Carlyle on Poverty

Thomas Carlyle was one of the many nineteenth century thinkers to note the dehumanizing and poverty-increasing effects of laissez-faire capitalism. In his Past and Present, he notes that "the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk fast or is sinking." He blames this not directly on any increased greed, but on the "dismal science" of economics, which has removed traditional values from human interactions and replaced them with analyses of profit and loss. He also believes that the "Master Unworker" -- that is, the aristocratic bosses -- have in their hearts severe misgivings about the underlying cause of the economic disparity, a "very simple sort of 'Liberty': the liberty to 'buy wherever he finds it cheapest and sell wherever he finds it dearest.'"

The answer to the present dilemma comes, for Carlyle, from the past: "The quantity of done and forgotten work that lies silent under my feet...gives rise to reflection." He does not believe that wealth will ever be distributed fairly, for its creation precludes this possibility. Rather, he wishes for a return to past times when wealth was not the ultimate goal. In contemporary times, "all the truth of the Universe is uncertain; only the profit and loss of it...remain very visible to the practical man." He paints the past, perhaps rather disingenuously, as a place of poverty but survival, where lords kept their serfs fed at the very least.

Carlyle relies heavily on restoring religion as a motivator for restoring decent human behavior, which contrasts sharply with Robert Owen's total rejection of religion. Owen believed that socialism and increased investment in human capital was the way to solve the poverty problem by evening the field. Thomas Malthus saw poverty as a natural result of over-population, and saw limiting family size as the only reasonable measure.