Abeyance Theory

Since the sixteenth century—roughly the end of feudalism and emergence of capitalism in Europe—modern societies have had to deal with the problem of people whose basic needs are met neither by market forces (employment) nor by kinship (informal support). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taking care of abandoned mothers and assisting returning soldiers became the founding tasks of the welfare state. But social alternatives were invented to accommodate excess populations well before then. Abeyance, a term borrowed from historical sociology, refers to solutions to this long-standing problem of a mismatch between productive positions available in a society and numbers of potential claimants of those positions.

The alternatives devised to absorb surplus people and neutralize the potential mischief of idle hands were varied. They included state-sponsored projects (frontier settlements, public works, compulsory education), breakaway religious orders (the Franciscans, wandering clerics, the Beguines), and countercultural movements (alternative communities). All of these provided sustenance and industry—that is, they furnished the functional equivalents of work—and, if necessary, lodging. And they did so for people who would otherwise have posed a substantial burden to kin or may have threatened social order.

As social inventions, abeyance mechanisms are full-service operations. They address not only where people will spend the night, but also what they will do when the sun comes up. Shelter is only part of the equation. To be part of abeyance is to be subject to the social contract of general reciprocity and the social control of organized work, including performing jobs that require no special talent. During the Great Depression, this could mean building roads, cutting trails, or doing construction. More recently, “workfare” programs, making no pretense of training participants for gainful employment elsewhere, have put public assistance recipients to work picking up litter or filing paperwork. But the “make work” practice is an old one. In the Middle Ages, monks could be hired to perform surrogate penances for busy sinners who could afford their catered services.

Public shelter, however, falls short of such provisions. Specifically, overnight lodging fails to meet the usual requirement of surrogate labor, while performing the “integration and surveillance” role that theorists usually expect of abeyance mechanisms. Such lodging fulfill the warehouse function but fail to put their charges to productive work. At best, then, shelters are partial abeyance mechanisms and [Page 2]for that reason are subject to distinctive problems of demoralization.