1 Jacobin Legacy: The Origins of Social Justice

In 1941, the British people were at war alone against Axis powers, poised on the brink of creating a popular welfare state. The pain and sacrifice their beleaguered and solitary plight required made a new kind of social citizenship necessary. In that year, William Temple, the archbishop of York (and soon after, of Canterbury), coined the phrase “the welfare state.” It would differ from the mere “power state” that the German National Socialists had brought about, achieving redistributive policy and social security without destroying personal freedoms. Despite the indispensable alliance with the Soviet Union to put Adolf Hitler down, the welfare state emerged as the sole alternative “the West” had to offer to the totalitarian state, in its various guises to the east. Eventually, the welfare state would appeal the world over.[^1]

The truth was, however, that it was still unclear whether liberal democracy could host the kind of welfare state modern economic circumstances seemed to require and that so-called totalitarian states had moved to achieve too. In the United States—which had some New Deal experiments behind it but was still debating whether to enter the fray not only of the war but also of the age of social citizenship—a professor named R. R. Palmer reflected on the beginnings of this new state and the origins of the debate about how precisely to organize it. He traced both back to the Jacobin state of 1793–4 during the French Revolution. The Jacobin state verged toward dictatorship in emergency circumstances, Palmer allowed, as some twentieth-century states did and as his own great Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt had even been accused of doing. Poised between democracy and dictatorship themselves, the Jacobins had pioneered a state that would be “interventionist, offering social services; it was to plan and guide the institutions of the country, using legislation to lift up the common man.” Already the French Revolution had not merely introduced human rights as a _lingua franca_ of politics for modern states—it had also initiated the contentious struggle for social welfare.[^2]

The history of economic and social rights, which has almost never been written, depends on a framework that captures the full aspirations of the political enterprises of which those rights have been a part. It is important to track the annunciation of each of the now-canonical social rights—first, rights to education and public relief; later, rights to work and to workplace protections; and ultimately, a panoply of other entitlements. But followed one by one or even together, the emergence of such rights makes no sense. Rather, a history of these rights requires an account of the main ideological origins of the welfare state and also, therefore, an account of contending responses to what the nineteenth century dubbed “the social question.” That account, in turn, shows that reducing the origins of the welfare state and the resolution of the social question to the narrower prehistory of economic and social rights would be a serious mistake, in part because of longstanding uncertainty about whether rights were a viable language for pursuing social justice. Indeed, until the end of World War II, it remained quite unclear what kind of political regime could provide adequate minimal protections. It would have to make the modern workplace more humane. It would need to erect shelters, like unemployment insurance, against the buffeting winds of the modern economy. Finally, it would require basic provision in domains like health and housing for those whose work did not afford them enough means or those who were too young, ill-equipped, or old to work in the first place. But even more important, the emergence of social rights took place in relation to the trajectory of other ideals, especially the distributive ideal of material equality. From the Jacobin state to the twentieth-century welfare state in its dictatorial and democratic guises, the ideal of sufficient distribution, which economic and social rights provide one way to capture, had to be squared with a variety of alternative hopes. These hopes included the aspiration to create a modicum of distributive equality among citizens—not merely a floor of protection against the worst outcomes by affording basic provision, but a ceiling on wealth and a constraint on material hierarchy.[^3]

When the United Nations canonized economic and social rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, it consecrated the democratic welfare state that had emerged victorious from World War II. It thereby did more than simply enshrine the ideal of distributive sufficiency that the declaration explicitly defined in its series of basic entitlements; it also reflected the ambitious political enterprise of distributive equality. The genocidal project of the Nazi welfare state was abandoned, but the democratic welfare states that triumphed were also designed for only some beneficiaries in national communities. The very West European states that went furthest toward welfare were also the larger imperial states that excluded from their generosity the vast bulk of humanity in the empire’s territories. The new welfare states also set up hierarchies of privilege at home, especially on grounds of race and gender. Long after Hitler, the very states that, through the 1940s, achieved democratic welfare for their full-fledged citizens continued to rule much of the globe’s territories and peoples, a fact the Universal Declaration did nothing to change. The welfare state shouldered the burden of provision for males above all, and ethnic and racial insiders among them. Women and children certainly mattered, but the welfare state’s schemes treated their plight as derivative, and its very generosity entrenched their subordination to the destiny of the male working nation, especially when welfare states took up natalist policies—a fact that the Universal Declaration’s prohibition of discrimination did shockingly little to affect for a long time. In short, the story of the rise of social rights in the welfare state is unintelligible when separated from that state’s equalizations as well as its discriminations.

The Jacobin state did the most in both theory and practice to set off a permanent debate about fair distribution in modern history and especially about the quandary of fulfilling sufficient provision of the good things in life without neglecting the establishment of a rough material equality of citizens. Assessing the contributions of socialist thought and the new parties and trade unions that advanced its ideals from the later nineteenth century opens a path to the twentieth-century welfare states’ more important ideological origins in class compromise and their incorporation of egalitarian aims alongside the goal of sufficient provision for the needy. After the Jacobin welfare state, the attempt to balance and combine sufficiency and equality—and therefore master the tension between them—began in earnest once coalitions of social masters and inferiors began to explore whether and how they could compromise between the extremes of doing nothing and changing everything. This new political form achieved unprecedented socioeconomic equality in modern circumstances of abundance compared to the liberal atmosphere of the nineteenth century and the neoliberal one of the twenty-first. It came bound up with glaring exclusions in its socialization of citizenship—exclusions not just of imperial subjects but also of women and non-whites alongside other unprivileged groups. Yet its modicum of egalitarian inclusion was to travel to the ends of the earth before neoliberalism came in our time, along with a storied human rights movement that remedied the historic exclusions of welfare states even as the material equality they had engineered was undone.

DEFINING and pursuing social justice changed decisively between ancient and modern times. The prospect of growth appeared, and God-given or socially necessary constraints were slowly eroded. Despite longstanding moral ideals both to serve the poor and to arrange distribution equally, to eradicate poverty or strive for a fair society did not seem feasible. “The poor shall never cease out of the land,” Deuteronomy explains (15:11). And while Plato entertained “communism” for the guardians of his ideal city, neither he nor Aristotle was in a position to advance a theory of distributive justice from first premises, in part because it was unimaginable that any polity could ever strive to arrange who got what.

As a moral and religious matter, it was long conceivable that provision of a sufficient amount of the good things in life counted among the most essential moral desiderata. Out of humane solidarity, the different monotheisms have all decreed charity (often through religious organizations) for the most downtrodden and certainly allowed moralizing: “He that withholdeth Corn, the People shall curse him” (Prov. 9:26). Religious communities could even institutionalize provisions to combat insufficiency. Yet gross hierarchy prevailed with little opposition. In Leviticus 25, God announced ordinances (probably never enacted anywhere) that, every fiftieth year, put all Israelites back at an equal starting point, to correct periodically for maldistribution. Jesus Christ did not have a soft spot for the wealthy, clearly, but for all his significance as a zealous religious firebrand preaching the end of days, neither did he prompt norms of economic or even political equality—at least not for centuries. In the Sermon on the Mount, he preached to his followers not to worry about the vital needs of food, drink, or clothing, but to seek the kingdom of righteousness in order to be provided them (Matt. 6:25–33; Luke 12:22–31). Jesus’s evangelizing disciple Paul arrogated the Greek concept of political equality for an ideal of famine relief through mutual aid: “For I mean not that other men be eased, and ye burdened. But by an equality, that now at this time your abundance may be a supply for their want, that their abundance also may be a supply for your want: that there may be equality” (2 Cor. 8:13–14). Otherwise, the risks of wealth were to one’s chances of salvation, rather than an affront to justice in this world. What did emerge with Christianity as it moved from rural Palestine into its first urban settings around the Mediterranean world was a much more powerful norm of solidarity with the poor. The practice in the Roman world of public benefaction for the sake of civic pride—the culture of bread and circuses—gave way to the virtue of poverty relief, including for those outside the faith community.[^4]

The very notion of “sufficiency” (_sufficientia_), absent from classical languages before the reception of monotheism, originally (mis)translated the allusion in Proverbs (30:8) to the bread that God was entreated to provide everyone. In the Hebrew, God is implored to provide an amount “allotted” under custom or law, with no implication that this amount would match vital needs. But by the time of some translations—into Greek in the Septuagint, and then in some Latin and later vernacular renderings—the term sometimes was taken to imply a satisfactory amount. Jesus’s chroniclers Matthew (6:11) and Luke (11:3) replace “allotted” with “daily.” And since early interpretations of these passages, God’s largesse has been associated with subsistence. A radical fifth-century Pelagian treatise, _On Riches_, condemning wealth and decrying poverty alike, opined that it would be best if everyone received that adequate amount and no more from divine or human powers, in effect equating a minimum floor with a maximum ceiling in distribution. It even supposed that were wealth to disappear, penury would no longer exist, so that equality and sufficiency were identical in practice. But no one argued that this standard had to be achieved through political authority. Humanity lacked not only modern states to enforce and institutionalize distributive justice but even the belief that it ought to be enforced and institutionalized, except through communal norms. Various communistic schemes over the centuries emphasizing egalitarian distribution amidst plenty or on a higher standard than sufficiency remained millennial and utopian.[^5]

Treating a world beyond the antagonism and hierarchy of rich and poor as a pipedream, ancient, medieval, and early modern texts went far further for this reason in anticipating the necessity of some kind of adequate minimum, even if it was rarely framed as an individual right or, rarer still, a political obligation. Almsgiving at various levels of organization, nearly all local, remained as old as the world. Medieval thought even outlined a necessity claim for some cases of thievery in the face of desperate need. Thomas Aquinas believed unavailability of a bare minimum to survive made property “common” for the taking, while Franciscan spirituals in the centuries that followed explained that followers of Jesus who could not own property at all could still use that of others to survive. By Europe’s early modern period, even as natural rights of the poor were less and less common to assert, there were ramshackle attempts to reinforce charity for mendicants with policy, essentially as insurance against social breakdown. Primarily, this was a matter of widespread custom and patchwork ordinances, notably in the Poor Law (1601) in Elizabethan England. As late as the Leveller and Digger agitation in the 1640s English Revolution, equality in distribution seemed, for those marginal prophets who imagined it, like a biblical promise reserved for the end of days or a local experiment for the frequently bizarre if morally just. In secular political thought, there had long been claims that the maintenance of republics required bars against disproportionate wealth, out of the prudential concern that doom would certainly follow from excessive inequality, and the early modern period saw these claims revived. From the Greeks to James Harrington in the seventeenth century (not to mention for his followers among American revolutionaries), extremes of riches and poverty were opposed, but as a matter of the stability of the commonwealth, not as a matter of justice, and not in the name of material equality. It was essentially not until the eighteenth century in Europe that anything like distributive justice within political order, whether aiming at sufficiency or equality, became widely conceivable.[^6]

When this finally occurred, the credibility of a politics of obligatory sufficiency competed with the credibility of a politics of obligatory equality almost from the first. What followed in the invention of ideals of modern distributive justice was one of the fundamental shifts in our understanding of how human beings ought to live among one other at any scale. Like so many other discontinuities in the eighteenth century, this one took place as the social realm became something distinct. Before, the notion of “society” had been precluded by visions that prioritized God or nature as suprahuman authorities to which humans must conform, and political regimes were defined according to their relation to divine plan or natural law. The Enlightenment inventors of a new understanding of humanity insisted, by contrast, that the structure of social institutions does most to determine a people’s way of life, including what they believe about the divine and what sort of political authority they embrace. There was “a fundamental transformation in what might be called the vocabulary of human relations during the period.” The newly coined notion of “society” described “an entity which did not owe its existence to any religious or political authority or indeed to any principle external to itself.” It signified a profound transformation in how Europeans “imagined the world around them: from a perspective in which the human terrestrial order was seen as subordinated to exterior (particularly divine) determinations, to one in which it was seen as autonomous and self-regulating.” And before “society,” there was no possibility of “social justice.”[^7]

This development is essential to understanding of the rise of the modern controversy over distribution. In an influential but misleading argument, political scientist James Scott claimed in the 1970s that rural societies through recorded history as well as in the contemporary world have been organized around the embrace of a moral expectation of subsistence and even an implicit political commitment to “social rights.” Peasants adopted various strategies for ensuring their own survival in a world of uncertainty, and they expected local political authorities to play a role when their own dogged strategies of sufficient provision failed. “The right to subsistence is a fundamental social norm in the village,” Scott explained, struggling to understand the wave of peasant unrest in his time. Uprisings were a time-honored possibility touched off when governance failed to help peasants secure their basic minimum. For Scott, it was quite important to name the expectation of subsistence as a “social right,” though when their own provision failed, peasants had no remedy besides anger and revolt and none ever enunciated a politically significant entitlement. “In all but the most coercive systems of rural class relationships,” Scott nonetheless explained, “there is some pattern of … _rights_.… [This] order was based on the guarantee of _minimal social rights_ in the absence of political and civil rights.” More than this, Scott went so far as to claim that the peasant actually desires the fulfillment of an expectation of sufficiency _rather than equality_: “that all should have a place, a living, not that all should be equal.”[^8]

Aside from the hazards of generalizing across time and space, however, it is not so easy to leap from a search for material subsistence to a belief in social rights that impose political duties as a matter of obligatory justice. If it were, such rights would hardly have become so pertinent in modern politics alone. It is even more dubious to suppose that such commitments are somehow more basic or primeval than ones to distributive equality. It is one thing to observe some peasant communities taking care of their own, especially when they are on the brink of starvation, and quite another to posit an immemorial norm of social rights independent of the rise of states and in the absence of an equally new imperative of material equality. In reality, both sufficiency and equality as obligations of social justice only came into view in the eighteenth century, when society itself became newly visible to its members and just social relations became something to bring about through politics and markets. Dismay at the hardships of indigence is no more absent from the annals of moral opinion than fanciful intimations of equality are. But the premodern imagination could not rank sufficiency over equality as goals of social justice, for the simple reason that it had not yet understood that human beings live in a society created and changeable by none other than human beings themselves.

Scott was inspired by the recovery of a widespread set of new popular expectations around survival and subsistence that rose to importance late in the emerging market societies of the eighteenth century. The earliest responses to commercialization struggled to make ethical concern for indigence, which religious imaginaries had made more hortatory and voluntary, the substance of political thought and action. The British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, writing about peasants in England, showed that a “moral economy” focusing on a sufficient minimum existed; Scott later generalized and globalized Thompson’s theory of it. When that minimum failed to be available, especially as a new political economy that insisted on the virtues of free trade displaced the moral economy, sometimes furious revolt could ensue. Thompson did not go so far as to suppose that a full-fledged sense of social rights was implicit in the moral economy; instead, he documented the widespread belief in a “just price” that limited the expense of basic products, such as bread, and that occupied the very center of ordinary people’s sense of right and wrong. What Thompson did not see is that the rise of market ideology, which counseled the repeal of the patchwork custom and law that formalized makeshift, stopgap charity, derived from a new sense of the social order as something made by human beings and thus subject to reform, which counted more. Social justice could now transcend the moral economy as propounding ethical principles of distribution became possible.[^9]

It is thus no surprise that both sufficiency (including arguments for social rights) and equality surged as expectations of justice were placed on the social order in the late eighteenth century. It was the age in which the notion of specifically economic sociability arose, and more and more surmised that the new commercial processes ushering in modern times would likely lead to fairness on their own. Increasingly, people were willing to believe that, after some time, a new culture of what came to be called “capitalism” would make the poor better off than they were under the old moral economy. Critics such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau doubted it, complaining that the rise of commerce expanded hierarchies of wealth that both morally enervated the rich and fed disorder, even if they left the poor better off. Rousseau’s contribution was pivotal in giving rise to a reformist counterblast, mainly because in his early critical screed _On the Origin of Inequality_ (1755), he made class distinctions seem so sickeningly entrenched and morally unwholesome. He did propound a right of each man “to everything he needs,” but without arguing for a direct obligation (separate from its indirect consequences) for the state to afford a social minimum. Nor was Rousseau committed to a modern sense of material equality as a requirement of justice. In _The Social Contract_ (1762), writing in a republican vein, Rousseau recommended that “no citizen be so very rich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself.” Extremes of wealth were self-defeating because they would lead the rich to opt out of necessary political equality and the poor to follow suit to survive; a just society would therefore “allow neither very rich people nor beggars,” Rousseau explained. This neo-republican call for moderating extremes to the extent necessary to avoid disorder soon ripened into a direct argument for equality’s intrinsic moral importance.[^10]

Theory evolved in tandem with practice, but rapidly enough that the tension between sufficiency and equality that would reappear in the era of the twentieth-century welfare states was enduringly set by the time of Jacobin rule in 1793–94. The American Revolution, despite its importance for the spread of human rights language generally, did not bear much on “the social question,” as its idolizers through Hannah Arendt (and more infrequent critics) always claimed. It may not have been libertarian in spirit, even promoting the cause of activist government for the sake of economic development, but this did not mean it bore on fair distribution of wealth and income for the sake of either entitled relief or fair outcomes. In contrast, the French Revolution from the first set off “the promise of a world beyond want” and an egalitarian community. Occurring in a new era of commercial modernity and indeed globalization, the French Revolution has never been possible to interpret apart from the emergence of the social question, if only because of the comparative prominence of republican commitments and the cult of Rousseau that left luxurious opulence stigmatized throughout. Into the twentieth century, its legacy made separating political feudalism from economic feudalism difficult; both were so closely related in the revolution that few of its heirs could disentangle them. If the social order now seemed under human control, it was corrigible not simply in its political leadership (the early years involving a move to constitutional monarchy) but even in its material outcomes.[^11]

The novelty of the French Revolution and its initial contributions is reflected in the spectacular trajectory of the English radical Thomas Paine, who ignited the American Revolution in the 1770s without engaging material obligation before becoming the chief propagandist of its sister revolt fifteen years later with a new distributive consciousness. During his expatriate years, when he did so much to set off the American Revolution, Paine had been a firm proponent of an unregulated economy—Philadelphia’s crowds demanding their own social minimum rooted in the moral economy tradition notwithstanding. But already in _The Rights of Man_, his 1791–92 defense of the initial French events, Paine spent much time laying out the first vision of a social insurance policy to end poverty. He did so in parallel with the French Marquis de Condorcet, who was in hiding from the Terror and would soon be arrested and die by presumptive suicide. Condorcet laid out his own scheme directed at achieving sufficiency for all French citizens. Both Condorcet and Paine built on the model of earlier English poor laws that were part of the moral economy, but they went far beyond this model in the extent of the provision they envisioned. Both emphasized not simply poor relief but the central importance of public education. Not coincidentally, these two norms, already figuring as policies in the pre-Jacobin Constitution of 1791, became the first two social rights in world history with the Jacobin Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793.[^12]

But the Jacobins in 1793–94 did not stop with novel rights to sufficient provision or with Condorcet’s or Paine’s impulses. The first years of the French Revolution, before the Jacobins rose to power, were not propitious for distributive entitlements to rise high on the agenda, even if the monarchy’s betrayal of social justice counted against its popularity and helped doom it. Now, driven by pressure from insurgents—dubbed _sans-culottes_ because of their characteristic short breeches—and contrary to their own relatively libertarian economic starting point, the Jacobins in power instituted commodity price controls, in effect to provide a guarantee against starvation. Throughout the period, both during Jacobin rule and after their fall, meeting a subsistence minimum occupied the center of political debate and popular engagement across the country. People spoke widely of _les subsistances_, which meant “in the last resort, the right to live” and, outside famine conditions, implied “good, varied, and plentiful food,” so that poor men and their families would not have to stoop to eat the potato or survive on “roots, berries, nettles, and dandelion leaves.” It was never simply the case, however, that the people’s precarious state exempted wealth from egalitarian concern so long as adequate social policy existed. Whether driven by envy in view of the privileges even revolutionary leaders claimed for themselves or by inchoate commitments to a form of social justice beyond sufficiency, support for the ultimately terrorist government depended on political claims not just in the face of abject need but also of a rank hierarchy of means. The “right of existence” escalated among the _sans culottes_ into a claim for “equal incomes.”[^13]

Real government policy certainly never matched the high ideals of sufficient and egalitarian provision, but these ideals were institutionalized in combination as never before in history. Still, if this was the first welfare state, it was more in aspiration than execution. Starvation occurred despite price controls, and the larger right to relief and to public education were aspirational. All the same, Jacobin policy hardly stuck to a sufficient minimum, struggling to meet it in the midst of the war the Old Regime powers declared on the revolutionary project. Instead, it promised “fair shares” for all, vacillating between and attempting to harmonize the claims of sufficiency and equality. No wonder Palmer, in 1941, could baptize it the first popular welfare state in world history, requiring “a planned economy more thoroughgoing than anything seen in Europe until the twentieth century.” However easily forgotten, the revolutionary origins of the initial impulse to a welfare state remain the principal legacy to recover, both for background to mid-twentieth century social justice and for interrogating the explosion of material inequality in our time.[^14]

The Jacobin vision of material equality was, like most such visions, nowhere near absolute. But its policy offered a full-spectrum attempt to reduce the material hierarchy that the Old Regime had left behind and that the early phase of the French Revolution had done little to disturb. “Fair shares” went beyond sufficiency. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793 moved to a vision of basic sufficiency, over Maximilien Robespierre’s objections that it needed to go even further. As Jacobin rule continued, a concern for fair distribution entered the mix. Fears of agrarian land reform for the sake of equalization were rife back to the history of Rome, and the Jacobins even imposed the death penalty on any who dared propose such a thing. But they proceeded all the same to reform inheritance law for the sake of equalizing redistribution and, even further, allowed division of common spaces and parceling out of seized feudal estates. In part to compensate for their still protective views of private property, the Jacobin convention moved most directly and enthusiastically to institute strongly progressive taxation in order to, as one legislator explained, “destroy inequalities, those monstrous distortions of the body politic, which devour all that surrounds them.”[^15]

It was a vision of what would come to be called “property-owning democracy,” which hoped to guarantee the ownership of some land and the participation in the economy of every man, with fair wages or, for those who could not work, backup support, in order to establish fair shares in the common good. Like later welfare states, the Jacobin one by no means treated all humans—especially women—equally. But while most of the state’s programs, including ones in the domain of health and education, remained notional or scattered, they were the means to an end of an egalitarian scheme that proved ahead of its time. As twentieth-century socialist Harold Laski was to put it, “the Jacobins … schooled the masses to the understanding that distinctions of wealth are legislative creations, and that, where crisis demands it, egalitarian innovation may be deliberately attempted.”[^16]

The short-lived Jacobin state left a profound legacy, equally as much as the Haitian Revolution of the same period raised the difficulty of how the empires of the day, including the French Empire, could accommodate new claims of liberty and equality on a global scale. But while a truly worldwide vision of distributive justice awaited a later era, French radicals acted immediately to save the materially egalitarian element of the Jacobin national welfare state from the ruins of its defeat—and indeed to extend it. The notary and self-taught thinker François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf, the first modern absolute egalitarian, insisted on going all the way instead of merely constraining inequality. Released from jail just as Robespierre fell, Babeuf understood that the principles of the Jacobin Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the social policy that followed it had a last chance at realization after a difficult year of wartime dictatorship. He demanded equal outcomes as a matter of principle, hauling full-blown equality from the primitive state of humankind, from which Rousseau believed it irretrievable, to the status of a modern project that Rousseau had never believed either possible or desirable.[^17]

In his short time on the historical stage, Babeuf was not above favorably citing the _sans-culotte_ ideal of sufficiency, writing in his “Manifesto of the Plebeians” (1796) for instance that the goal had to be “to assure to each person and to his progeny, however numerous, sufficiency, and nothing but.” Yet from that last clause equality also peeks out, because it mattered not so much that the indigent get bread and other good things in life but that no one have better and more than others. Babeuf took his Roman name in allegiance to the most famous proponent of equalizing land reform. But in a sense, Babeuf came close to reviving the ideal of the late antique _On Riches:_ making people equal involved satisfying their basic needs, but no more. He did not connect the egalitarian aim with a dream of general abundance, and he believed that abolition of property—“simple administration of distribution” of the good things in life to the people—rather than some more detailed institutional scheme would do the trick. Founding a “conspiracy of equals,” and executed for his radicalism, Babeuf left a mark thanks to friends and disciples who struggled to keep his message alive as an era of backlash set in. Like his confederate Sylvain Maréchal who penned a “Manifesto of Equals,” Babeuf deserves more credit as a founder of absolute egalitarianism than as a founder of the welfare state. Their extremism indicates, rather, that in the revolutionary era and especially during Jacobin rule, it became more and more the common sense that some sort of “reasonable” equality in the distribution of the good things in life was both feasible and necessary.[^18]

It was a critical addition to modern social justice, because it made proposals merely to provide sufficient amounts or necessities to the people seem themselves insufficient to a more and more mainstream audience. Babeuf hated Condorcet, who had spoken more plangently about the possibility that equality might materialize without going beyond proposals for a basic minimum. The latter did not survive the Terror. When Paine redoubled his commitment to minimum sufficiency, precisely in response to Babeuf’s “conspiracy of equals,” he rejected a more robust equality. The two ideals had been implicitly present but in confusing relation, both in popular consciousness as well as in proposed and enacted policy. Before Paine drew the line by endorsing the one and repudiating the other, no one had really ever specifically defended sufficiency _against_ equality. “I care not how affluent some may be, so long as none be miserable in consequence of it,” Paine wrote graphically in his _Agrarian Justice_ (1796). (He was thus the first one clearly to reach the position that Scott later attributed to peasant morality beyond space and time.) Arguing for a rights-based social minimum, Paine extended his earlier claims in favor of the specific social rights that Jacobins had since propounded, such as public relief. The Bible had taught, and no one had ever forgotten, that God gave earth to humanity and in common; while it had later been parceled out, Paine argued, it was in exchange for an enduring guarantee against poverty insofar as property and commerce allowed growth and wealth. On this basis, he innovatively argued not simply for a universal basic income through taxation but also for the state’s role in protecting the needy, the young, the elderly, and the disabled as a matter of right. However innovative, the rearguard elements of Paine’s scheme need also to be kept in mind. His intent was only to insist no one fall below a threshold standard, not that any kind of distributive equality prevail, and even this generosity would never have been so great without Jacobin experiments outflanking him.[^19]

ONE HUNDRED years later, in 1886, Austrian socialist law professor Anton Menger reflected on the contest of socialist ideas as they had developed since the French Revolutionary experience. The place of socialism in the history of social rights is most often badly understood. No one provides a better perspective than Menger does on distributional ideals in socialism between the origins of modernity and our times. Socialists, more than any other force in history, were committed to adequate provision for the needy, but they were divided on whether to propound social rights. For a long time, a commitment to egalitarian distribution beyond sufficiency, which the Jacobin welfare state pioneered, was not prominent among socialist aims. The search for subsistence or a sufficient minimum mattered, but only in relation to competing ideals. Not only did socialists hesitate to formulate the insistence on adequate provision in terms of rights, but they supplemented that aspiration with a different one than material equality until they backed the welfare-state class compromise of the twentieth century.[^20]

To the extent that a moral economy existed in early modern history, it had clearly broken down in the century of the “social question,” as customs and laws to meet basic needs proved as much a source of outrage for their limitations as a source of praise for the succor they provided. Rampant and rapid urbanization created communities of strangers, not to mention vast slums where no local caretaking spirit prevailed. The new science of political economy originally voiced moral concern for sufficient provision—“they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people,” Adam Smith wrote, “should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.” But it did this while accepting that the increasing wealth of nations would drive inequality within and among them. As political economy came into its own, it developed the heartless attitude toward subsistence that sparked both humanitarian and radical responses to the attendant miseries of modern economic life. “If [a man] cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour,” famed political economist Thomas Malthus wrote in 1803 (in a passage he later dropped because it proved so scandalous), “[he] has no claim of _right_ to the smallest portion of food.… At Nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders.”[^21]

In reaction to such heartlessness, socialists everywhere rallied behind the ideal of a sufficient minimum as fundamental to their cause. The renowned principle that called for distributing “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” had proven strikingly powerful, from French utopian socialist Etienne Cabet (if not further back) to Louis Blanc to Karl Marx himself in his _Critique of the Gotha Program_ (1875). Sometimes the commitment to basic provision was expressed in terms of rights. Even if an entitlement to minimum sufficiency or an enumerated list of the basic human needs went back to the 1790s—Menger himself cited English radical William Godwin as the first to propound it in the French Revolution’s aftermath—it was in permanent competition with other priorities for socialists. Indeed, the very social rights that socialists sometimes prioritized indicated their broader ends.

After the French Revolution, the first right in importance was the right to work: an obligation on government and society to provide gainful employment if none was available. Despite a mention in the 1793 French Declaration—with its right to public relief from society—of the means of procuring work to achieve “maintenance” for “unfortunate” citizens, an individual entitlement to a remunerative job had not figured substantially in the revolutionary politics. Thinking through the aims of the Jacobin state and its aftermath, German philosopher J. G. Fichte first propounded a right to work. Later and independently, early French socialist Charles Fourier both named it and launched it on its spectacular modern career. Politician and creative Fourierist Victor Considérant made the right famous in the years before the 1848 revolution in France, where it played a pivotal role both in advocacy and legislation. “We will do much more for the happiness of the lower classes,” Considérant wrote, “for their real emancipation and true progress, in guaranteeing these classes well-remunerated work, than in winning political rights and a meaningless sovereignty for them. The most important of the people’s rights is the _right to work._” In the 1848 revolution in France, organizing government to provide useful activity, as in Louis Blanc’s famous national workshops, was a major goal.

While socialists then and afterward understood the great potential of demanding guaranteed employment from the state, Menger recognized the right to work as an “offshoot” of the ideal of sufficiency, because a job and therefore a state jobs program functioned as a means toward that ideal, not toward affording more than minimal compensation. Indeed, the rhetoric of the right to work could also serve conservatives, notably when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, after uniting Germany, set up the first real welfare state since the Jacobin experiment. “Give the laborer the right to work so long as he is healthy,” Bismarck said in a much-noted 1884 parliamentary speech—although he did little to institutionalize employment, even when creating the earliest broad-scale state apparatus for the ill and elderly.[^22]

If the right to work had been for socialists the only competing priority to the right of subsistence, their early programs would have been unified, directly or indirectly, around the search for a sufficient minimum. Instead, they certainly aimed higher—yet the aim, Menger contended, was not really at the achievement of equal distribution of the good things in life. Early socialists had gone beyond subsistence for the sake of the other new right, from which Menger took the title of his famous book: the right to the whole product of labor. Instead of a system of production in which owners of capital enjoyed rents without themselves laboring (what Marx called surplus value), socialists had striven for workers taking every bit of the value of their work—an ethical principle Menger also traced to Godwin. (He therefore impishly denied credit to Marx, provoking furious howls of protest.) For Menger, the right to all the fruits of one’s work was “the fundamental revolutionary conception of our time, playing the same dominant part as the idea of political equality in the French Revolution and its offshoots.” In other words, for socialists, the sequel to political equality was not typically distributive equality. Subsistence was not egalitarian because needs were different, depending on one’s makeup and situation. “When so many communists speak of an _equal_ distribution of wealth in a communistic state,” Menger wrote, “it is … distribution in proportion to wants and existing means of satisfaction to which they refer. For no one could seriously strive for a really equal distribution in the face of the enormous differences in wants due to age, sex, and individual character.” And the right to the whole produce of one’s labor was not egalitarian either: it depended on how much one worked.[^23]

It would be false to suggest that material egalitarianism found no place whatsoever in socialism at the start. But to the extent it percolated as a barely sketched ideal, it prevailed among those utopians and revolutionaries who designed blueprints for an ideal society and who, either for this reason or out of the priority of moral outrage about existing injustice, simply did not think very carefully about permanent institutionalization of moral principles in a future social venture. Once again, France remained the homeland of such figures through the nineteenth century, especially those who set out to guard the flame of Babeuf’s memory. Cherishing not the 1789 but the 1793 declaration for moving toward welfare, a short-lived Société des droits de l’homme (Human Rights Club) took up the revolutionary cause in the 1830s under King Louis-Philippe’s “bourgeois monarchy.” Babouvist agitators such as Jean-Jacques Pillot preserved his idol’s commitment to egalitarian distribution, now adjusted upward so that the good things in life, not simply the necessary ones, would be fairly divided. “Society’s goal,” he explained, “is to give to each of its members the greatest amount of well-being possible, by assuring him the satisfaction of his true needs … while the useful and agreeable will be distributed in the same proportions as the necessary.”[^24]

As for Marx, while he certainly made room for needs-based subsistence and supported some pragmatic campaigns for reforms, there is _no evidence_—for all his association with the currency of egalitarian justice since—that he envisioned material fairness in a communist state. Marx wanted to bring about a post-market society, eliminating domination and classes. He did not embrace distributional equality before the revolution, because it was hostage to class rule, or after the revolution (to the extent it is clear what he envisioned besides an abolition of private property), because different people may have vastly different needs and work more than each other. Just as important, Marx and especially “scientific” Marxists not only rejected the search for ethical principles like distributional ideals as bourgeois, they rejected the very idea of human rights. They operated on the premise that the essential task was to overthrow “capitalism.” In their judgment, as Marx’s chief associate Friedrich Engels demonstrated in his vituperative response to Menger, not even conceptualizing a right to the whole product of labor beyond subsistence really made a difference to the campaign of revolutionizing a system of production that needed to be overthrown for domination and exploitation to end.[^25]

THIS LEAVES the mystery of how the return of the Jacobin synthesis of distributive sufficiency and equality occurred—as well as how rights to sufficient provision came to be nestled within a materially egalitarian project in the twentieth century. It was, in a word, as part of the class compromise in the origins of the welfare state, which socialists helped bring about even as it transformed their horizons. Even then, it left reformers of all stripes unsure whether to pursue sufficiency within the framework of rights protection, as they embraced equality more and more enthusiastically as a demanding imperative.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the first apex of economic liberalism in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century led to the largest gulf between the richest and the poorest any society has ever created. As socialists debated their aims and tactics, and in large part because they were doing so with such visibility, a “century of redistribution” began, starting with a more tenacious insistence than ever before on a floor of socioeconomic protection in market economies based on libertarian contract and property rules. The essential alternative posed to it at the time was not distributive equality but political revolution. But an ethics of egalitarian redistribution made slow inroads in compromise projects between classes, the rich buying off their enemies and the rest exerting pressure to sweeten the deal.[^26]

The deals were first designed to ensure sufficiency, even as inequality expanded. Social rights, one analyst put it in retrospect, “can boast no lofty pedigree. They crept piecemeal into apologetic existence, as low-grade palliatives designed at once to relieve and conceal the realities of poverty.” It is this combination that makes the great era of the expansion of social rights, particularly the late nineteenth century, so reminiscent of a later neoliberal time, when sufficiency gains could sometimes coexist with greater and greater material differences between the most wealthy and the rest of humanity, from the local to the global. The originally socialist discourse of basic needs became the stock-in-trade of early struggles for state-directed welfare, with more and more people calling for the state to be responsive to a poverty that charity could never remediate, given “the human needs of labor.” At the same time, that quest for sufficiency sparked debates in natural science and early “social science” about what goods and services (including, for example, how many calories) humans absolutely need to survive or flourish, as well as whether standards should change with collective wealth.[^27]

The easiest to agree about was free and compulsory primary education, institutionalized first and most broadly among entitlements in emerging welfare states. It served multiple agendas. The Enlightenment belief in pedagogy, reflected in Jacobin promises; the later need, in an increasingly industrial society, for parents to leave home and have the children occupied during the day, at least until teenage years; and the social value of a minimally literate workforce—all contributed to the early rise of a right to education. In his classic essay on the origins of the welfare state, English sociologist T. H. Marshall could look back and call widespread elementary education “the first decisive step on the road” to “social rights of citizenship.” It was a bumpy road, however, precisely because each social right depended on a new configuration of interests to institutionalize it, and no other convergence was as straightforward as the first around education.[^28]

For broader entitlements, Bismarck set the tone, giving the socialist right to work rhetorical credence but going further and, in transatlantic context, moving first to institutionalize minimal state protections for the ill, the sick, and the elderly. The foundations for his policies were laid in the 1870s by the pioneering Association for Social Policy, which would soon be matched intellectually in other nations even as its leading figures, such as Lujo Brentano, were denounced as “pulpit socialists” by those who felt humane compromise with hierarchy was a terrible mistake compared to the agenda of seeking fuller-fledged power. Now Bismarck drew on its policy suggestions while banning socialist organizations, and the first national welfare state since the short-lived Jacobin experiment was born.[^29]

Elsewhere on the European continent, social reform projects mushroomed in these years, finding early if modest uptake. With their more enduring allergies to the state, and always weighing the risk of creating vicious indolence in the name of providing succor, the United Kingdom—notably in its updated Poor Law of 1834—and especially the United States lagged behind, both in the production of policy expertise and its institutionalization. While conservative Germany took the lead in social insurance, however, reformist England did slowly establish preeminence in workplace standards and rudimentary workmen’s compensation. As with the origins of distributive ethics in the eighteenth century, both kinds of program to advance social justice depended on a further rise of the social, now modified from its more familiar guise as the contractual relations (economic or political) of pre-existing individuals. Now “society” increasingly implied a collective unity or even organic body in relation to which individuals were never separate, let alone prior.

This was the most important reason, however far in the background it may have remained for many, why the political language of rights remained permanently controversial in the quest for sufficiency (and never seemed plausible in the search for class equality). But several other reasons also prevailed among reformers. In practice, the individual’s rights to sacrosanct private property and “free” market relations were the dominant ones, and even to reformers who did not set themselves on the overthrow of capitalism, extending the list of rights to counteract those two dominant entitlements did not seem helpful. Rather, the whole metaphysics of antecedent individuals with natural rights had to be challenged. In this classical liberal era of modern political economy, as in the two ages of national welfare and neoliberal inequality to come, rights conformed with the spirit of the age. If the rights of man were primarily those of free enterprise and sacrosanct property, many thought it best to oppose the whole notion of rights rather than supplement the list. Accordingly, the broad notion of social rights would not really come into fashion until the mid-twentieth century.

Menger angled for a different outcome. “An exaggerated importance has been attached to the recognition of political rights, which is in striking disproportion to their scanty practical effect,” he acknowledged. “Nevertheless, the formulation of such rights is not without value, as they crystallise into a password the chief aims of political and social movements.” But he lost the argument for a long time. The socialization of thought that made rights debatable as progressive tools, including in the United Kingdom and the United States, was profound. And where Marx had early mounted the challenge to rights on behalf of revolution, it was equally if not more important that early proponents of the welfare state mounted it in the course of offering _an alternative to_ revolution. Reformers had different idioms, whether “idealist” or sociological, in different intellectual cultures. Altogether, the critique of rights in the name of social reform went so far (Menger’s friendliness toward the concept notwithstanding) that by 1901, the so-called “new liberal” J. A. Hobson could complain that exploration of the progressive use of rights to advance social justice had been rendered close to unimaginable. “Among modern social reformers,” he observed, “there is a tendency to carry the revolt against the theory of natural and inalienable rights of individuals, upon which the eighteenth-century political philosophy was built, so far as to deny the utility of recognizing any rights of the individual as a basis for social reform.”[^30]

But a last and interlocking reason for the marginality of individual rights in the origins of the welfare state is that not only sufficiency beckoned: equality inspired as well, accompanied by more collectivist languages for it and, above all, ideologies of class compromise, normally described in terms of collective need or greatest benefit. In the Roman Catholic version, as expressed in Pope Leo XIII’s classic social encyclical _On New Things_ (1890), the rights that mattered beyond the individual right to property were not those of individuals but of “capital” and “labor” to reconcile their interests in view of the common good. This was representative of the collectivist spirit of reconciliation at the heart of the welfare state, where individual rights had an uncertain place, to the extent they were not starkly demoted. And no one ever formulated an individual right to the egalitarian distribution of the good things in life.

Unions, of course, always prioritized the rights to associate, strike, and bargain collectively, and not merely because it served their specific purposes. The importance of the right to strike for unions was as ambiguous as it was telling. Insofar as rights mattered at all in working class movements, the collective right to strike—broadly illegal at the start—drew by far the most attention in every country from the middle of the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth. It was far more than just another item on a list of entitlements; rather, its function was to empower unions to exact outcomes both of sufficient provision and beyond, although whether in service to building toward fairer class reconciliation or outright revolution was left open. Unlike the right to work, the right to strike was not just a claim to basic provision by another name. It portended more, but precisely what remained unclear. The right to strike remained so controversial that it would not make it into the canonical text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).[^31]

Despite some radical versions of trade unionism, labor movements ultimately trod a path toward the reconciliationist welfare state. It was not an inevitability, certainly, and it was achieved best where some unions and parties worked for gains in bargaining and representational power in the shadow of others insisting on violent revolution. Trade unions and socialist parties became the central agents—and the male working class they represented became the main beneficiary—of welfare state legislation that aimed at sufficiency and equality alike. There were places (notably the United States) where socialist parties did not survive or unions rarely feinted in the direction of revolution, just as after 1917 there came to be places where revolution succeeded. Some parties and unions remained officially revolutionary in their aims; having been burned by Bismarck’s maneuvers, when it became legal again, the eventually massive German Social Democratic Party adopted Marxism in theory in its Erfurt program (1891), while vacillating in practice as activists such as Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg vied to define socialist aims. In France, some “anarcho-syndicalists” held out for a _grand soir_ of a general strike supposed to bring the system to its knees with one massive blow, and the main organization of trade unions, the Confédération générale du travail, opposed social reform legislation as a bourgeois sham as late as 1928. Yet in the shadow of workingmen and their representatives debating tactics, and perhaps because they were doing so, norms of sufficiency began to crystallize, legislation on the workplace and initial social security regimes were institutionalized, and equality dawned on the horizon as part of the believable agenda of a new form of state.

Notwithstanding the permanence of the debate on the left about whether to argue in terms of rights and what more ambitious ideals to pursue alongside the fulfillment of basic needs, the welfare state became the ultimate prize. The originally Jacobin ideals of sufficient provision and egalitarian distribution finally revived in the cross-class ratification of progressive welfare after Bismarck, notably as socialists and trade unionists embraced equalization of outcomes as a fundamental ideal and were transformed into willing participants by welfare states. The rise of welfare states did as much to saddle forces that had flirted with other outcomes with more egalitarian purposes as vice versa. Compromise between capital and labor as a middle path between libertarianism and revolution formed the aspiration to material equality that welfare states struggled to fulfill alongside a sufficient provision of the good things in life.

Social rights were one version, for those willing to talk about rights at all, of a welfare compromise. In 1982, the great English Marxist social historian Eric Hobsbawm was summoned to Emory University, in the midst of the greatest spike in history of rhetoric about human rights, to explain what labor had contributed. Hobsbawm reminded his audience of the many reasons why workingmen’s movements had steered clear of rights in order to focus on power, whether through collective bargaining, democratic representation, or (if they were Marxist revolutionaries) state capture. Hence “the paradox,” he concluded. “More than any other force, the labour movement helped to unlock the politico-legal, individualist straitjacket which confined human rights.… If the UN Declaration includes economic, social, and educational rights … it is primarily due to the historical intervention of labour movements. At the same time labour movements demonstrate the limitations of a ‘human rights’ approach to politics.”[^32]

THE COMMUNIST state that grew up on the territory of the old Russian Empire after World War I certainly claimed the Jacobin legacy for itself, but it was in Western welfare states through the 1960s and 1970s that the actual Jacobin legacy was strongest in socioeconomic affairs. Its project, in the tracks of the Jacobin experiment, was to go beyond a sufficient minimum for all citizens in order to achieve some modicum of egalitarian citizenship. However pursued, egalitarian aims were especially prominent in Continental Europe due to traditions of so-called “national economics,” the strength of domestic socialism, and the proximity of the new Soviet experiment. Even in England, however, ethical socialists such as the “new liberals,” who were acutely sensitive to the value of freedom amid the goals of social reform, moved to argue for egalitarian outcomes. In a famous minority report to a late-Victorian Poor Law reform project, Fabian Beatrice Webb issued a radical call for “a national minimum of civilised life.” By twenty years later, as the Great Depression ushered in an egalitarian moment, Christian socialist R. H. Tawney could explain its necessity in the most laudatory terms. “The reason for equalizing, as means and opportunity allow, the externals of life is not that the scaffolding of life is more important than the shrine, or that economic interests, for all their clamour and insistence, possess … unique and portentous significance. [It is] to free the spirit of all [and achieve] a much needed improvement in human relations.”[^33]

The chronology and mechanisms of the birth of the welfare state differed profoundly across space and time. Leading with sufficiency, the different welfare states ended up constraining inequality more and more, ultimately as an end in its own right. It is certainly true that, even in its glory years after World War II in selected West European states, the welfare state has never been “_very_ egalitarian—and it does not even really try to be.” The often modest extent to which its redistributive effects, even at their most thoroughgoing, have in fact gone beyond achievement of sufficiency to egalitarian outcomes was once, indeed, the source of widespread derision. At the same time, however, it was the welfare state’s very embarkation on a project of equality beyond sufficiency that once drew its fiercest criticism for falling short. And it is now confirmed that, through a suite of approaches, the mature national welfare state, shot through with exclusion though it always was, constrained material inequality more than any other political arrangements that modern humanity has learned to bring about. The bar of expectations needs to be set correctly to perceive how fundamentally egalitarian its purposes and many of its tools for achieving those purposes were—as the fullest realization so far of the Jacobin project of policies that pay due attention to sufficient provision without neglecting equality of outcomes.[^34]

Before the Great Depression and after experimental responses to it, the social insurance schemes Bismarck introduced in the 1880s were always the dominant form of meeting needs and, later, of furthering equality, since programs could vary tremendously in how redistributive the pooling of collective risk became in practice. Bismarck’s constrained and ungenerous version was soon transformed, and not merely by recognition of manifold forms of vulnerability. Elevating French constitutional provisions from 1793 and 1848 into a radiating ideal, the pioneering 1917 Mexican Constitution kicked off a global moment of the ascendancy of social rights in constitutions. The trendsetting constitution of the Weimar Republic (1919) propounded a number of social rights. With a nod to the once-famed internationalism of the left-wing parties, which had suffered so grievous a blow when workers of all countries engaged to the hilt in World War I, it even referred to “an international regulation of the rights of the workers, which strives to safeguard a minimum of social rights for humanity’s working class.” The canonization of rights for the sake of regulating work became popular in interwar constitutions, perhaps most generously in the 1921 Yugoslav constitution, and did not change much after World War II. As founder of the discipline of comparative constitutional law, Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, recorded in 1928, one of the most characteristic “new tendencies” of constitution-making was not just consecrating political and civil rights across Europe after World War I but also augmenting old lists with newfangled economic and social rights. And there was pressure to do so in places without new constitutions: “In the twentieth century, the social meaning of law is no longer a doctrine or a slogan of a clique but life itself,” Mirkine-Guetzévitch explained. “Nor is it possible to distinguish between the political and social individual, so we witness a transformation not merely of the general theory of the state but of the doctrine of individual rights.”[^35]

But it took the greatest crisis of capitalism for more than piecemeal reform to take hold, always in connection with egalitarian pressure and whether in the name of social rights or not—most of all in the famously isolated “Nordic model”—before World War II drove the rest of states much further than they had ever gone before. There is no doubt that the constant social pressure of labor activism, whatever its intended ends, contributed strongly to the relatively more egalitarian results than before (or since), most of all when social democratic parties could take control of policies of taxation and redistribution. All along, the possibility—however exaggerated—of working class revolution and its new symbol in the Soviet Union drove egalitarian generosity in response to a mixture of inspiration and fear. No event more than the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experimentation that followed brought a materially egalitarian dream home to so many people. In 1918–19, V. I. Lenin issued (and Nikolai Bukharin and Josef Stalin edited) a “Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People,” which asserted the prerogatives of workers against capitalists. Two decades later, the Soviet Union’s new “Stalin” constitution (1936) laid out the most full-fledged catalog of rights ever propounded, with its most unique attention given to a long catalogue of social rights. But precisely because it stood for the proposition that social justice required political revolution, no one thought the Soviet Union stood for the ascendancy of basic economic entitlements, certainly not alone.[^36]

Now claiming to institutionalize socialism, the new state struggled with many problems Marx had not and, like socialists elsewhere, embraced ideals of equality as governing philosophy. The equality that began as class compromise in “bourgeois” states became a distributive ideal in the first worker’s state. There were two periods of powerful social leveling: just after 1917, in the experience of the abolition of private property and forced collectivization, and in the 1930s, with the war against “kulaks” or wealthy peasants that turned genocidal. Lenin had anticipated the need in “the first phase” for continued differentiation of income and wealth after exploitation had been abolished. As a new Soviet class structure arose as that phase continued indefinitely, his successor Stalin gave a much-noted speech in 1931 criticizing “equality mongering.” But because equality was the “central element” in the utopian thinking the revolution had inspired, the new Soviet state managing its divisions bred outsized dreams of even more equality, just as the Jacobin state had in its time.[^37]

More than most have been willing to acknowledge, however, it was right-wing regimes, breaking with parliamentary government, that created their own welfare states focused on sufficiency and equality. Indeed, they were far more directly influential models on Western countries than the Soviet Union was before World War II led to reversals for fascist welfare (outside the Iberian peninsula and, later, in Latin America). All advocates of social justice in the 1930s were aware that welfare and even social rights had become more associated with illiberal states, which were quickest out of the gate in redistributive policy after the Great Depression, not just on the left but also and even preeminently on the right. Under fascist auspices before the stock market crash, the Labor Charter of Italy (1927)—like the Portuguese Constitution (1933), the Labor Charter of Spain (1938), the Brazilian constitutional reforms under dictator Getulio Vargas (1943) after the crash—showed that not merely constitutions but social rights very specifically were part of the agenda of reactionary states. Equality was too, leading far-right regimes to siphon support from previously progressive sources. It is no accident that the inventor of the still most widely used measure of national inequality, Italian statistician Corrado Gini, was a Fascist.[^38]

True, National Socialists had condemned the very idea of individual rights—“the year 1789 is hereby eradicated from history,” Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels crowed shortly after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933—and took the racialized structure of social policy that characterized all welfare states to a genocidal extreme. But the regime made shockingly impressive egalitarian strides for the _Volksgemeinschaft_ even as it moved to exclude so many—eventually fatally. After painful memories of the starvation of World War I, during which hundreds of thousands died as a result of blockade, and the hyperinflation soon after, the depression saw Germans looking for policy-enforced subsistence minima that their former monarchist and democratic governments could not provide. And with the commitment to socialism and workers that other right-wing populisms shared, and taking economic nationalism to the point of autarky, the state Adolf Hitler founded became the clearest example not merely on the right but across the political spectrum of how far welfare states could go to create intentionally egalitarian outcomes. Hitler called for “the highest degree of social solidarity … for every member of the German race,” while pitilessly decreeing it would become the “absolute master” of other races. “The National Socialist German Workers Party was founded on a doctrine of inequality between races,” one historian comments, “but it also promised Germans greater equality among themselves than they had enjoyed during either the Wilhelmine empire or the Weimar Republic.” And through devices like quadrupled corporate taxation, in the midst of state-funded military buildup (without much thought for who would take care of the debt), the redistributive effects were a great cause of the regime’s popular support.[^39]

For all its extremism, Hitler’s welfare state shared a disturbing amount with other states on the common road to constraining inequality to a historically unprecedented extent. The restriction of the redistributive community to national borders in an age of continuing global empire reflected far more than a reluctant logistical confinement of generosity. In the communist East, Josef Stalin announced a policy of “socialism in one country,” and the struggle for welfare, too, occurred country by country. Democratic though they usually were, new states after World War II, starting with India and Israel, were often founded by national socialist worker’s parties. And within the borders of each twentieth-century national welfare state, patterns of exclusion privileged male whites (notably in Jim Crow America), conditioning distributive equality on discriminatory exclusion. It was not accidental that the famed Swedish welfare state grew up in close connection with long-lasting eugenic policies, ones that even a future proponent of the expansion of the welfare concept to the world stage, Gunnar Myrdal, originally supported. Even among white males, the roles of socialist parties and trade unions in paving the road toward welfare often meant that the welfare states that emerged favored industrial workers first and foremost, not the categories of people Marx himself had originally disdained so much, the urban _Lumpenproletariat_ and the rural peasantry, both often the most destitute. In the case of the female half of the population, the most numerically glaring case, no welfare state designed policies that treated them equally; most often, they took the benefit of wage-earning husbands as proxies for that of their wives. The excluded and marginalized suffered even more.

Sufficiency and equality had come together, the Jacobin ideals revived, but as a model of social justice the national welfare state of the mid-twentieth century left much to be desired. It consecrated a high set of aspirations attempting to balance and resolve sufficiency and equality, but sharing much of the exclusionary spirit of Hitler’s welfare state. In the long run, the ideal of human rights would forbid such compromises in the democratic countries where it could become the watchword not simply for foreign victims but also for those domestically subjugated on the grounds of gender, race, disability, or sexual orientation. Yet for all these flaws, the ideology of national welfare included more people in a community of distributive justice than ever before. The ideal of distributive sufficiency that remains powerful today had been consecrated. But achieving unprecedented consensus around a modicum of material equality had also been embraced—a commitment since lost.[^40]

THIRTY YEARS after Palmer set off in search of the Jacobin origins of the egalitarian welfare state, a young student at his university at the same time, John Rawls, published his epoch-making _A Theory of Justice_ (1971). After an age of national welfare states, Rawls had set out to justify the welfare state’s egalitarianism in a new way, formalizing as an ethical theory of distribution what activists and statesmen had begun to bring about in practice. Reviving the early-modern theory of the social contract, Rawls contended that fair distribution must obey his famous “difference principle,” which forbade material inequality unless it improved lot of the worst off and not simply the better off. Drawing on and transforming a phrase from British argument, Rawls later insisted he was speaking out in favor of “property-owning democracy.” But there is no doubt that his thought reflects the achievements of welfare states stretching back to the Jacobin example.[^41]

After World War II and especially after the American Civil Rights Movement, the community of distribution was fully inclusionary for Rawls. As a liberal he ranked personal freedom as the most important value, with fair distribution coming second—though he did signal that it might be acceptable to relax liberal priorities when it came to the developmentalist agenda of the still-new postcolonial states. Still, what is remarkable in retrospect is how Rawls captured a once-dominant egalitarianism that placed limits on hierarchy in the distribution of the good things in life. Ironically, he let loose the owl of Minerva on the achievements of the best liberal welfare states: the difference principle that Rawls championed may never have come closer to fulfillment—especially in his own country—than the day his book was published. His thought sparked a massive philosophical debate about the nature and scope of distributive justice, but it was in a neoliberal age, when national inequality in transatlantic states generally expanded and sometimes exploded. Some even worried that his own commitments to implicitly neoliberal premises about how to justify an egalitarianism of fair shares ruined his last-ditch attempt to save it.[^42]

In the long view, however, it was perhaps most revealing that sufficiency went missing in Rawls’s thought. Fair distribution was organized around how well the worst off did. But fair distribution was not concerned, either at the initial stage of moral principles or at the later stage of political institutions, with the pressing moral importance of a sufficient minimum of the distribution of the good things in life, even as a first step on the egalitarian journey. It permitted departure from perfect equality only for the sake of the worst off, but it did not concern itself with whether they transcended a line of minimal provision. As one Rawls’s most brilliant early critics, legal scholar and fellow Harvard professor Frank Michelman, noticed, in formulating his principle of just distribution, Rawls remained ambivalent about a basic minimum of provision. “A precept for the distribution of material social goods which ignores claims regarding basic needs as such … will for many of us seem incomplete,” Michelman observed, as part of his own plea to constitutional judges to safeguard minimum standards as entitlements of citizenship.[^43]

As judges helping the poor replaced workers transforming society at the center of the imaginary of reform, the goal of sufficiency would loom ever larger in the global political imagination. It never progressed far in the United States, where Michelman hoped to see the Supreme Court act, but it has in the end become vital for the global human rights movement today. Yet that happened as a demand for sufficiency came not to balance and supplement but to displace and leave behind an emphasis on equality. Rawls did not use the phrase _human rights_ and in 1971 likely did not know of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its specific social rights—it was not yet famous. In the years after his book, the national welfare state that Rawls theorized faced the objection that it had no implications for global fairness, except that the peoples of the world could strive on their own for their own national welfare states. But in the age of human rights, as the social rights of the global indigent have come into sharper focus, the egalitarian dimension or even preference Rawls still retained—even if for local rather than global purposes—has been abandoned. In the history of distributive theory, John Rawls was the last Jacobin.