Defining Exclusion

It was in the first part of the nineteenth century that the social issues related to pauperism emerged explicitly for the first time. At that time a new type of poverty resulting from modernization and industrialization was affecting the working class. Social tensions produced by industrialization and liberalism were threatening the social order. The conflictual dynamics of social forces and the risk of social breakdown were at the heart of the debate. Exclusion was viewed mostly as a political phenomenon resulting from the under-representation of the working class in political institutions. The problem was seen in the context of class struggle. Thus, the social question was relevant to the integration of the working class into the political process. On the basis of an analysis of capitalism in the nineteenth century, Polanyi (1957) has shown that a self-regulating market, where the economy is disembedded from society, so as to allow the market to function without social and political constraints, had in fact failed, as society reacted to enforce factory legislation, social insurance and the institutionalization of industrial relations. This was the origin of the modern welfare state.