What It Means to Have Nothing: Poverty and the Idea of Human Dignity in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores the historical background of an issue that is central to present-day constitutional and human-rights discourse: the relationship between human dignity and the fight against poverty. It analyzes the role the idea of human dignity played in the reasoning of nineteenth-century German middle-class authors who were professionally engaged in social-reform debates, with a particular focus on debates about mendicancy. In these debates, notions of dignity were pervasive, and they provoked a troubling question: Is poverty a state of impaired dignity, and if yes, in which direction does causality point? Tracing the shifting perceptions from the enlightened belief in the self-perfectibility of man at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the rise of biomedical theories at its end, the article argues that concerns about human dignity gave the commitment to eradicate destitution an important impetus, yet with side effects that highlight the pitfalls of the dignity concept.