Pedro Ramos Pinto

Peter Sloman

Daniel Zamora Vargas

This new edited collection brings together historians and social scientists to engage with the global history of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and offer historically-rich perspectives on contemporary debates about the future of work. In particular, the book goes beyond a genealogy of a seemingly utopian idea to explore how the meaning and reception of basic income proposals has changed over time. The study of UBI provides a prism through which we can understand how different intellectual traditions, political agents, and policy problems have opened up space for new thinking about work and welfare at critical moments. Contributions range broadly across time and space, from Milton Friedman and the debate over guaranteed income in the post-war United States to the emergence of the European basic income movement in the 1980s and the politics of cash transfers in contemporary South Africa. Taken together, these chapters address comparative questions: why do proposals for a guaranteed minimum income emerge at some times and recede into the background in others? What kinds of problems is basic income designed to solve, and how have policy proposals been shaped by changing attitudes to gender roles and the boundaries of social citizenship? What role have transnational networks played in carrying UBI proposals between the global north and the global south, and how does the politics of basic income vary between these contexts? In short, the book builds on a growing body of scholarship on UBI and lays the groundwork for a much richer understanding of the history of this radical proposal. Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Universal Basic Income in Historical Perspective

The Liberal Party and the Economy, 1929-1964 explores the reception, generation, and use of economic ideas in the British Liberal Party between its electoral decline in the 1920s and 1930s, and its post-war revival under Jo Grimond. Drawing on archival sources, party publications, and the press, this volume analyses the diverse intellectual influences which shaped British Liberals' economic thought up to the mid-twentieth century, and highlights the ways in which the party sought to reconcile its progressive identity with its longstanding commitment to free trade and competitive markets. Peter Sloman shows that Liberals' enthusiasm for public works and Keynesian economic management - which David Lloyd George launched onto the political agenda at the 1929 general election - was only intermittently matched by support for more detailed forms of state intervention and planning. Likewise, the party's support for redistributive taxation and social welfare provision was frequently qualified by the insistence that the ultimate Liberal aim was not the expansion of the functions of the state but the pursuit of 'ownership for all'. Liberal policy was thus shaped not only by the ideas of reformist intellectuals such as John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge, but also by the libertarian and distributist concerns of Liberal activists and by interactions with the early neoliberal movement. This study concludes that it was ideological and generational changes in the early 1960s that cut the party's links with the New Right, opened up common ground with revisionist social democrats, and re-established its progressive credentials.

Peter Sloman

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