‘This method of dealing with thieves is both unjust and undesirable. Considering how few of them get away with it, how come we are still plagued with so many robbers?’ ‘What’s odd about it?’, I asked – for I never hesitated to speak freely in front of the Cardinal. ‘I’ve seen as many as twenty on a single gallows. ‘We’re hanging them all over the place’, he said. I forgot how the subject came up, but he was speaking with great enthusiasm about the stern measures that were then being taken against thieves. “ I once happened to be dining with the Cardinal when a certain English lawyer was there. The provision of means of livelihood to the poor, he argued, would be a more astute way of fighting theft than sentencing thieves to death, which had the unpleasant side effect of increasing the murder rate: Raphael Nonsenso narrates there a conversation he says he had with John Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The closest one can find to a serious proposal in that direction is to be found instead in part I of Utopia. Moreover, More insists that his finding these institutions fascinating enough to write down their description does not entail that he endorses them. This hardly qualifies as an Unconditional Basic Income. The inhabitants of Utopia all have access to adequate means of subsistence provided in kind, coupled with compulsory labour. In part II of Thomas More’s (1478-1535) Utopia, published in Louvain in 1516, the Portuguese traveller Raphael Nonsenso, having allegedly met More on the central square of the City of Antwerp, famously described the institutions he observed when visiting the island of Utopia. Some of the so-called humanists started playing with the idea of a minimum income in the form of public assistance. With the advent of the Renaissance, the task of looking after the welfare of poor people ceased to be regarded as the exclusive preserve of the Church and of charitable individuals. The idea of a minimum income guaranteed by the government to all the members of a particular community is far older than the more specific and more radical idea of an Unconditional Basic Income. Minimum income: More (1516) and Vives (1526) More: Raphael’s cure for theft It resurfaced in Western Europe around 1980 and slowly spread until it gained worldwide popularity from 2016 onwards. It was the subject of short-lived national debates in England around 1920 and in the United States around 1970. As far as we know, it was first proposed at the local level by Thomas Spence at the end of the 18th century and at the national level by Joseph Charlier in the middle of the 19th. Nor was it first formulated by Thomas Paine. No, the idea of an Unconditional Basic Income is not to be found in Thomas More’s Utopia.
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