Universal Basic Income in Historical Perspective

Abstract

This edited volume is one of the two outputs stemming from a workshop on the ‘Intellectual History of Universal Basic Income’ held in Cambridge in 2019. The other, by Malcolm Torry (2021), Basic Income: a history, I have already had the privilege to review for the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. Although Torry’s book provides broad coverage from a single perspective and is an excellent reference source, the Sloman et al. volume engages with a selection of in-depth historical discussions from a variety of perspectives, providing a stimulating intellectual rollercoaster. Debates about what constitutes, and what might justify, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) are deeply contested and have even been traced back—fancifully, perhaps—to ancient Athens (Standing, 2017). However, the focus in much, but not all, of the Sloman et al. volume is the 20th Century. While it is fascinating to trace intersecting genealogies of competing ideas and interpretations of UBI, to do so can be unhelpful, as the editors make clear in Chapter 1. What we are really talking about, they say, is ‘a family of ideas, linked by a set of common characteristics’ (p. 6). The various chapters engage with: differences in language and context relating to variants or derivatives of UBI; with the range of UBI’s individual and institutional advocates; the different ways in which proposals for UBI have been received in public debate; and the emergence of global networks that have extended debate beyond the global North and into the global South. The editors acknowledge that the book’s coverage does not extend to later developments in Latin America, Asia and the Pacific or such 21st Century developments as the International Labour Organization’s Social Protection Floor.