The Logic of Charity: Amsterdam, 1800-1850 (review)

Webster defines charity as “an act of good will or affection,” “kindness or leniency in judging others,” or “a voluntary giving of money or other help to those in need.” Can charity then be said to have a logic? Perhaps not, but Marco van Leeuwen is not in fact discussing charity here at all but rather poor relief. The author argues that poor relief formed an “important feature” of preindustrial societies. Moreover, he insists, one cannot comprehend the social history of Europe as a whole “without an understanding of poor relief (1).” To do so, Van Leeuwen poses three deceptively easy questions: “Which groups provided poor relief and why?” “Which groups received poor relief and why? “What effects did poor relief have on society?” (2) He draws extensively on secondary literature and archival records to formulate his answers and to construct a “simple model of poor relief.”

Each chapter takes up and elaborates one part of this “simple model.” The model is a functionalist one grounded on a complementarity of strategies: elites employed public assistance as a tactic of control while the recipients of relief played the game to obtain their own objectives. Poor relief, therefore, acted like an “exchange mechanism” and reflected the “mutual dependence” forged between groups. This paradigm has much to recommend it. It offers a plausible reason for why several municipalities (such as Amsterdam but also Hamburg) continued programs of poor relief generally recognized as “ineffective” (in the sense that they failed to eliminate or even ameliorate poverty). They persisted, however, because they realized a series of disparate goals exceedingly well. Reform plans were sometimes floated but rarely vigorously pursued because this “historical inheritance”—the structure of poor relief as developed over time—had, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, “evolved into a well-balanced and efficient system (188)” that served a multiplicity of interests. It stabilized Amsterdam society; immobilizing the poor to a large extent but also providing opportunities for nonelites to engage in socially gratifying activities. For instance, certain citizens gained status and could wield modest authority in return for the time and effort they invested in administration. The system as a whole assured the constant presence of a reservoir of cheap labor. And, because the money for poor relief came not from taxes but from other sources, it cost elites very little. On the other side of the ledger, in return for submission to the social control embedded in relief, paupers and potential paupers enjoyed access to “an attractive survival strategy” that some may have come to regard as a kind of right.

In many respects van Leeuwen’s picture is compelling. He marshals abundant archival resources to demonstrate the financing and staffing of poor relief, the drafting of policies, the reactions of paupers and their ability to manipulate the system. While his is principally a quantitative study, he does not neglect factors such as religious sentiment that cannot be easily counted although he does instrumentalize them. He candidly acknowledges some of the model’s deficiencies. For instance, he concedes that modeling runs the risk of diluting a “rich historical reality.” Nonetheless, he believes that such flaws are not fatal in a method able to “disentangl[e] general processes and structures involved in local and time-bound phenomena (34).” The great virtue of this explanation lies in the explicit argument that a logic of self-interest motivated and sustained preindustrial systems of poor relief. Poor relief served objectives that numerous members of the polity felt were worthwhile. Van Leeuwen therefore rejects a facile, top-down control argument in favor of a far more subtle and sensitive approach based on the tactics various social groups deployed.

Despite these considerable strengths, one still doubts whether modeling in general, and this attempt in particular, furnishes the best way to discuss social phenomena of great complexity like poor relief or charity. The disadvantages van Leeuwen lays out are not the only ones and are—in this reviewer...