Conceptualising Poverty under Capitalism: From John Locke to Sam Brittan
Bill Jordan
We are at a historical moment when, perhaps especially in Ireland, poverty is no longer a technical
issue, but one which asks fundamental questions about the political and economic order. From John
Locke to Karl Marx, poverty was analysed as part of an account of how money, property, markets,
taxation and even government itself could be justified. Now once again we look for an explanation of
poverty – the income shortfalls experienced by the ‘squeezed middle’, mortgage defaulters and
debtors, now rubbing shoulders in charity food dispensaries with claimants of unemployment and
other state benefits – in the failures of global capitalism and public finance, rather than the
technicalities of transfer mechanisms.
My claim to be allowed to take a historical approach relies only partly on my knowledge of the
literature of early theorists of capitalism and poverty; it also rests on my great-great-grandfather’s
role in the Irish uprising of 1848, at the height of the famine. I think he was in correspondence with
Karl Marx after his return from transportation to Tasmania – there is certainly a reference to him in a
paper in the Karl-Marx-haus in Trier. Anyway, I believe they would have agreed on this much at least,
that poverty should be conceptualised in terms of the political economy of capitalist development.
Questions about how to define and measure poverty have always seemed to me to be secondary to
ones about why some people are so rich and others so poor. In Ireland those questions had been in
the public mind as long as landowners and rulers were either English, or else had strong links to the
English church and state. But they rather waned after independence was won, partly because until
quite recently conspicuous affluence was not entirely socially acceptable. The revelation that the
sudden emergence of an Irish plutocracy was based on a mixture of speculation and corruption
restores the case for an eighteenth or nineteenth century approach to conceptualising poverty.
Before 2008, Ireland seemed to have found a way of plugging the material welfare of its whole
population into global capitalist development, through inward investment, European markets and
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rural prosperity. Now it is clear that this was all based on a bubble in finance and construction,
Ireland is in the same position as every other heavily indebted country in the eurozone – trying to
find an alternative rationale for those parts of the economy that are not linked with global
corporations, and a role for those citizens who lack such connections.
From the start of the modern era, political philosophers and political economists have tried to argue
that no-one need be excluded from the advantages that arise from money, property and markets,
indeed that every member of a society founded on these institutions is necessarily better off than
any member of a society which lacks them. Most of them argued that there were iron laws of
economics preventing governments from significantly reducing poverty without inflicting all sorts of
damage on the economy as a whole. Marx, of course, argued the opposite – that poverty could
never be abolished, or even reduced, unless the rich were expropriated, property was abolished, and
markets made subservient to social needs.
So I shall start with the conceptions of poverty in the works of those early theorists of money,
property and markets, and try to show how the issues they addressed have returned today. How can
capitalism justify itself to the millions of people now falling into, or back into, poverty, and how can
governments justify their continuing commitment to supporting its most egregious expressions of
irresponsibility and greed? I shall conclude by giving an example of the recurrence of old issues in
new guises in the work of the distinguished Financial Times economic columnist, Samuel Brittan. He
has recently proposed that property can be legitimately taxed as a source of revenue to prevent
poverty, thus giving rise to a new and morally defensible form of capitalism.
But just in case you are dismayed at the prospect of a diversion into intellectual archaeology, let me
first quote to you a piece from the last chapter of the last book of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations
(1776), ‘Of Public Debts’. How’s this for contemporary relevance.
‘The progress of the enormous debts, which at present oppress and will in the long run probably ruin
all the great nations of Europe, has been pretty uniform. ... When national debts have once been
accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been
fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has been brought about at all,
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has always been brought about by a bankruptcy, sometimes by an avowed one, but always by a real
one, though frequently by a pretended payment’ (Smith,1776, Pt V, ch.3).
On a day of muted optimism about the future of the euro after the Greek and French elections, heed
the words of Adam!
How Can Free and Equal Citizenship be Reconciled with Unequal Property?
Questions about the legitimacy of property ownership have a long history in Ireland, of course, but
they also underpin the justification of government in England. Just as the English seized the land of
Ireland by conquest, so too the Normans seized English land from its Saxon owners in 1066; Norman
rule was based on this violent occupation and expropriation of property. When the intellectual and
aristocratic elite of England was trying to find a constitutional rationale for the new regime after the
overthrow of James II in 1689, one was conveniently at hand in the work of John Locke, who had
crossed back to his native land with the Dutch king William, having been living in exile in his court.
Locke tackled the question head-on. He argued that all men (sic) were born free and equal, and had
equal rights to a share in the earth’s bounty, which God gave them to hold in common. He explicitly
described this state of nature as underpinning the ‘ancient constitution’ of Saxon England; although
he did not try to justify the Norman conquest, he did aim to show how wealth and power came to be
held by the few, while the many remained poor. But he also had to show that in some circumstances
revolution to overthrow a tyrant (i.e. James Stuart) was justified, when power was not exercised
properly (Locke, 1690, especially Second Treatise, secs 25-57 and 11).
Locke thought that people made nature into productive resources by their labour, using natural
materials, and that in this way they turned nature into property; but unequal ownership only
became justifiable with the invention of money. In a type of argument which anticipated Adam
Smith’s Invisible Hand legitimation of markets, he claimed that the hoarding up of money allowed
individuals to purchase land and raw materials, and by new technology to increase productivity,
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without any harm to others. When all the land had been bought up in this way, governments were
formed to protect property and make just laws about economic relations.
Because the higher productivity enabled by private property allowed higher wages to be paid, and
hence higher standards of living to prevail, no one suffered any wrong in these processes, so long as
government respected the fundamental liberties of all Englishmen (which James did not).
Locke had to present some very convoluted reasoning to show how employment relations did not
violate these fundamental liberties, since his definitive ‘free-born Englishman’ was someone working
on his own land and producing for subsistence. Unconvincingly, and with lots of tricky footwork, he
said that, just as the poor ‘consented’ to the introduction of money when they used it for their
convenience (shopping implies the endorsement of markets), so they agreed to their own
subservience to the disciplines of employment when they signed a contract with an employer (rather
as defeated nations, such as the Irish, signed away their freedom, and could in fact be enslaved,
when they surrendered at the end of a war).
The situation of destitute people, with no means of support, was even worse. When they threw
themselves on the mercy of the Poor Law authorities, they were abandoning all their liberties, so
they could be put to do any kind of work or service (e.g. military service) by the authorities (Locke,
1697). This was the original justification for workfare under modern economic conditions; Locke
would have heartily endorsed David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith’s enthusiasm for compulsory
unpaid shelf-stacking in Poundland.
So the Glorious Revolution in England, which established the basic civil and political rights of which
the British Constitution rests, was also the foundation for a commercial society in which very
unequal holdings in land, and the beginnings of capitalist production, were also justified. Locke was
openly contemptuous about the poor, whom he described as living from hand to mouth, and
incapable of political consciousness. In many ways the situation in relation to land holdings in Ireland
is much better than in England, because of the redistributions that took place in the last years of
British rule. In Ireland, the average holding of land by all home owners is roughly 10 times that in
England, where much of the land owned by the aristocracy is not even registered.
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I shall return to all this when we come to look at Samuel Brittan’s proposal for a tax on land in
England.
Do the Poor Really Benefit from a Market-Based Economic System?
The next question to be addressed by Enlightenment thinkers was what form the most justifiable
social order should take. In England, the Glorious Revolution of 1689 had brought an end to absolute
monarchy, but it was unclear how a coherent and cohesive society could be sustained by commercial
relations. The Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, David Hume and Adam Smith, set themselves
the added challenge of starting from the assumption that there were no natural laws to supply
blueprints for such a society; it had to be kept running by people’s everyday desires and emotions
(the ‘passions’), and not by reason seeking some kind of hidden design feature of the universe.
In Hume’s case, his account of what kept things together was substantially in terms of sex, but that is
another story. For Adam Smith, complex modern societies were possible because a benevolent Deity
had endowed human beings with all sorts of fairly base emotions (greed and admiration for
splendour, as well as natural sympathy for others’ sufferings), and the combination of these and the
market mechanism meant that a viable social order could become self-sustaining’ even though no
one actually intended it. Even the poor could benefit from this order, and any attempt to shift it in
their favour would make everyone worse off.
Smith gave the first real account of a dynamic capitalist system, indeed a global system, in which
development was moving from rural subsistence and commercial production towards urban
industrial production, to the advantage of all. His model is today completely recognisable in China
and Indonesia, though no longer in Europe, as we shall see. Expansion was fuelled by innovation in
methods of production, by investment from a financial sector with international reach, and by a
plentiful supply of workers from the countryside, displaced by enclosures, by machinery and by
sheer poverty.
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In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith had already put forward the famous Invisible Hand
analysis of the distributive effects of markets, insisting that they shared out the benefits of this
dynamic to all, including the beggar sunning himself on a rural bank, in the fairest feasible way.
‘The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more
than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their
own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labour of the thousands whom
they employ, be the satisfaction of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor
the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand...’ (Theory of Moral
Sentiments, part 4, ch.1).
Smith was trying to give an account of how individual liberties and ‘good government’ could emerge
spontaneously from free-market economic development. But his problem was, that on his own very
honest account, the institutions of existing wealthy societies, such as Britain, had been established
under quite different conditions, and that these institutions included the property of the rich, the
criminal justice system and the coercive features of the poor laws. He readily conceded that these
were all oppressive and unjust in their operation, and that there was no automatic mechanism to get
rid of them in his accounts of either human nature or the laws of capitalist development.
What’s more, although Smith advocated generous wages, and considered that rising living standards
would increase the number of ‘independent’ citizens who came to own property, get an education,
etc., he also thought that any attempt by government to increase the share of national income going
to labour, or to protect the poor, would be counter-productive. And he anticipated Malthus and
Ricardo in insisting that the growth in the incomes of the poorest people only led to population
increase, which would eventually produce famine and disease, and hence a fall in survival rates
among children.
So Smith was unable to give a convincing account of why the poor would not be exploited and
oppressed, by the rich and by the state, even under the specially favourable conditions for capitalist
development which he identified. And Ricardo went on to show, In Chapter 31 of his Principles of
Political Economy and Taxation (1817), that under other conditions the introduction of machinery in
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an industry could cause mass unemployment and destitution. This led to the formation of a small
group of Ricardian socialists, later referred to approvingly by Marx, to develop an alternative theory
of labour, wages and value, in which the goal of economic development was to improve the quality
of life of the many.
Redistributing Property
Meanwhile in America political thought had moved away from the attempt to justify the property
holdings of the super-rich aristocracy, for the obvious reason that there was plenty of land to be
claimed from ‘nature’ (i.e. the indigenous inhabitants). Jefferson, for instance, thought that
independent landowning citizens were the best basis for a political society of freedom and equality.
Following the same line of thought, but taking it in a slightly different direction, Tom Paine proposed
the following solution to the problem of poverty in his Agrarian Justice (1797):
‘To create a national fund out of which shall be paid to every citizen, when arrived at the age of
twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pound sterling, as compensation in part for the loss of his or
her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property. And also the sum of
ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and for
others as they shall arrive at this age. It is proposed that the payments, as already stated, be made
to every person, rich or poor.’
Paine’s proposal implied that landed property represented a form of expropriation of the rightful
claims of each citizen to a part of the natural resources of the country, and that taxes should be
levied on those who owned those resources to provide this compensation. This idea developed the
economic insight first put forward by the Earl of Lauderdale in his Inquiry into the Nature and Origin
of Public Wealth (1804) which drew attention to the paradox that natural resources became a source
of profit only after they had acquired scarcity value, i.e. other potential users had been excluded,
and a price charged. Air is free, but land is costly after it is enclosed, the trees are felled and sold as
timber, and the streams diverted to irrigate crops. In this way, private developers (‘improvers’ as
they were called in the eighteenth century euphemism) grow rich, but most of the costs are borne
by the rest of the population.
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The idea that poverty stemmed from the fact that the many could not implement their claims to
their historic legacy from resources which rightly belonged to all was a more logical conclusion from
Locke’s premises than was his own convoluted reasoning about the positive consequences of a
commercial society. The poor were properly regarded as the intentionally dispossessed, and poverty
was a direct consequence of this dispossession. Either they should be compensated by a
revolutionary government which in turn expropriated the rich, or the latter should have their
wealth, and especially their land, taxed to supply a fund to pay them a regular income. Indeed,
Ricardo justified a land tax.
These arguments have always had more purchase in colonial situations such as Ireland’s towards the
end of British rule, when indeed substantial land redistribution did occur. Much the same happened
in British and French colonies in South-East Asia in the 1950s and ‘60s, though not in Africa. This
helps to explain why the countries of South-East Asia embarked on a steep upward curve of
development at that time, while those of Africa, even those which started at higher levels of per
capita income, did not.
But in fact Paine’s proposal was adopted by the State of Alaska (not exactly a hotbed of socialism) in
the early 1980s. Since then, the Alaska Permanent Fund has paid each adult resident in the state an
annual sum now over $1,200, out of its oil revenues. Mongolia is committed to a similar scheme, to
be paid from its recently-discovered mineral wealth; and Namibia has a local version of the fund in
one region (Standing, 2009). What these countries have in common is that enormously valuable
natural resources are supplying huge profits for minerals companies, while indigenous people live
lives of traditional hardship and poverty. So Paine’s and Lauderdale’s conditions apply, and the
prominent solution to poverty as a justifiable claim by those excluded from the direct benefits
accruing to the exploiters of such resources is adopted.
But other countries have used ‘sovereign wealth funds’ from natural resources to prevent poverty,
notably Iran, which has recently replaced food subsidies by payments from oil revenues to all its
citizens. And Brazil may well be next in line; there a bolsa familia has been successfully trialled in Sao
Paulo, and new discoveries of oil are likely to be used in this way.
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The conceptualising of poverty as dispossession of the many by the rich few again has resonance in
the present situation in Europe. Here in Ireland, you might reflect that a tax on land sold for
speculative development might have prevented the bubble in construction that led to the financial
crash, even if it had not supplied enough revenue to fund a dividend for all. In the UK, of course,
chances to create a sovereign wealth fund from oil revenues in the 1980s and ‘90s were squandered,
as were those of taxing financial transactions in the past decade. There are sovereign wealth funds in
41 countries worldwide, and it is never too late to start one.
Under advanced capitalism, the other obvious source for taxes giving rise to sovereign wealth funds
is the super-profits earned by those entrepreneurs whose innovative uses of new technologies
allows them to create globally popular products. The obvious recent examples are Microsoft, Google
and Facebook. It has been far more profitable for them to prolong the period in which they had
control over their innovative creations than to allow other companies immediate access to the
opportunity for imitation.
This can be seen as an instance of ‘rent-seeking’, a concept used by public choice theorists to
describe the actions of anyone who uses a position or resource to earn an extra income that could
not be gained in a perfectly competitive situation. The standard examples of rent-seekers are mafia
bosses who extort protection money and politicians who use their office to gain corrupt payments
for favours. But Lauderdale’s enclosers of the commons and monopolistic entrepreneurs are both
also getting such rents, and so it would be justifiable to tax them on these, and redistribute these
revenues to the general population.
Poverty and Labour
The twentieth century saw the rise of labour movements committed to the labour theory of value,
and welfare states which operationalised this theory by offering poor people benefits on condition
that they performed labour for employers. In this version of political economy, since all value
derived from the work done by employees, the state took responsibility for the income shortfalls of
those unintentionally excluded from labour markets, or whose earnings did not meet their
subsistence needs. Officially recognised poverty was that which occurred despite the best efforts of
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those willing to labour; other forms of indigence were dealt with by therapeutic or punitive
measures.
This view was re-enforced by mass unemployment in the Great Depression, and by the rapid growth
of European economies after the Second World War, when the share of national income going to
wages and salaries rose to around 65 per cent in the UK, and many people made the transition from
proletarian to middle-class lifestyles by way of further and higher education. But it has been shaken
by the succession of fiscal crises of the state all over the affluent world since the early 1970s, and by
the stagnation of earnings levels, first apparent in the USA, since that time.
The underlying question has always been whether the Adam Smith model of development, which
seemed to have been enhanced and complemented by welfare states, was actually sustainable
under conditions of globalisation, when most mass manufacturing had been moved to China and
elsewhere in the developing world, and the affluent ones had become largely financial centres and
service economies. Even if the labour theory of value were tenable (and economists had by then
shown it was not) how could the labour theory of poverty relief continue to apply, when productive
labour (in Smith’s terms) was done in those other countries?
No real attempt was made to address that question. Instead, much effort was put into trying to rejig
the welfare state model to fit it for new global conditions. The dominant solution to emerge was the
USA’s, where labour ‘flexibility’ was matched by subsidisation of wages through tax credits, but
enforcement of labour obligations through workfare or other ‘activation’ schemes became a
prominent part of benefits administration. So just as the material basis for labourist versions of value
and income support were collapsing, the ideological justification for state intervention in the field of
poverty became more frenetically linked to the enforcement of labour conditions on benefits.
The crisis which began in 2008 reveals the futility of this whole project. Even before the crash,
activation schemes were fruitless; of the 21 OECD countries, only in Australia and Canada were spells
of male unemployment reduced during the boom years 2000-7, and in most they rose substantially
(OECD, 2011). In the UK, youth unemployment rose inexorably in the New Labour period. And real
wages in almost all these countries had stopped rising, even though profits forged ahead; the gap
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between the top 3 per cent of incomes and the median widened alarmingly, while the poor fell
further behind the middle. The share of national income going to wages and salaries in the UK fell to
little over 50 per cent.
In other words, the notion that poverty in these societies could be eliminated from capitalist
development with rapid growth, leading to rising employment levels and wages, was no longer
tenable. After the crash, the stock markets quickly recovered, as real earned incomes continued to
fall. The UK had become a rentier economy, where 70 per cent of the profits of the FTSE leading 100
companies were made abroad. Austerity measures, required through sovereign debts incurred in
bank bail-outs, simply re-enforced these features.
So it is time to re-conceptualise poverty, using an analysis which dispenses with the baggage
associated with labourism, and especially the apparatus of state enforcement of the obligation to
perform labour for an employer. The only justification for that obligation was that labour was
necessary for the creation of value, and that it supplied a reliable route out of poverty. Neither of
these claims is now credible.
Towards a New Understanding of Poverty
The present crisis shows that the theorists whose ideas I have reviewed were right to recognised
that the institutions of money, property, markets and the state itself could only be justified if they
supplied (in combination) a plausible way of preventing poverty. After all, our Stone Age ancestors,
who had none of these institutions, had no concept of poverty either. They saw their lives as rich in
meaning and value, as we can tell from the study of the few hunter-gatherer societies which survive
today.
We have started to talk about the moral defensibility of capitalism again as austerity bites, and we
have recognised how the state is hopelessly implicated in its least attractive features in the bail-out
of the financial sector. In the UK, we have even glimpsed its involvement in the exploitation and
oppression of the poor in the scandal over ‘work experience’ schemes and corruption in the firms
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which run them. But actually it is not just the present problem of capitalism in affluent societies that
is at stake; all the other institutions which sustain it should come under scrutiny.
So it is interesting that one of the few original new voices to emerge during the crisis has been Phillip
Blond, the brains behind most of David Cameron’s Big Society project. Blond tries to be even handed
in his critique between the big state and monopoly capital; but he shines a spotlight on
concentrations of property as the source of much that is unacceptable in present-day British society.
In arguing for property to be redistributed from the state and big business to individuals and
communities, he draws on liberal dissidents from the Lloyd George era, when the labourist welfare
state was founded. Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, celebrity intellectuals of their day, had been
all but forgotten, but it is to them that he has turned for his proposals on property redistribution, as
an alternative to the state as enforcer of low-paid or unpaid labour (Blond, 2010).
Blond seeks to create a society of small proprietors and entrepreneurs, rather in the tradition of
Jefferson or Paine, and he acknowledges Paine’s scheme for abolishing poverty by a universal grant
or income stream for every citizen. But the author he quotes in support of this idea is not Paine, but
Samuel Brittan, whose work on how to justify capitalism by such a programme has been around
since the early 1990s.
Brittan has never abandoned this proposal, but recently he has linked it with the idea of a land tax
(‘Tax England’s Green and Pleasant Land’, Financial Times, 23 February, 2012), pointing out the
respectable line of support for this idea, from Ricardo to Winston Churchill.
‘Gross UK trading profits of non-financial and non-oil corporations are running at over £200bn per
year or about 20 per cent of gross domestic product. Some part of this – we do not know how much
– is not true profit but the return on land. There is one way that the supply of land can increase. That
is when land, previously off limits, is newly released by local authorities for development. This
consequent increase in value, say some land tax campaigners, is created by “the community”, which
is entitled to a share of the increment. But to argue in this way is to sell the case short. The case for a
land tax is valid even for land which was always available for development or which remains in
agricultural use’.
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The piece caused a bit of a stir, and landed interests at once protested that it would be costly to
assess any tax due; many large estates are not even registered. But the greatest landowners,
including the Queen and Prince Charles, do go to the trouble of claiming their EU subsidies from the
Rural Payments Agency, so this should not be too difficult.
This is just one example of a new questioning of property ownership rights, which in turn raises
issues about the rights and claims of poor people, and the role of government in arbitrating between
the rich and the poor. What Brittan proposes is that universal sums should be paid unconditionally
to all citizens, partly from a fund accumulated from taxes on land-based wealth. But the case for
such payments, as a new compensation for those dispossessed by capitalism, and a new basis for
free and equal citizenship under capitalism, is now beginning to be heard in surprising quarters.
The Basic Income debate has been live in Ireland for several decades, and I found politicians here
better informed about it than their British counterparts when I did some research here more than 10
years ago. It has a fresh urgency and relevance today.
If an unconditional state income for all is a necessary condition for social justice in the age of
globalisation, then perhaps poverty will at last be recognised as a symptom of the unacceptable face
of capitalism, and workfare as the unacceptable face of the state.
One final thought. The late eighteenth century was a seminal period for social policy in England and
Ireland, as well as the cradle of capitalist industrialisation and democracy. From 1770 to 1830, real
wages stagnated, and the share of national income going to capital grew rapidly. The households of
workers were kept from starvation only by growing supplementation of wages out of the poor rates
– schemes like the Roundsman and Speenhamland systems in England were the equivalent of
welfare-to-work, and parish wage subsidies equivalents of Working Tax Credits.
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In the UK under New Labour’s last few years, almost 9 out of 10 families with children received Tax
Credits, probably the same proportion as those receiving poor law payments in that period, and
again at a moment when real wages are stagnant or falling, and the share of capital in national
income growing fast. It seems that at such moments, capital and capitalist regimes prefer to
subsidise earnings through the state, rather than raise wages. This institutionalises poverty, and
creates a huge class of official paupers. It may seem generous in times of boom, but it quickly turns
nasty at times of bust, as austerity measures lead to cuts in earnings supplements.
Eventually, if the advantages of investment in new technology are to be enjoyed by the many, all this
has to change. In the twentieth century, labour’s share of national income increased through
collective negotiating power and social insurance. But the twenty-first century cannot be a ‘Century
of Labour’ for the developed nations by those same political processes (Standing, 2009). We need a
new institutional settlement to reverse this era of impoverishment, and the political movements to
achieve it are more likely to look like Los Indignados or the German Pirate Party than like Social
Democrats.
References
Blond, P. (2010), Red Tory: How the Left and the Right Broke Britain and How We Can Fix It, London:
Faber and Faber.
Britain, S. (2012), ‘Tax England’s Green and Pleasant Land’, Financial Times, 23 February.
Lauderdale, Earl of (1804) An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth, Edinburgh: Tate.
Locke, J. (1690), Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
(1967).
Locke, J. (1697), ‘Memorandum to his Fellow Commissioners of the Board of Trade, in The Works of
John Locke in Four Volumes, ed. W. Strachan et al., Edinburgh: Tate.
OECD (2011), Labour Market Statistics, Paris: OECD.
Paine, T. (1797), Agrarian Justice, Edinburgh: Bell.
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Ricardo, D. (1817), Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, London: Dent (1917).
Smith, A. (1759), The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in H.W. Schneider (ed.), Adam Smith’s Moral and
Political Philosophy, London: Harper (1948).
Smith, A. (1776), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell
and A.S. Skinner, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1976).
Standing, G. (2009), Work after Globalisation, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
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