davie, Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855–2005 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). level much of it remains to be written. What is clear is that the circulation of ideas about UBI cannot be divorced from the structural asymmetries of the modern world, including the legacy of the colonial past, the influence of western institutions and ideas, and the dependency relationships created by global capitalism. The imbalances of power between and within nations that define social policy agendas, making some interventions possible and others unfeasible, must be a central part of the story. Competing narratives, contested meanings As previously noted, most of the chapters collected in this volume were first presented as papers at a workshop in Cambridge in January 2019. All of them emerge out of ongoing (and independent) research agendas, in many cases by doctoral students and early career academics, and with research questions which range well beyond the history of basic income. Our contributors are also drawn from a variety of disciplines, and include two sociologists (Daniel Zamora Vargas and Walter Van Trier), two applied political theorists (Alyssa Battistoni and Louise Haagh), and a social anthropologist (E. Fouksman) as well as political and intellectual historians. Though we have sought to include a wide range of perspectives, we have made no attempt to steer the contributors in particular directions or to achieve comprehensive coverage. This book thus makes no pretence to offer a total history of UBI. Rather, we believe the chapters make an important set of focussed contributions to our understanding of basic income debates in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in line with the broad objectives set out in the previous section. Taken together, the chapters collected here can be seen to contest existing narratives around basic income in three main ways. Firstly, several of the contributors show that the modern UBI movement, formed in the 1980s and institutionalized through BIEN, built on arguments and proposals which had circulated in Europe and the United States during the third quarter of the twentieth century. Peter Sloman points out in chapter 2 that the costed basic income schemes which Hermione Parker and Malcolm Torry have produced in the UK show close structural affinities with the proposals for ‘a new social contract’ which Juliet Rhys-Williams drew up during the Second World War, and that figures such as James Meade and Sir Brandon Rhys-Williams provided a direct link between these two eras. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, Daniel Zamora Vargas, Andrew Sanchez, and Alyssa Battistoni explore how economic ideas, futurist visions of ‘cybernation’, and feminist and environmentalist campaigning in the post-war United States produced very different conceptions of the nature and purpose of a guaranteed income. Likewise, Anton Jäger shows in chapter 6 that concerns about automation and the future of work circulated widely in Europe as well as North America from the 1960s onwards, and helped shape the New Left’s anti-productivism and anti-statism. These early attempts to rethink the prevailing models of work and welfare provide crucial contexts for understanding how the UBI movement took off when unemployment surged in the 1980s. Secondly, the contributors point out that the political meaning of UBI can vary markedly according to the content of proposals and the political agendas of its advocates. One perspective which has featured prominently in recent literature sees UBI as part of a larger field of essentially liberal and technocratic cash transfer programmes, which reflects the neoclassical orientation of mainstream Anglo-American economists and seeks to alleviate poverty without interfering directly in labour and product markets. Peter Sloman has made this point in relatively neutral terms in his recent study of UK guaranteed income proposals, Transfer State (2019); Daniel Zamora Vargas and Anton Jäger have pushed the same line of argument further and given it a critical form in two articles, arguing that UBI proposals are ‘firmly rooted in a neoliberal understanding of social justice’ which left-wingers should reject.36 Zamora Vargas fleshes out this interpretation in chapter 3 by putting Milton Friedman at the heart of his analysis of the US guaranteed income debate, and Marc-Antoine Sabaté’s analysis of the growing interest in UBI in France in chapter 7 expresses similar caution about its implications. Likewise, in chapter 9 Samuel Moyn sets the popularity of basic income against the backdrop of the global ‘basic needs’ agenda which has emerged since the 1970s, and argues that the prevailing focus on poverty relief has served to marginalize more radical calls for greater equality. As Alyssa Battistoni points out in chapter 5, however, this is far from being the only way in which UBI and similar proposals can be read. Battistoni shows that US guaranteed income proposals drew support from thinkers and campaigners well beyond the ranks of the economics profession, tapping into welfare rights activism, ecological concerns about over- consumption, and the feminist politics of the Wages for Housework movement. The social work students who founded the US Ad Hoc Committee for A Guaranteed Income in 1966 – which Andrew Sanchez discusses in chapter 4 – also backed the idea for very different reasons to market economists. There are thus good reasons to be careful about seeing the growing popularity of cash transfers as intrinsically ‘neoliberal’. On the other hand, as Louise Haagh notes in chapter 11, there is no necessary correspondence between the origins of an idea and its effects. The fact that many UBI proponents identify with the political left has not prevented market liberals from appropriating their arguments, and is no guarantee that basic income will not be used to shore up support for financialized capitalism. Thirdly, and relatedly, this awareness of the mutability of basic income has implications for debates about development policy in the global south. Over the last decade, scholars such as Ferguson have held up UBI campaigns and pilot schemes as examples of a ‘new politics of distribution’ which bypasses the wage-labour relationship and subverts the paternalism of traditional development strategies.37 As Fouksman points out in chapter 10, however, the vast majority of social grants programmes in southern Africa are restricted to certain categories of claimants (for instance, the unemployed and disabled) or subject to means-testing, and so pose a much less radical challenge to traditional social norms than a fully-fledged UBI. Likewise, the political goals of grassroots civil rights movements tend to be very different to the technocratic focus on poverty relief, work incentives, and human capital development which continues to prevail within leading global institutions such as the World Bank and IMF.38 We must be careful not to allow superficial similarities between social welfare proposals to blur profound differences in meaning. We are well aware that these findings only scratch the surface of a large and complex topic. More work is needed in a host of areas: most obviously, on the regions which we have not looked at here (particularly Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific), on the connections between UBI and other global social policy initiatives (such as the ILO’s social protection floors), and on BIEN’s role in the development of a transnational ‘instrument constituency’.39 36 Daniel Zamora and Anton Jäger, ‘Historicizing Basic Income: Response to Daniel Zeglen’, Lateral, 8, no. 1 (spring 2019), available online at https://csalateral.org/forum/universal- basic-income/historicizing-basic-income-zamora-jager/; see also Daniel Zamora and Anton Jäger, ‘One Question: Universal Basic Income’, State of Nature blog, 30 July 2018, available online at https://stateofnatureblog.com/one-question-universal-basic-income/. 37 Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish. 38 Peck and Theodore, Fast Policy, 85-129. 39 For the social protection floors, see Bob Deacon, Global Social Policy in the Making: The Foundations of the Social Protection Floor (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2013); for the concept of an instrument constituency, see Daniel Béland and Michael Howlett, ‘How https://csalateral.org/forum/universal-basic-income/historicizing-basic-income-zamora-jager/ https://csalateral.org/forum/universal-basic-income/historicizing-basic-income-zamora-jager/ https://stateofnatureblog.com/one-question-universal-basic-income/ Nevertheless, we hope that the research collected in this volume will enrich our understanding of where UBI proposals have come from, and help to integrate the basic income debate with other research fields. After all, the contextual sensitivity which historical research requires is relevant not only to the past but also to the present and future. Social programmes have enormous power to change people’s lives, for good or ill. Careful analysis of how a particular form of basic income might function in a particular society will always be essential to informed debate and successful policy-making. solutions chase problems: Instrument constituencies in the policy process’, Governance, 29, no. 3 (2016): 393-409.